 Good afternoon. About 10 years ago when I first started thinking about helping nonprofits to start social enterprises, I heard a lot of feedback from folks that this just wasn't possible, that nonprofits can't start businesses. And this was contrary to my experience that said working with social enterprises around the country and starting with myself in the early 90s. I heard a lot of different things from folks both and I heard a lot of voices from inside my head too saying the same thing, nonprofits can't start businesses. Nonprofits don't know how to market, they said. Nonprofits don't know how to activate a crowd or have customers, they said. Nonprofits don't understand financing or how to take a financial risk, they said. And this one is one of my favorites because it's my belief that nonprofits actually take nearly 100% financial risk every single year just to keep the doors open. Nonprofits don't know how to pivot, they said. Of course one of the great examples of a nonprofit making a significant pivot with the eradication of polio and March of Dimes changing its model. And finally, nonprofits can't make a profit, they said. Which I don't even know how to respond to this one so I've decided this will be a topic for a future SoCAP TV conversation if they let me come back. So when we really started trying to think about the naysayers and how to address the concerns that naysayers had about nonprofits and their business acumen my partner Rick Swech and Intersector Partners L3C and our colleague Julie Voiles at J. Voiles Nonprofit Consulting looked at a number of social enterprise models around the country. A lot of them were very much training based and they really focused on helping nonprofits in a short period of time. We felt that a longer term engagement of capacity building was more appropriate. We also looked at traditional accelerators so tech accelerators, healthcare accelerators and we realized those were great models but they really didn't connect specifically to the needs of nonprofits. So we said what if we activate the community? What if we get a bunch of people in Denver to give their time, treasure and talent to support nonprofits, these innovators and leaders in starting new businesses? And what if we make this social enterprise accelerator focused specifically on those needs of nonprofits? And what if we make it even further customized to support folks in Colorado? Because as you may know things are different in Colorado. I'll go with this instead just to be safe. We put together a great group of funders and a number of folks in our community to really embrace Colorado nonprofits. We spent about a year building the program, having lots of meetings, the same thing all of you do as entrepreneurs. Meetings, conversations, fundraising and ultimately we were able to put together the model that has allowed us to serve over 100 nonprofits in our community through 101 type workshops and programming from ideation through the early stages of building a business. We've also worked with 17 organizations through our social enterprise cohort and they have all graduated in our various stages of launching at this point. So I want to tell you about three of them. The full official title of this talk was to be the business of bison, beans and baby strollers. So I'm going to tell you about those three organizations, the first one being bison. Plains Conservation Center is a nonprofit in Colorado that has an asset unlike really anything I've ever seen for a nonprofit. They own 10,000 acres of privately protected grasslands. For those of you who have been to Colorado, you are probably familiar that you land at DIA and head to the mountains. Mountain biking, climbing a 14 or rafting on the Colorado or the Arkansas River, that's the way we all tend to go in Colorado. But Plains is responsible for this amazing resource that is actually the most endangered ecosystem on the planet, the grasslands. So they wanted to get people out to Plains to experience it because people just don't tend to go that way. So the idea of the Biju Grasslands Eco Resort was born. This is a high end luxury but low impact eco resort that will give people the full Plains experience including the opportunity to interact with the bison. But even it's a big project. They wanted to raise $2.8 million to get it launched. And even to get people interested in investing, they found they needed to get them to the site. So they decided to do a pilot program along the way that would help to introduce people to the site. West Biju is the name of the site. So this summer and fall they've been doing a series of safari dinners catered by high end restaurants in Colorado and offering a snapshot of that Plains experience to folks. They've also had the opportunity to partner with the autonomous tent designer who is world-renowned architect Harry Gessner. And so this is a prototype of his new project, The Autonomous Tent. It's a great way for them to introduce people to the site and get people excited about preserving the Plains. So if you come to Colorado, I would love to have the chance to introduce you to the folks at Plains Conservation Center and what they're up to. Next up is Girls Inc of Metro Denver. Girls Inc came to the cohort with a vision of empowered girls in an equitable society. They have a fantastic reputation in Colorado and we were thrilled when they applied to be part of the cohort. So the coolest thing about their business is that it came from the very greatest asset that they have, which is the girls they serve. They would come to the cohort and bring us ideas and the adults would get all excited and they'd go back to the girls who would say, not really our thing. Girls wanted a coffee shop and so that's the idea that they went with. They wanted entrepreneurial training skills, they wanted jobs and Girls Inc wanted to make enough money to at least pay for the business if not provide some support back to them. So on March 5th of this year, they launched Strong, Smart and Bold Beans. They raised startup capital in the form of individual donations and crowdfunding. They did a program-related investment to support their startup costs and they raised enough for startup and six months of operating expenses. The best thing about what they are up to is they've created 13 jobs in the community already, two full-time permanent positions for the social enterprise manager and the coffee shop manager and 11 positions for the girls that they serve, the majority of whom had no previous employment experience. And finally we have Children's Hospital of Colorado. Children's may not seem like a likely suspect to participate in an accelerator program but they have a program called the Children's Health Advocacy Institute and CHI provides child safety and injury prevention programming in the community. They had the opportunity to look around the country at what other children's hospitals were up to and they found this model of a safety store. They pursued the model to figure out if it would be a good fit in Colorado. And I don't know if any of you are new parents but the team realized this is what folks face when they go to the store to buy a baby stroller or a car seat or any baby-proofing items. A sea of choice and no one really to help them make the right decision. So they felt if they could combine their knowledge of child safety and injury prevention with education and a curated selection of products they'd have a hit on their hands. So the safety store opened in February of this year at the Children's Hospital of South Campus in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. They are on target with revenues from other safety stores at this time and they're looking at opportunities to expand locations as well as to online services. So as you can see the organizations did what I had hoped they would be able to do from the start which is leverage their significant assets to meet community need through their businesses. They did this by participating in our cohort program which should have nine bullets of all of the content that they participated in over time. Everything from ideation through to feasibility studies and business planning. And those of you who have started social enterprises know that you really can't do it without a village. So I mentioned we were activating the community. We have had hundreds of people participate in supporting these organizations along the way. We have been really fortunate to have a great group of funders who have contributed significant amounts of money but also expertise and advice to the program to help make it a reality. We have had folks serve as business mentors. We have had the existing nonprofit social enterprises in our community open their doors and give tours such as the women's bean project on the top right there. And we really couldn't have done all of this without this level of support. To date the Colorado nonprofit social enterprise exchange and its graduates have catalyzed $1.5 million into social enterprises in Colorado. We are really excited to see what comes next. These folks graduated a month ago and we're certain that they are on a great trajectory to keep raising even more money. And we're about to see our third cohort. So when Rick and Julie and I started the social enterprise exchange we had three ideas in mind that would help make nonprofits successful in starting businesses. First was the idea that if they started with social purpose and kept that at the core and built the business around it then they would be successful. Mission first. Second was if we did wraparound services from our community and activated folks to really support them that would lead to success. And third was that if we embraced those initial naysayers actually is an asset to us and use them to help motivate us and to help us check our assumptions and our beliefs along the way. We believe all three of those things have come true. We have a saying at the exchange that is these nonprofit leaders are the original social entrepreneurs. And whatever preconceived notions other folks may have about nonprofits and their ability to run a business we would like to commend these Colorado nonprofits for proving that social enterprise is in fact everyone's business. Thank you.