Another part of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s focus on the changing nature of Nashville’s business landscape has been the evolution of Twendé, the organization’s program focusing on entrepreneurs of color.

Kiswahili for “let’s go,” the Twendé program was founded in 2019 as a nine-month effort for entrepreneurs, regardless of industry, to grow their businesses through a targeted curriculum, community support and mentorship.

But the emergence of the program, and subsequent sharpening for the current cohort on the areas of corporate and governmental supplier diversity, came not from a top-down, opportunistic look from the organization, but rather from within, from founders going through the EC’s existing program set, says Brittany Cole, the EC’s chief equity and inclusion officer.

“They were in programs at the EC and they saw an opportunity, ‘Hey, these programs are great, but they’re not meeting specific needs that I have as a Black founder. Could we create something that is more tailored to how we are experiencing entrepreneurship, and that speaks more to our experiences?’” Cole says.

Twendé started as a single event that drew close to 200 interested founders and operators to the EC, and has since expanded to its own primarily virtual, programmed track that’s drawn interest (and funding) from across the state.

Cole took over leadership of the program last year when the previous facilitator left for another opportunity, and says feedback has helped shape and focus the program quickly, especially in the wake of both a pandemic and global racial reckoning in the wake of the George Floyd murder in the summer of 2020.

“When I came in the door you know, as any leader would, you don’t come in making change. You come in listening and trying to understand and learn,” Cole says. “Through surveys and listening sessions and one-on-one conversations, it became very clear that the biggest need with the program was having a more focused curriculum and taking it to the next level, which excited me.

“We found an area of opportunity, which was when you look at Black and brown founders that grow and scale their business, how does that happen?” she continues. “When you look at those stories, when you read the reports, coupled with what’s currently available in the marketplace, the synergy between those two questions was business to business.

“There was nothing in the marketplace that was specifically focused on helping Black and brown founders do business with corporate and government clients,” Cole notes. “So we landed on a program promise that’s just that. This newly redesigned program is all about helping Black and brown founders do business with corporate and government clients. The structure is tailored toward helping these growing businesses do business with big business.”

Cole helped forge a partnership with the San Antonio, Texas-based company Stimulyst, a female founder focused accelerator that has helped more than 10,000 women land corporate deals, for a curriculum licensing agreement. “So they’re more focused from a gender perspective, but we’ve leveraged their curriculum, their program design and a lot of the experience that they have in this space with diverse groups to really make Twendé a one-of-a-kind program,” Cole notes.

Another aspect of the Twendé experience Cole hopes could be adopted on a larger scale within the EC is moving away from the primarily linear nature of the organization’s information deployment.

“One thing that is new that we’re doing with Twendé that I believe could be a model for the EC to leverage as a company is we are providing the full-scale curriculum on demand,” she says. “The way that the other programs work at the EC is that instructors teach curriculum in real time. We are working with a subject matter expert and we’re asking them, ‘Hey, come in and teach on sales,” and they’re leveraging their intellectual property to come in and share.

“I think one of the things that we’re learning through Twendé, with this partner Stimulyst, is this curiosity around what could it look like for the Nashville Entrepreneur Center to create its own curriculum around entrepreneurship,” Cole continues. “Taking PreFlight, for example, and building out a robust curriculum that not only serves PreFlight, but then you could also license it to organizations who want to teach a similar course.”

Regardless, the awareness distribution the Twendé program is already generating has brought a new slew of promising candidates to the forefront for future cohorts. “This year, over 70 founders over the course of maybe five weeks applied to be a part of our Twendé accelerator program,” Cole says, companies with an existing annual average revenue of $183,000.

“That’s the encouraging piece. We can do this. We can build businesses that are million-dollar businesses, billion-dollar businesses,” she continues. “Every Fortune 500 business started in someone’s mind, and someone had the guts and the relationship capital and the support and the resources and the financial capital to go build something great. We have that same opportunity.

“The challenges look different and yes, there are oftentimes more of them, but that’s where great programs like the Twendé accelerator program are built for.”