The Kansas City Startup Village (KCSV) wants to invite its neighbors over for dinner, er, meetings.
Fresh off 1 Million Cups‘ weekly Wednesday gatherings at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the KCSV has been sticking around for an hour-long discussion at 10:30 a.m. (left). Topics have been fairly limited to the Village’s challenges and initiatives, but that’s about to change. KCSV co-founder Adam Arredondo told Silicon Prairie News the group realized there needed to be a place where the entire community could voice ideas.
“We started asking ourselves, ‘How do we best spend our effort and time?’ ” he said.
In what he says will be a fluid situation as everyone comes to understand how best to operate the meetings, the post-1MC meetings will alternate weekly from KCSV-centric to community-wide. The first community meeting—Kansas City Startup Community as it’s temporarily being referred to—was two weeks ago and the next will be held at this week’s 1MC.
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Maria Meyers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Innovation Center director, brought six challenges facing the community to the first meeting, and Arredondo said the group will wrap up that discussion Wednesday before dividing into teams to try and solve them.
“We want to figure out higher-level objectives first then form teams to optimize efforts on a larger scale,” he said. “Maybe we’ll spend 30 minutes in general discussion, 30 minutes in teams.”
Right now, as with KCSV, the goal is to grow the meetings organically. Arredondo envisions eventually reaching out to major players—accelerators, investors, more—around the city to get involved. And while the meetings alternate back and forth between KCSV and KCSC for now, he sees the possibility for all of the meetings to focus on the community at large. Until then, leaders are welcome at the table every other Wednesday.
Credits: Photo by Jeff Slobotski
