NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Kansas Leadership Center (KLC), a Wichita-based nonprofit, has selected Reno County as the third of four communities in the Heartland region to participate in a pilot program that will generate leadership and civic engagement to support local entrepreneurship.
"We had folks apply to the program," said Jackson Swearer with StartUp Hutch. "We're really excited about the cohort of folks we were able to put together. We've got some folks from Hutchinson, obviously, we've got a pretty diverse mix of people and also some folks from the surrounding towns around Reno County. We're really trying to talk about this combination, or maybe the intersection, let's say, between entrepreneurship ecosystem building, which is really what StartUp Hutch is all about, and also the idea of adaptive leadership and that's what the Kansas Leadership Center does."
The Heartland Together Flagship Experience is November 14-16.
"We're going to have two and a half days where we get folks from our local community together to talk about those two things together and what are the gaps that we see in our entrepreneurship ecosystem now," Swearer said. "We're going to ask people to design some experiments. We're going to put a few dollars behind some of those experiments and ask them to try some new things. What we're going to at the Reno County Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Partnership level, is we're going to use those experiments and what we learn from this program to help us create the next action plan for StartUp Hutch and for our whole entrepreneurship ecosystem. I'm really excited to see what we learn from folks, what people are hearing on the ground and what kinds of different experiments people come up with."
According to the Kansas Leadership Center, every situation calling for leadership has elements that are adaptive (focused on hearts, values) and technical (the stuff experts can solve). A potential goal is to determine technical tools to provide to entrepreneurs so that they can spend their time working on the adaptive side of the problems they face.
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