Hooray!!! I'm here at the West Mesa Business Incubator, the culmination of almost a year of planning on the part of the West Mesa Community Development Corporation and Stealthmode Partners. WMCDC has an almost empty building on the outskirts of downtown Mesa that they have given us to use as space for co-working, business acceleration, and resources. We've got all the basics: free wi-fi, tables and chairs, conference and training rooms, a kitchen, the wonderful executive director with all her connections to resources, and us.
This is big for the Phoenix area, which already has Gangplank for tech company acceleration (we're there, too), and now will have a place for health care and retail support businesses. After forty years, this community is beginning to support its local businesses and provide some infrastructure to help them grow.
We're going to kick the incubator off formally with an Open House on Tuesday, Feb. 2, from 4:30-6 at 587 W. 10th St., in Mesa. Here's a map.
This particular partnership is trying to grow businesses in the vicinity of downtown Mesa, especially the kinds of businesses that will support the expansion of Banner Health, whose corporate center is across the street, and which is in the middle of a big expansion. We will once again use the Kauffman Foundation's Fasttrac program, because we love it and we know it works.
If you, or anyone you know, has a home-based business and would like to co-work, or is up for starting a business to serve this part of the community, we can get you all the help you need. We also have a place for user groups and community groups to meet, too.
Now that we've done this, we will have to prove to the community that it works. That involves people coming to work here. Jo Ellen and I have a dream that there can be child care here one day, too:-)
