Collider Peer Groups Enter Second Year to Support Local Starters

This month, Collider Foundation wrapped up its first year hosting peer-to-peer groups, called Peer Networks, to support female and food business founders across southeastern Minnesota. This work assisted twenty-two different businesses through thirty-six hours of monthly meetups. Overall, participants viewed these Peer Networks as a unique experience that helped them feel supported and understood and reduced the isolation and loneliness of entrepreneurship.

This work leveraged the success of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation’s (SMIF) well established peer efforts to create these two pilot groups in the Rochester area.

Collider’s Female and Food Peer Networks connected entrepreneurs together, allowing them to provide solutions for one another as they individually started or scaled their businesses. These networks were built on mutual trust, respect, and vulnerability to allow founders to get value out of these interactions and be able to speak freely about their business struggles and successes.

In total, sixteen different women-led businesses participated in the Female Peer Network over the past year. In addition to monthly structured meetings, participants in this network have been organizing their own monthly meetings for the past several months to connect and work on their businesses together. 

Our pilot Food Peer Network assisted six local businesses within the region. In addition to monthly get-togethers, this group created holiday gift boxes in late 2021, which were sold through Collider to benefit the continuation of this Peer Network as a way of giving back to the community.

Over this past year, the Female and Food Peer Networks were generously supported by the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation and Rochester Area Economic Development, Inc. (RAEDI). We are excited to announce that these two groups will continue on in the community for another year with support of these two organizations.