Fire Awards: Finalist - Fire starters/community builders
As an innovation hub focused on advancing the region’s bioscience industries, BioSTL has placed an emphasis on promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in St. Louis’ innovation economy by helping minority entrepreneurs create and grow startups in the bioscience sector. It also teamed up with the Cortex Innovation Community and the Center for Emerging Technologies to establish VOICES, an entrepreneurship affinity group that facilitates dialogue and networking among minorities working in St. Louis' startup ecosystem.
What was your organization’s biggest achievement in the past year? BioSTL advanced our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commitment and capacity over the past year, focusing on systems-level changes, both internally and externally, operationalizing a strategy to apply a DEI lens to all of our work, and providing awareness-building, training, and engagement with staff and external partners. To date, we have reached nearly 2,000 individuals with $53 million raised by inclusion participants and more than 400 diverse future founders trained.
Internally, BioSTL achieved 80% participation across a suite of regular, company-wide DEI trainings and expanded our targeted recruitment of diverse pools of talent to fill open positions, resulting in the hiring of 17 full-time employees of diverse backgrounds. Externally, BioSTL has helped increase the capacity of our partners to center the needs of historically excluded communities to ensure a wholly inclusive innovation ecosystem.
What is your organization’s top goal for the next year? BioSTL envisions a St. Louis region where economic opportunity from the biosciences and innovation helps close health and economic outcome gaps in the region and the world; and where the opportunity to thrive for every student, employee, and entrepreneur is not determined by their race, gender, place of birth, or any other demographic characteristic. Over the course of the next year and beyond, BioSTL is committed to increase the availability and diversity of the entrepreneurial talent that drives St. Louis’ innovation ecosystem. Specific work includes:
- BioSTL will expand talent development initiatives across its partnerships and programs and enhance our own organizational capacity and diversity.
- BioSTL aims to increase talent attraction and development: internally to increase program outputs and community impact; among emerging startups (homegrown and globally attracted) through a new, more inclusive pipeline of founders and startup executives; and throughout the regional workforce that enables startups to grow in the region.
- Across each of these areas, applied through all the strategic initiatives of BioSTL, we will embed programs, practices, and policies that ensure an inclusion and equity lens is core throughout all activities.
- BioSTL aims to recruit and retain additional talent into BioSTL and into emerging companies in the region. We will add Executives in Residence; support executive recruitment for emerging businesses (started in or attracted to St. Louis) to help them reach their growth potential; hire Venture Fellows (diverse talent immersed in a BioGenerator venture capital fellowship); and expand our Inclusive Entrepreneurship Development Program - providing support and access to capital to Black, Latinx, foreign-born and women entrepreneurs across the broad areas of life science (e.g., health, wellness, food, and nutrition).
- For the regional ecosystem, we will build workforce pipelines of entrepreneurial talent through work-based learning (WBL) opportunities within St. Louis’ startup community.
- BioSTL is partnering with four historically black colleges and universities this fall to recruit entrepreneurs and talent of color with science-focused backgrounds by attracting them to career paths and internship opportunities within BioSTL/BioGenerator. We are creating strategic relationships with professors, entrepreneurial groups, athletic clubs, fraternities and sororities, accelerator programs, to build a pipeline of talent for the region.
For links to profiles of winners and finalists in the 2022 Fire Awards and Startup Exit Awards, go here:
