Is There An “Open City” Project For Home Based Entrepreneurs?

Detroit, Michigan is “challenged” to say the least. Corrupt government, abandoned properties, severe depopulation, and 30% unemployment (approximately).  Nevertheless, something “right” is still happening there from time to time.

I just heard about the “Open City” project there.

Once a month, a local gathering place hosts an “Open City” meeting. About 100 people come to meet, eat, great and talk business.  It’s become an “incubator” for new business because 25% of the people who are there are already in business and the rest are toying with the idea.  This project has been going on since 2007 in fact.

Hoping to nudge these latent entrepreneurs along, Claire Nelson and Liz Blondy launched Open City in 2007. They had both recently started businesses — Nelson owns the retail shop Bureau for Urban Living and Blondy runs a dog daycare business called Canine to Five — and were keenly aware of how much their success had depended on the advice and encouragement of other business owners.

Nelson and Blondy designed Open City as a forum for providing that mentoring on a broader scale. Each meeting features a panel of speakers on a particular theme (see a list of this year’s topics here), plus lots of time for participants to talk about their business ideas and share information and advice.

As a result, they’ve seen numerous small businesses start and some expand.

Some of the businesses not only employ local people of course, but they also make it their business to be “sourced” by other local manufacturers and, in the case of restaurants, local farmers.

It makes me wonder… “Is there an Open City project or something similar we could set up for home business people?”