A nonprofit spinoff of venture fund PS27 Ventures is ramping up plans to help train early-stage companies and startups, especially those founded by women, people of color and veterans.
The expansion of PS27 Foundation's entrepreneurial education programming — which provides educational resources and access to a wider network of business leaders, financial resources and other, more experienced founders — comes as the organization, which was founded in 2016, expands its funding and brings on its first executive director.
PS27 Ventures CEO Jim Stallings said the move to hire Emmanuel Fortune as executive director comes at a time of rapid growth for the foundation.
“We’re going to double, over the next year, the numbers of programs” from two to four large programs, he said. “We probably touch 400 entrepreneurs a year. We’ll probably touch over 1,000 a year from now.”
Fortune, who was appointed executive director by the board of directors on Feb. 1, brings to the position a master's degree from Stanford University and more than 14 years of nonprofit experience, including working with Teach for America, Flamboyan Foundation and the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida.
This expansion of the Foundation’s reach takes place as the nonprofit reports its fundraising has doubled in the past year, according to Director of Communications Christine Caven. The organization's budget comes to “several hundred thousand dollars," Stallings said, with the nonprofit securing funding from more than 10 entities, including Black Knight, Cannae Holdings, Fidelity National Financial, JP Morgan Chase and others.
With the Foundation’s Female Founders Forum hosting 300 women at the University of North Florida in March and the new Black Entrepreneurs Forum in June likely to attract 500 attendees, Stallings said, an executive director was needed to manage the growing entity.
“We need an executive director with vision and energy and passion for entrepreneurship to say, ‘What are we missing, what do we need to add, and what are the resources we need to bring to bear on this?’” Stallings said.
Fortune said his goals for the Foundation have less to do with expanding existing programs than creating new ones, including the Black Entrepreneurs Forum and a Veteran Entrepreneurs Forum slated for next year.
It’s early days to be pinning down metrics for particular goals, though, he said, adding that the Foundation hasn’t yet established benchmarks for growth and is more focused on creating sustainability by securing more partnerships. In doing so, he believes the Foundation can make Jacksonville a more formidable competitor on the regional stage.
“Atlanta has been able to see growth across those three demographic groups (women, people of color and veterans) in our lifetime,” Fortune said. “What’s it going to take for another city in the South to do that?”
In terms of why he’s choosing to expand the Foundation, Stallings said he wanted to meet demand in an increasingly entrepreneurial economy. The number of applications filed for new business licenses in Jacksonville reached 31,200 in 2020, a 31.8% increase from the 23,700 applications filed in 2019.
While the VC arm of PS27 is separate from the nonprofit Foundation, Stallings added that the latter does present opportunities for the former.
“If someone is particularly growing and they go through one of our programs and they grow to a stage where they need venture capital, they most likely will ask us (on the VC side),” he said. Plus, “we share a name … people tend to, when they look for one, they find the other, and that helps us.”
