A More Holistic Assessment of the St. Louis Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Funded through a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Inclusive STL is a partnership between the Washington University’s Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEI) Lab and WEPOWER.
St. Louis-based Black-led community entrepreneurship organizations are reframing the role of the entrepreneur in the community, calling out extractive practices, encouraging sustainable businesses, and building business models that reinvest in the communities they serve.
Our research will explore the influence of the Black-led community entrepreneurship organizations on the entrepreneurial community including anchor institutions, and other actors in the St. Louis entrepreneurial ecosystem. By connecting the data on wider racial disparities to the emergence of Black-led community power organizations, we will bring the various siloed systems into an intersectional questioning and reframing of what is the ecosystem and what it encompasses. It will draw attention to arbitrary limits, contours, and relationships made invisible in the ecosystem by asking:
- How does the emergence of a Black-led community power-building and entrepreneur support organization affect the dynamics and the limits of the existing ecosystem?
- What can other studies of systemic racism in St. Louis tell us about the contour of the current ecosystem and who is considered inside it (and worthy of support) and who is not?
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