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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Public Partnerships and Entrepreneurship Coalitions

Here at the Nauvoo Commuter, we are working to build a coalition to develop local entrepreneurs through education. The original plan was to create a model community, but our community is in fact too small. We're rolling it out to include all of Hancock County, and honestly Carthage is doing the heavy lifting so far.

We'll be discussing this issue more later, but here are three hints when building a coalition to promote entrepreneurship education:

- involve as many pertinent people as possible, but leave the "stoppers" out of the planning process
- build the partnership on a bigger scale than you are comfortable with
- include school superintendents (go straight to the top), banking and other funding professionals, and helpful public employees

Why do you need all these people?  Because you will be doing more than teaching a class. You will be providing mentorship and support to help launch businesses, so you will need broad commitment.

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