In November 2023, after Kellee Mikuls closed her child care startup Swishboom, she went into mourning. A lack of corporate clients and widespread budget freezes meant Swishboom didn’t have enough money to operate.

Endless hours of work, a dedicated team, venture capital investment and a dream to scale a tech solution to the child care crisis had suddenly ended. In the haze, she had no idea what to do next.

Before founding Swishboom, “I was in commercial real estate for 10 years, and through the work of building a startup, I knew I didn’t want to go back to that,” Mikuls said. “But I didn’t really know where my skills were transferable.”

But the startup community knew Mikuls was a valuable leader. Erica Wassinger, general partner at the venture capital fund Proven Ventures, encouraged her to get involved with a nonprofit called Ignite Nebraska. 

Founded in 2022 by Joni Wheeler, an executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska, Ignite upskills Nebraskans from underserved communities into careers to help fill the state’s workforce needs. Mikuls was hooked by the effort. 

“I was like, ‘I have to do this,’” she said. “I can take my skills in growing and scaling businesses, I can take my skills in thinking innovatively and bring it to the nonprofit world.”

Today, Mikuls is the executive director of Ignite Nebraska. She has helped the nonprofit expand its upskilling programs, reach more people and contract with the likes of Google, Nebraska Medicine and the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services to place workers.

As Mikuls aims to make Ignite Nebraska the “best workforce development solution in our state,” she is applying many of the lessons she learned as a startup founder. Top of mind: How to solve problems with innovation, focus and a lean team.

Matching people with jobs to fight poverty

As Mikuls sees it, Ignite Nebraska is addressing a multilayered problem. On the corporate side, turnover can be costly. Finding and training qualified local replacements across tech, trade and health care jobs isn’t easy.

“We solve that by filling their entry-level roles,” Mikuls said. “We bring participants to the table and say, ‘These are the roles. Let’s upskill you with these competencies.’”

Meanwhile, for many Nebraskans, including from underserved communities, finding a high-skill and high-wage career is a challenge. They may not feel confident in themselves, may not know where to go to get upskilled and need help with debt management and child care. 

So Ignite Nebraska steps in with wide-ranging support “so that people can not only get those jobs, but stay in those jobs,” Mikuls said. “Child care, transportation, food insecurity, soft skills coaching, debt consolidation, record expungement, whatever it may be that is a barrier for our participant.”

But there’s also a deeper issue: The benefits cliff. Welfare programs like SNAP and child care assistance are tied to low wages. Sometimes, getting a better job or a promotion with more pay — if the upgraded wage isn’t enough — can’t cover the loss of those benefits.

This pushes many Nebraskans to stay in poverty. To escape it, they need higher wage increases with better jobs, and employers willing to pay those wages to hire and keep workers. 

“We do require employers to pay a meaningful wage,” Mikuls said. “Not everyone’s there yet — maybe not everyone can get there. So in order to use Ignite, we really try to set that tone of, ‘This is the expectation if you want those types of retention benefits.’”

The Ignite approach seems to be working. Employers have a 93% retention rate with Ignite Nebraska participants after two years, Mikuls said. The nonprofit has about 65 alumni, all of whom have gotten off of state benefits, and generated roughly $2.5 million in net new income for Omaha.

The average annual starting salary for Ignite Nebraska participants is $54,000. “As a state, we’re able to create our own workforce that gets people off benefits,” Mikuls said.

The startup-nonprofit balance

In 2026, Ignite Nebraska aims for more growth. Mikuls expects to place 190 participants into careers and serve over 250 Nebraskans with coaching programs. 

The nonprofit also has a contract with the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services to hire 125 Ignite participants annually for the next three years. Mikuls is looking to expand programs further, upskilling Nebraskans into project management, architecture and engineering jobs.

But Mikuls is also learning that the startup-like push to expand isn’t necessarily the right approach for Ignite. “When you come from the startup world, you think, ‘More users, more subscribers, growth, growth, growth, more and more and more,’” she said.

“That’s where probably the startup mindset has to shift when you work in a service industry, and Ignite really is a service provider,” Mikuls said. “You can’t just use a growth factor for what we do, and so it’s kind of a unique spot that really keeps me up at night — where’s that balance of, what’s the most we can grow to that doesn’t negatively impact our quality?”

Mikuls doesn’t want Ignite Nebraska to be just another case management resources firm. She wants Ignite to be the best at what it does. 

Ignite’s work, in a way, also overlaps with the needs of the startup community. On one hand, the nonprofit is focused on entry-level, high-wage roles rather than the experienced tech workers that many startups want.

But today’s entry-level tech workers become, in a few years, experienced people who might contribute to startups. And in a larger ecosystem sense, Ignite and the Nebraska startup community also face a similar challenge with getting corporate clients bought in.

Studies and data about employment in Nebraska show both that startups create new jobs and that many residents are stuck in low-wage jobs that keep them in need and the state from growing. Mikuls and other advocates say corporate Nebraska should help unlock both trends.

“Nebraska continues to be a ‘sit on the sidelines’ and ‘watch and wait’ culture before (companies) jump in and raise their hand,” Mikuls said. “I’d love to see more … partners take a risk and say, ‘This is a great idea. It’s not going to be perfect, maybe from the jump, but we’re going to grow with you.’”

Doing so can uplift all of Nebraska, Mikuls said. “The more people in our community that are going from surviving to thriving means restaurants doing better, museums doing better,” she said. “It means school (support) and taxes coming into the community. It means safer communities. It’s all interconnected.”

Lev Gringauz is a Report for America corps member who writes about corporate innovation and workforce development for Silicon Prairie News.