Venture Cafe Foundation Inc.

Innovation is a process to improve the human condition. Venture Cafe help people interested in becoming entrepreneurs to be more effective in starting businesses and accelerating their business growth in a strong and sustainable way. Startups and small businesses create more jobs in the economy than large companies. We see entrepreneurship skills as key to developing healthy communities and economies. We believe that innovation is everywhere, and everyone has the potential to be an entrepreneur, and seek to broaden and diversify the innovation economy through open, inclusive networking, programming, and mentoring at multiple locations in Greater Boston.

Venture Cafe Cambridge connects innovators, entrepreneurs, industry experts, investors and innovative companies with each other to support innovation and economic growth.

District Hall Boston is a meeting place for the innovation community in Boston's Seaport District.

Roxbury Innovation Center supports small business-led growth in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.

Venture Cafe Providence and District Hall Providence connect, support, and grow the innovation ecosystem in Providence and Rhode Island.

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.

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.