In support of the Town of Davidson’s Economic Development team, we conducted a small business and community-based needs assessment in the fall of 2020 to:

• uncover common challenges, needs, and gaps of local business owners to determine what services and learning tools will make the most community impact,
• discover what communication channels are preferred by the business owner community especially in a time where in-person connection is limited, and
• better understand how residents’ behaviors and preferences changed due to COVID-19.

Upon completion of the assessment, we designed and facilitated six virtual interactive business recovery modules to target the most critical business challenges identified. A few of the topics covered included gathering useful customer feedback, creating powerful moments as marketing, and how to use experiments to pivot effectively.

Planted over pints of craft beer, bloom. continues to be part of the seed and the growth of LaunchCLT a local organization of entrepreneurs, executives and business leaders created to empower the startup ecosystem, enhance mentorship opportunities and encourage economic growth.

bloom. has helped build and lead LaunchCLT (originally LaunchLKN) since it originated in January 2017. In collaboration with several serial entrepreneurs and investors in the Lake Norman area, we developed an organization focused on community, education, mentoring and investment. We helped create and currently lead the LaunchCLT Mentor Program, fueled by over 60 volunteer mentors. We partner with The Hurt Hub @ Davidson and First Turn Innovations to provide the resources and support local entrepreneurs need to scale their ideas. In 2022, due to significant growth across the city, we rebranded the organization to LaunchCLT.

We served as part of the President’s Office Innovation Initiatives team to launch an upskill program for adult learners in support of economic mobility in Charlotte. We did a listening tour, engaging with and learning from workforce development organizations and large employers to ensure we understood our target audience and could design needed learning experiences to spur internal mobility and strong pathways for advancement. We served as project managers to support the course development with Davidson faculty and to create the pilot course, Ready to Lead, which launched in March 2022.

Charlotte Mecklenburg Library was awarded a $492,000 federal grant to pilot a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) in the city’s West Boulevard Corridor to help reduce the digital divide and provide free in-home internet to residents after COVID protocols forced library branches to close.

bloom. led the discovery, strategy, design and implementation of a free in-home internet solution (MeckTech Connect) that will scale to serve between 800-1300 homes in the West Boulevard Corridor. We began the work by developing and executing a community assessment of the West Boulevard Corridor, including resident surveys, customer discovery interviews, and conversations with local community leaders. Next, we led the team through a feasibility study to determine how to build a network that incorporated our learnings from the community. We served as the strategic project managers to create and launch the pilot network, which began providing wifi to its first customers in February 2022. We collaborated with the Library’s Chief Innovation + Strategy Officer to explore sustainable funding opportunities for the network as well as engage UNCC’s Urban Institute to develop a program evaluation for the project.

• Generating ideas to improve team-building in a virtual environment
• Exploring how to create safe, trusted environments to exchange ideas and give constructive input