A few weeks ago, Penny Peavler and Valerie Horn were deep in a $50,000 grant application to fund food distribution to kids in Eastern Kentucky, when Horn realized what she had: a food distribution network. Since 2017, Horn had been building a nonprofit, Community Agricultural Nutrition Enterprises, to get farm produce to families that needed […]
Trailblazers
Stories about innovative company builders in the middle of America
Posted inTrailblazers
No Outside Developer Had Worked In OKC’s East Side For 35 Years. Then, An Unlikely Team Stepped Up.
Part of a series on right-sizing capital Jill Castilla had just driven under the giant railroad trestle on Broadway Extension outside Oklahoma City when Jonathan Dodson reached her on Bluetooth. “I have a deal,” he started. The young developer had previous successes in the city, Castilla knew, including a rehab of an old theater. She […]
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How A Turkish Startup Focused On Autism Education Reached A Global Market
Hasan Zafer Elcik’s little brother Alper was diagnosed with severe autism at the age of two and a half and, for many years after, was unable to talk, read or write. Then, about seven years ago at their home in an Ankara, Turkey, suburb, Elcik let his little bro play with his new smartphone. The […]
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The 80-Year-Old Investor Behind Some Of The World’s Biggest Health Data Companies
John Sculley is often thought of as one of the best CEOs of the late 20thcentury, a leader of Apple and Pepsi. But in his second career as a super-angel investor, he’s having arguably as much influence today – though quietly — through his investments in startups including Zeta Global and Rx Advance. His entrepreneurial […]
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Wartime Entrepreneurs: 50 Syrian Women Find A Way To Export Aleppo’s Famous Soap To The U.S.
“Everybody would be telling stories about their homes. Then the singing and laughter would turn into tears.” Amid the flood of migrants, and the fear provoked by terror attacks, individual stories only slowly come to the fore, especially the stories of women. It’s been three years since I wrote the story below, about the inspiring […]
Posted inRest of US, Trailblazers, US Heartland
A Tiny Woman Entrepreneur Stands Up To The Trump Administration On Lead
The day the U.S. federal government repealed the federal ban on lead ammunition on wildlife refuges, Lynn Tompkins had a bald eagle dying of lead poisoning in her bird rehab center. She told the young woman working with her to grab a phone and video the bird’s suffering. The bird, likely poisoned from eating the carcasses […]
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Successful Women Are Starting Businesses. Yes, Even After 50.
Arthur C. Brooks, the departing CEO of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a long researched essay in The Atlantic this month. It says that your career peaks at 50, and woe to those who don’t accept their decline gracefully. While I was reading it, drawn by the fear-inspiring headline “Your Professional Decline Is Coming Sooner […]
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Susan Sarandon’s new cause: Championing women’s entrepreneurship
When Susan Sarandon visited refugees on the Greek island of Lesvos at Christmas 2015, she asked each one three questions: Hold old are you? Where are you from? What is your job? Architect, teacher, lawyer, they said, and spoke to her about wanting to go back to work. Her new venture, a documentary film called Soufra, which […]
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How A (Crazy) Main Street Entrepreneur Sparked A Renaissance In A Pennsylvania City
Tweet This We need individuals, dissenters, to shake up the system, before it is popular or safe to advocate for a cause. Steve Murray’s store was never going to scale in terms of revenue. But he had scale in another way: His vision scaled. “Walk down to my store,” Steve Murray said to me urgently that day in […]
