Fresh Off A Weekend Of Success, Forge Arkansas To Speak At 1 Million Cups
by June 16, 2015 7:18 pm 98 views
The work of a Jonesboro entrepreneurial group will be featured Wednesday at Little Rock’s weekly 1 Million Cups series.
Officials with Forge Arkansas will talk at the 9 a.m. Wednesday meeting of the 1 Million Cups at the Venture Center, located at 107 East Markham Street in downtown Little Rock.
“We are really excited about it,” co-founder and president of Forge Arkansas Steven Trotter said.
The 1 Million Cups program is a free, weekly program that tries to educate, engage and connect with entrepreneurs. The Little Rock chapter recently marked its first year of operations.
Forge Arkansas, which works in Jonesboro and Randolph County, was formed in Jan. 2015 after nearly two years’ worth of grassroots work, Trotter said.
Once it was formed, the group created four different facilities for people to use – Forge Foods, Forge Labs, Forge Factories and Forge Ahead.
Trotter said the Forge Foods group will help people plant, grow and eat healthy foods, while the Forge Factories group will help with business accelerators.
The Forge Ahead group will work on quality of life issues as the Forge Labs group helps to build ideas, said Trotter.
The Labs group provides an opportunity for people including children to “make things,” Trotter said.
FORGE IDEA FESTIVAL
Last weekend, the group hosted a highly successful entrepreneur festival in Jonesboro.
Trotter said the festival had budding entrepreneurs from Northeast Arkansas, Northwest Arkansas, Central Arkansas and Memphis, with at least 30 sixty-second pitches.
Trotter said the entrepreneurs had an opportunity to hear from several people including Jonesboro Mayor Harold Perrin and Jonesboro Regional Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Mark Young.
“Lectures and workshops included a discussion about public spaces for innovation by Kristen Jeffers, also known as The Black Urbanist,” Trotter said. “Jeff Amerine spoke about building a startup movement in an emerging region, specifically Northeast Arkansas, which fit perfectly into the day’s goal of extendeding the mission of Forge Arkansas. John Aucker also spoke about the Delta Cuisine commercial kitchen and food incubator in West Memphis, a very exciting facility and program now available to the region. The day was rounded out by a whole host of talks from local professors, patent and trademark specialists, business leaders and mentors.”
FUTURE
Trotter said the group is working mainly in Jonesboro now but hopes to expand to the rest of Northeast Arkansas and the Delta.
Trotter said while the goal is to keep the group as grassroots as possible, the group has received support from businesses like Ritter Communications.