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The Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta is honing in on innovation in the city, with the recent adoption of the ATL + Israel Women’s Accelerator and other resources for entrepreneurs.
The ATL + Women’s Accelerator officially launched last week, where 12 Jewish women in different stages of their startups began learning how to bring their companies to market and connect with female mentors in Israel over the course of five weeks. The women will pitch their ideas and business to the community on Dec. 12.
But this isn’t the first product of innovation to come out of the Jewish Federation of Atlanta—it’s actually one of several initiatives.
The JFGA’s focus on innovation spawned about a year and a half ago from front porch conversations with the entire community throughout greater Atlanta, according to Vice President of Innovation Jori Mendel. Through those discussions, the organization realized it needed to provide a culture of innovation to assist the future of Jewish Atlanta.
“What are we doing from the innovation initiative? We’re really trying to build this ecosystem and new culture of experimentation, learning and collaboration,” Mendel said. “And we are really serving as a lab that’s supporting and nourishing bold new ideas for social good, and also supporting existing legacy organizations and figuring out how can you make them operate more efficiently, provide them the skills that they’re looking for to succeed in this market…really how are we making those connection points.”
The federation has chosen to reach out to existing legacy organizations and others in the tech community to help them tap into the greater ecosystem, Mendel said. Her goal is for Atlanta to become the Jewish innovation hub.
“The reason innovation is critical at this moment in time is because the face of Judaism and the face of our community is changing and the needs of people are changing and so to be able to equip all of the incredible organizations that we as a Jewish Federation help support to do better business, to serve the changing base of the community, we felt that innovation was critical,” she said.
From connecting entrepreneurs with mentors to offering skill-building classes to having conversations with leading tech companies to launching the women’s accelerator, it’s all about establishing connections among the community, Mendel said.
The federation also offers a Bloom Innovation Microgrant Fund where from one to five applicants can be awarded $500 to $2,000 every quarter. On a larger scale, JFGA offers $5,000 to $15,000 to an innovation proposal that can be used for a yearlong project or to scale a business.
“We kind of felt like this was an opportunity to reset the stage and to really pivot and position us to think and act like a tech business and many ways, like a startup, in our organization,” she said.
Uber Eats Expands in ATL
Uber Eats, the food delivery service within the Uber ride-hailing app, announced Oct. 23 the company is launching in new cities and expanding to suburban areas, including in Atlanta, to serve 70 percent of the U.S. population by the end of 2018.
The new expansion will double Uber Eats’ city count from the previous year. In Georgia, the service recently expanded to Athens and Savannah earlier this year.
“Our expansion into these cities covers mostly suburban areas and even rural areas,” Rachel Jaye, Uber Eats general manager, said. “Specific for us in Atlanta and in the southeast, we’ve seen Uber Eats grow tremendously in Atlanta and our service area has grown in every direction in the last year, actually. When we started we maybe had 50 restaurants and now we’ve grown to have thousands in the Atlanta metro.”
In November, Uber Eats will expand to Fayetteville and Peachtree City in the Metro Atlanta area, in addition to Macon and Columbus, Jaye said. In the metro area, Uber Eats currently covers all the way up to Roswell and Alpharetta and down south to Union City and Riverdale.
“We’re continuing to expand, but our general goal is to be present in the city,” she said.
Across the Southeast, Uber Eats has launched in Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa and Auburn, Ala., with plans to launch in Mobile next month; Charleston, Columbia, Greenville and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“It is in part driven by the folks in our Atlanta office,” Jaye said. “So we have over 50 Uber Eats employees who are only focused on growing Uber Eats in Atlanta and across the U.S.”
Last month, Uber saw order volume increase 10x compared to two years prior. In the past three months, 40 percent of new Uber Eats users have been brand new to Uber, Jaye said.
