CIC St. Louis, which operates a campus in the Cortex Innovation District in the Central West End, is launching a new program designed to incubate “social impact” companies.
It has established the Social Impact Cohort St. Louis, which CIC St. Louis says will focus on accelerating local early stage companies that have mission-driven purposes. The organizations selected for the program will receive free office space and networking and will participate in a digital skills curriculum. CIC St. Louis is currently seeking applications for the program.
CIC St. Louis is part of the Cambridge Innovation Center, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and owns and operates about 1 million square feet of workspace and event space in the U.S. and globally. CIC St. Louis General Manager John Land said the idea for the new program originated from CIC’s Philadelphia site, which has run several iterations of its own social impact cohort.
“We have been really enamored with the idea for a while,” Land said.
Land said CIC St. Louis originally intended to launch the new program in 2020, but decided to hold off amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been delaying the program until it felt comfortable it could safely stage the cohort in person, Land said.
“We were getting a little tired of having to put this on the shelf. We really wanted to roll it out and we really wanted to bring it to the community. We’ve been so excited about it for so long,” he said.
Land said the cohort will be open to companies seeking to drive positive change in St. Louis and that its application process is taking a broad approach to what might define social impact.
“We wanted to let folks sort of speak for their own work and let them tell us about the impact that they are trying to have in the community,” he said.
The cohort could include both for-profit startups and nonprofit organizations, Land said. Given its curriculum and the connections CIC St. Louis can facilitate, Land said early stage firms are the best fit for the program. CIC St. Louis expects to select about three to five companies for the upcoming fall cohort.
Companies selected for the three-month cohort will receive free office space and be grouped together near each other on CIC St. Louis’ campus. The curriculum for the cohort is being offered through a partnership with New York-based technology education provider General Assembly.
Land said he hopes the new program further expands CIC St. Louis’ ability to convene companies and organizations with mission-driven purposes.
“The whole mission behind CIC has always been to bring folks together who are striving to make a positive impact in the world. That’s always been at the core of our mission. That’s really close personally to my heart and why I love this place. We’ve always seen folks doing that work in our space. I really wanted to find a way to encourage that and maybe even accelerate that or create a really intentional program to attract that kind of company,” he said.
Applications for the Social Impact Cohort St. Louis close Sept. 3.
