Venture Cafe Foundation Inc.

Venture Café Foundation enhances and accelerates innovation through spaces, programs, and conversations for individuals and organizations to network, share knowledge, and learn, including: Venture Cafe Cambridge is a weekly networking and mentoring program taking place weekly on Thursdays at One Broadway. The program is currently virtual at https://venturecafecambridge.org VCC connects innovators, entrepreneurs, industry experts, investors and innovative companies with each other to support innovation and economic growth. District Hall Boston location is a virtual and physical networking and knowledge-sharing hub for the innovation community in Boston's Seaport District. Roxbury Innovation Center is an urban innovation center to drive economic development in the Roxbury and Nubian Square neighborhoods Venture Cafe Providence and District Hall Providence are partnerships with the City of Providence and State of Rhode Island to grow the innovation ecosystem and business-led development .

Venture Cafe has over ten years of experience in connecting the innovation economy in New England. Our experienced and entrepreneurial staff is well-tuned to the needs of entrepreneurs, the resources provided by many parties around Greater Boston and Greater Providence, and how to connect them. As the success of our different locations shows, we are skilled in tailoring our programming and offerings at different locations to the needs of the surrounding communities. We work with hundreds of programming partners to execute the courses, workshops, clinics and gatherings to help company founders. We survey program attendees regularly and use attendance and other internal metrics to monitor and evaluate our impact.

Venture Cafe New England uses both quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure our progress and impact. For example: * District Hall: hosted more than 1,000 events in 2019, with 90K people participating * Roxbury Innovation Center: 1,000 attendees at programs we ran and hosted for small businesses in 2019, 75% repeat attendance rate. * Venture Café Cambridge: Nearly 5,000 events since inception in 2010. Attendees - 200,000K + since 2010, 20,000 in 2019 We survey attendees regularly on the value of VCF programming. Metrics include: number of unique attendees, number of newsletter subscriptions and social media views, percentage of startups and founders attending, percentage of women attending, percentage of Black or Latinx or Asian people attending, office hours (mentorship program) attendance and topics. Additionally, we track through survey data the percentage of attendees who say that their professional network has improved, that they have learned relevant professional skills or formed new partnerships through VCF, and that they have found a job or hired staff through Venture Cafe events. We also collect and share impact stories.

More than 200,000 people have attended Venture Cafe New England events since 2010, connecting with the resources they need to support innovation and launch and grow businesses. Looking forward, we want to deploy our core belief that innovation is a process to improve the human condition to support startups and innovators everywhere in creating innovation-led responses to the global recession, to increasing diversity, and to racial justice. We also want to extend and increase our impact in neighborhoods and cities that are suffering from higher rates of employment, where entrepreneurship can be a local economic development driver. Roxbury Innovation Center's success as a hub for local startups and small businesses is one model for this. Roxbury Innovation Center is supported by many funders including the Economic Development Administration, Cummings Foundation, BNY Mellon Bank, and Eastern Bank. We hope to improve the continuum of support for entrepreneurs and innovators in underserved areas in developing business skills, building strong businesses, and finding financing. Over the next one to three years we hope to find new ways of replicating the model we have developed.