Sara Day Evans, Founding Director of Accelerating Appalachia

Chances are when you hear the words “accelerator program” or “entrepreneurship,” the first thing that comes to mind is not “Appalachia.” But that’s something Sara Day Evans, founding director of Accelerating Appalachia, hopes to change.

Evans is a geologist who has been living and working in Appalachian communities for most of her life. She spent her early childhood in North Carolina, Kentucky and southwest Virginia. “Growing up there really influenced my connection to nature,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in geology since I was a kid collecting rocks and fossils and shark teeth.” At 19, Evans traveled to the Grand Canyon, where she solidified her decision to study geology in college.

Evans joined a water protection group in Missouri while working toward her degree. And after graduation, she spent 13 years working for the state of Kentucky to help build their groundwater and waste management programs. But that’s when her interests took an unexpected turn.

“I was really drawn to local economies,” Evans says, “especially after working across Appalachia for so long. A lot of what I was doing was managing a program to clean up and institute recycling and waste reduction. But what about the economy?” she asks, “ Why are the environment and the economy viewed as separate?”

When she moved to Asheville, North Carolina in 2006, Evans finally witnessed the connection she had been seeking between local economies and the environment. “I started seeing small businesses in the sectors of food, farming, forest products, fiber,” she says, “And I was so inspired by their work. And they were working with the biodiversity and agrobiodiversity of the region.”

Evans continued her work with the state of North Carolina for four years. However, after a government turnover in 2010, the program she worked for was cut and she was left unemployed. It was during this transitional period that Evans began to explore the realm of social enterprise.

“I had friends in the entrepreneurial world who told me, ‘You work like an entrepreneur anyway, you should be exploring this,’” she recalls, “There were people in the Asheville region who were working globally on social enterprise, and they really helped introduce me to that world.”

Evans started a consulting firm called Prosperity Collective, but within six months, another idea for a nonprofit organization began to take form. After a lot of research—and with the help of her colleagues Jennifer Flynn, Kimberly Hunter and Dayna Reggero—Evans created Accelerating Appalachia, the first nature-based business accelerator of its kind.

Accelerating Appalachia is an accelerator program for seed-stage businesses in nature-based industries such as farming, food, clean energy, textiles and more. The program’s intensive curriculum instructs entrepreneurs in subjects like financial planning, value proposition improvement, supply chain development and advisement on capital raising options.

“We’re focusing on businesses that support farming and other regenerative land practices, practices that farmers use that actually help to restore and regenerate the soil,” Evans says. “Regenerative agriculture is blowing up, because data is starting to come back about how much the right kind of agriculture practices can sequester carbon and have a huge impact.”

Accelerating Appalachia, 2016 Cohort

Despite the fact that Accelerating Appalachia focuses on nature-based enterprises like farming, Evans says over 75% of participating enterprises are either women-led or co-led.This is because, “Women-led enterprises are very profitable but way under-capitalized.” But Evans adds that Accelerating Appalachia’s diversity goes far beyond gender. “We seek to not just accelerate women-led businesses, but also minority and indigenous populations,” she explains.

Regardless, Accelerating Appalachia remains committed to one thing: creating harmony between economy and environment. “Our focus is to create a few good jobs because that’s important for our economy,” Evans says, “and then build that connection to regenerative agriculture.”

The post Connecting Economy and Environment Through Accelerating Appalachia appeared first on Startup Southerner.

Forty percent of all wetlands in the United States are in the state of Louisiana. And with the fifth-longest coastline in the nation, Louisiana’s water economy is very much in play when it comes to the state’s overall economic health. The challenges that come with maintaining such an economy may seem like something that’s left up to government agencies, but that’s not how New Orleans entrepreneurs see it. Since 2014, a collaborative initiative between Propeller, the Idea Village and the Greater New Orleans Foundation has focused on solving critical regional water challenges through entrepreneurship.

“Social innovation is a critical component of the entrepreneurial ecosystem,” says Catherine Gans, marketing and communications director for the nonprofit organization that helps launch social and environmental ventures. “For social entrepreneurs, ‘disruption’ means changing the status quo by providing financially sustainable, viable solutions to pressing social issues.”

The latest year-long collaboration on solving the region’s water challenges concludes on March 14 with Water Challenge 2016, a full-day summit focused on Louisiana’s growing water economy. In addition to panel sessions, there is also a pitch competition, with a $15,000 prize sponsored by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. The three finalists, Martin Ecosystems, Hanging Gardens and Caminada Bay Oyster, address a variety of issues, including water quality, land loss and stormwater management.

“The Water Challenge and other social innovation pitch competitions like it create a culture of innovation around problems that affect the vibrancy and safety of our region,” Gans says.

And how fitting it is that this summit will take place right in the middle of New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW), which starts on March 11?

Gans points out that NOEW does an incredible job of sparking engagement in the New Orleans entrepreneurial community and shining a national spotlight on New Orleans as a hub for innovation and ideas. With $18.7 billion estimated in the settlement for the BP oil spill and $50 billion slated to be spent in the next 50 years to restore Louisiana’s coast, “there exist numerous potential revenue streams for entrepreneurs to finance innovative solutions to issues that have threatened our coastal and urban water safety for decades,” she says.

The Water Challenge is free and open to the public, but registration is required via www.NOEW.org.

The post NOLA’s Water Challenge Proves Disruption Isn’t Just for Apps appeared first on Startup Southerner.

Pat Rogers, a fifth-generation peanut farmer from Blenheim, South Carolina, was at an InfoAg conference in 2014 when he identified a problem within the farming community. He realized that the world of agriculture was in desperate need of a way for farmers to connect and share information in a faster, more convenient way.

Rogers had seen firsthand how scarce networking opportunities were for agriculture professionals. Even social media platforms and online message boards failed to provide steady, relevant information to farmers in their own regions. So he came up with the idea for a peer-to-peer network where farmers could both communicate and access local information on a single platform. He called that platform AgFuse.

AgFuse would allow farmers to connect with one another, share farming tips, pitch product ideas and keep in touch with other agriculture professionals in their area.

“I knew I had a good idea, but I had to verify it,” Rogers says. In August of 2015, he set up a landing page that featured a signup box and a description of the site’s functionality. AgFuse received so much interest that, just a month later, the full site was released to the public. Since then, it has welcomed users from over 28 countries, including Australia, Mexico and Canada.

The platform works lot like Facebook, but with a networking component similar to LinkedIn’s. Farmers are able to connect with one another and receive information based on geographical location, crops, and news interests. Users can also join groups, create posts and scroll through their news feeds to see what’s happening with other farmers in their network. But AgFuse omits some of the unnecessary features of traditional social media to make room for more business.

“It’s more like an information network instead of a social network,” Rogers explains.

AgFuse is the first social media platform of its kind, which means it has a lot of potential for development. Rogers hopes to have the iOS app up for testing and feedback within the month, with the Android app soon to follow. Other upcoming features include a platform through which agri-bloggers and other writers can post their work straight to the website, and a reference service that will make pertinent information accessible to farmers from anywhere, especially the field.

But AgFuse is currently a bootstrapped venture, so Rogers is taking things slow. When asked if he plans to seek investors anytime soon, he responds by saying, “We plan to take bootstrapping as far as we can. I have a vision for the product. I’m kind of a target user, so I’m doing it a little for myself.” Rogers says he wants to ensure the product has integrity and will properly serve farmers like himself before seeking more funding.

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