Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge
Centro App: Democratize Entrepreneurship
In response to What specific problem are you solving?
This solution seems to provide a pathway, increased knowledge of technology, potential for increased income and more for a multitude of users. It appears to offer a positive impact in any community it can be offered in.
In response to Film your elevator pitch.
This solution appears it will positively impact many lives because it takes into account the need for mobile resources, ever changing technology, helping to reskill workers and increase career pathways.
In response to What is your solution?
The shut downs due to Covid 19 has effected many small businesses to the point of closures. Does your solurion help businesses through such times?
Thank you for your question and you’re absolutely right. In May we added new functionality to the Centro App to help entrepreneurs discover local lenders and business support organizations or resources. After entering their zip code in the Centro App, entrepreneurs can see the organizations that are relevant to them. This was already planned, but we also added a link to each organization’s COVID-19 response page (when available) so that entrepreneurs could find even more resources to help them. We currently have more than 100 organizations included and are growing the list every week. As a Kiva Hub, we have already helped more than 70 entrepreneurs receive $680,000+ in interest-free micro-loans.
In response to What is your business model?
What makes your solution different from any other online on in person class with the same vision?
Thanks for your question! There is a lot that makes our solution unique - from our focus on creating a solution for low-income, BIPOC, and women entrepreneurs to our teaching methodology that guides the design of our app and in-person workshops.
The Centro App is unique as it is a stand-alone micro-enterprise development ecosystem providing business planning, access to capital and business advisory services, all-inclusive on one platform. It can be easily scaled and replicated nationally to catalyze business ownership and alleviate poverty. To our knowledge, no other organization is linking entrepreneurs with enterprise building tools, small business lenders, and business resources on one platform like Centro. While there are similar tools including Dreambuilder (Thunderbird School of Global Management) and FastTrak (Kauffman Foundation), they both require participants to be in a classroom with a computer to receive the training.
The Centro App is available to anyone, anywhere for free and features a user-friendly interface that makes it accessible and useful for entrepreneurs who don’t have access to an in-person program. If the entrepreneurs have access to our in-person program, the Centro App complements the lesson plans (serving as a pre-class tool to flip the classroom around), and makes the program more rich and engaging.
In response to What is your solution?
How will you continue to fund this after you run out of funds if you were to win.
Thanks for your question! Our app is already available and since it’s part of our normal programming, the ongoing maintenance is included in our program costs.
These funds will actually help improve the sustainability of our organization by increasing revenue (through referral fees on small business loans and licensing our training program to other organizations), and reducing our impact gathering costs (by adding it as an integrated feature of the app).
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