Collider Quarterly Report
To our friends and supporters in the Rochester community, thank you so much for your continued support of Collider Foundation and the work we do here. As the quarter draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reintroduce our mission and share with you the work we’ve been doing in the community for the past few months.
Collider Foundation is a Rochester, Minnesota based 501(c)3 organization. Our mission is to activate, connect, and empower early stage starters in Rochester, MN. Our vision is to create a community with zero barriers to entrepreneurship for anyone with a great idea and a passion to see it grow.
How do we do that?
Amanda Leightner, our Executive Director, along with recent Collider team addition, Manasseh Kambaki, our Director of Navigation, work together to reach starters in our community through connection to business resources. Together they link early stage entrepreneurs to the resources they need with a highly personalized approach to help overcome business barriers for local starters. Their insights into a resource rich network is key to making starting a business faster and easier for entrepreneurs.
We especially seek to serve minority entrepreneurs in Rochester as our research has shown that women and BIPOC starters to be the most likely to not be linked in to a network of connections and support, making it more challenging for them to start or grow their idea into a business.
We’re excited to share that Amanda and Manasseh were able to serve fifty-seven unique starters between January and March over the course of seventy-five hours of communication, support, and relationship building. Out of these fifty-seven entrepreneurs they assisted, forty-eight percent were women and forty percent were BIPOC starters.
Thank you so much to Mayo Clinic, Rotary Clubs of Rochester, the City of Rochester, the Small Business Development Center, Altra Federal Credit Union, and Premier Banks for supporting this work in the Rochester entrepreneurial community.
Thank you to all of our sponsors who make Collider’s work possible!
Another way we seek to enrich the entrepreneurial community of Rochester is through education and peer support.
Collider Foundation facilitates the meeting of two local peer networks, one for different food business founders and one for women founders, which each meet on a monthly basis to provide ongoing support and advice for these communities of business owners. These meetings provide a space to reduce the isolation associated with running a business. They also provide starters with an opportunity to connect with other business owners to learn from each other, celebrate their successes, and work together to think through challenges their businesses are facing. We are excited to see these two groups continue past their pilot phases into a second year of meeting and to connect eight unique entrepreneurs through these two peer networks. Both groups are actively recruiting members to their group, driven by current members of each network.
We are grateful to both Rochester Area Economic Development Inc. (RAEDI) and The Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) for directly supporting our work with these peer networks.
We have a series of educational events and programs in motion for the coming months. We are excited to partner with Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota School of Business and Technology to host Critical Conversations, which are panel discussions led by local starters discussing topics key to all entrepreneurs including: buying a business, finding co-founders, mental health, and hiring your first employees.
We are also thrilled to be launching our CO.STARTERS programs next quarter! CO.STARTERS is a program that helps starters move from idea to action. This program uses entrepreneurship to transform communities. Some major programs that are offered through CO.STARTERS include Get Started, which is a 3 hour workshop to help starters think through their business idea(s) and figure out which idea has the best chance to support a business. The other major program is CO.STARTERS Core, an eight week, cohort based education program to give starters the tools and support they need to take their ideas into action. Amanda spent a lot of time this quarter going through CO.STARTERS extensive training (along with some amazing partners in the community) to facilitate this program in the community. After piloting several different forms of cohort based education in Rochester after the past few years, we are so excited of the potential that CO.STARTERS offers to all starters in Rochester, MN.
CO.STARTERS is specifically supported by Think Bank, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota School of Business and Technology, and Fredrikson & Byron.
Another recent addition to the Collider team, Corrie Strommen, who joined us in January of this year as our Director of Community, has spent much time this quarter revitalizing our storytelling efforts in the community and amplifying the stories of Rochester entrepreneurs through original, insightful content. This includes weekly articles or videos and the monthly Rochester Rising podcast. This work helps provide inspiration capital that shows that entrepreneurship consists of many different things and that there is not one pathway to get there. It opens up the possibility of entrepreneurship by sharing stories of many different types of starters and allows anyone with a business idea to see entrepreneurship as something accessible to themselves.
Over the past few months, we have released four articles, one podcast, and one video with many more in the works! It has been a joy connecting with so many different entrepreneurs, from many different backgrounds and walks of life. So far this quarter, we have had the opportunity to connect with ten different business owners who are either women, BIPOC, or LGTBQ+ members of the Rochester community and are excited to share each of their stories.
Along with Collider’s work with the local entrepreneurial community, we also work to provide a coworking community to the Rochester area. Collider manages a low cost space for starters to connect and collide to spark new ideas. We currently have forty-nine members and are looking forward to seeing growth in our community in coming months. We provide member specific programming, such as peer networks and other member-only activities, as well as networking and social opportunities for anyone in the community.
Our coworking space, located in the Minnesota BioBusiness Center.
This week, Collider is running our quarterly fundraising campaign to support our mission to activate, connect, and empower early stage starters in Rochester, MN. If this work speaks to you, please consider becoming a donor: https://bit.ly/3NDhAXv.
How can your support help?
$100 helps 5 starters in the community get connected to the support they need.
$225 allows one entrepreneur in the community to participate in the 8-week CO.STARTERS Core program.
$50 allows one entrepreneur the opportunity to participate in the Get Started workshop.
$75 subsidizes the cost of 1 entrepreneur to participate in CO.STARTERS Core.
Regardless of amount, every dollar helps to support our mission of zero barriers for everyone in Rochester with a great idea and a passion to see it grow.
The Collider Team - photo by William Forsman
