CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA Tom Tom Founders Festival, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering diverse entrepreneurship in small cities, today announced the launch of the first-ever Virginia Policy Entrepreneurship Retreat this April 13-14 in Charlottesville, VA at the Marriott Residence Inn Downtown and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
The Virginia Policy Entrepreneurship Retreat is an intensive workshop for Virginia’s mayors, city and county managers, and economic development directors, designed to facilitate entrepreneurial thinking and action in government. The Retreat takes place as part of Tom Tom Founders Festival’s inaugural Hometown Summit, America’s biggest conference for small cities.
The Virginia Policy Entrepreneurship Retreat will be co-hosted by Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia (SE@UVA) and Babson College, and will be led by Jim Cheng, former Secretary of Commerce for the Commonwealth, and John Kluge, Co-Founder of the Alight Fund and Advisor to SE@UVA. “The Retreat’s curriculum was jointly developed by Babson College and UVA, both world-class leaders in entrepreneurial education,” says Kluge. “Our methodology is designed to provide policy entrepreneurs with the space and expertise they need to develop paths to resiliency and collaborative changemaking.”
The Retreat aims to foster a state-level entrepreneurial ecosystem that will lead to greater effectiveness in government. The initial cohort will convene annually, allowing participants to stay connected as they implement their respective local projects.
“The first cohort of Virginia Policy Entrepreneurs will work together in a mix of classroom and interactive sessions, and will integrate content with the larger Hometown Summit,” says Cheng. “The energy generated from each of these events will have a long-lasting impact through entrepreneurially inspired policy initiatives.”
Executives from Virginia’s city and state governments–particularly mayors, city managers, and economic development experts– will compose the cohort. Facilitators, drawn from Babson College, the University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, the Darden School of Business, and the private sector will serve as resources for the group.
Participants will also have the chance to interact with small city innovators from across the country during Hometown Summit activities. Cheng and Kluge say that they hope the Hometown Summit and Virginia Policy Entrepreneurs Retreat will help to raise the profile of Charlottesville and the Commonwealth of Virginia as national leaders in urban and policy innovation.
“This Retreat is about bringing the creativity and efficiency of entrepreneurial thought into the work of government, which has such a profound impact on our everyday lives,” says Paul Beyer, Founder and Executive Director of Tom Tom Founders Festival. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for growth among our state’s urban innovators, and our hope is that the Retreat’s innovation-oriented lessons will ultimately prove to have a significant national impact.”
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About the Tom Tom Foundation and Tom Tom Founders Festival
The Tom Tom Foundation is the nonprofit organization that hosts the annual Tom Tom Founders Festival. Supporting high-impact events throughout the year, the Foundation seeks to empower the innovators whose creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to community help ensure a better future for us all. Now in its sixth year, the action-packed Founders Festival is held during the week of April 13 (hometown hero Thomas Jefferson’s birthday) in Charlottesville, VA. Featuring outstanding local music, art, and food, as well as high-stakes startup competitions and high-impact conversations with business, entrepreneurial, and academic and civic leaders, the event attracted more than 38,000 attendees in 2016. Learn more at www.tomtomfest.com.
About Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia
Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia creates opportunities for students to learn about social entrepreneurship through experiential classes, workshops, speakers, hackathons, concept competitions, Global Field Experiences and internships. Social Entrepreneurs are committed to solving the major challenges facing the planet today. They take innovative and creative approaches to develop sustainable solutions to a range of problems from poverty, malnutrition, and homelessness and to lack of access to education, health care and dignified work. Those solutions may take the form of innovative financially-sustainable non-profits, world changing for-profits, or a range of hybrid models in between, including innovative financing like venture philanthropy, social impact bonds, public-private partnerships and impact investing. Often real system-change requires collaboration across sectors, this is the focus of the SE@UVA Research Hub for Collaborative Innovation.
About Babson College
Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds®. The top-ranked college for entrepreneurship education, Babson is a dynamic living and learning laboratory where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society. We prepare the entrepreneurial leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to make a difference in the world, and have an impact on organizations of all sizes and types. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value.
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