Everyone at Assets' Great Social Enterprise Pitch on Thursday evening was in agreement: The judges had their work cut out for them.
"They're all incredible," Lisa Weaver-Gonzalez said of the four individuals and one duo making the case for their business plans.
Weaver-Gonzalez is the program director at Assets. Over the past few months, she has been overseeing the 2024 cohort of Pitch entrepreneurs as they prepared for the moment of truth on the Mickey's Black Box stage at Rock Lititz.
- Previous coverage: Assets' Great Social Enterprise Pitch guides entrepreneurs toward 'triple bottom line'
In the end, it was Kate Farbo, co-founder of Prism Thrift, who won the $10,000 grand prize. The business, which opened its Lancaster bricks-and-mortar storefront at 101 N. Queen St. in late August and held its official ribbon cutting last week, offers a "true thrift experience" and a safe and affirming experience for the LGBTQ+ community.
There's no comparable business in the area, Farbo said: Other thrift stores are out in the county, and some have ties to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations. With violence against queer individuals on the rise, "it is more critical than ever for this community to have safe spaces," she said.
Prism Thrift is a walkable destination that will divert thousands of clothing items from landfills, instead reselling them at $6 to $20 to its core Gen Z market, whom Farbo called "the thrifting generation."
"I'm at a loss for words," Farbo said afterward.
Founded a decade ago in 2015, the Great Social Enterprise Pitch provides a "Shark Tank"-like experience to entrepreneurs who want to start social enterprises — for-profit businesses that also advance social and environmental goals. It's part of Assets' broader mission of encouraging promoting economic development in underserved communities and creating a "human-centered economy" that serves everyone, Assets CEO Jaime Arrroyo said.
Over the summer, a cohort of 10 received intensive training in business planning and marketing before making a preliminary pitch to a team of internal judges at Assets, who picked the five finalists. They received another two weeks of coaching before taking the stage Thursday at Mickey's Black Box. The 212-seat venue was sold out, Arroyo said.
All the finalists delivered their presentations crisply and with conviction, packing into 5 short minutes their idea, their game plan for taking it to scale and the broader good it would do. The judges then retired from the stage to deliberate; local performers entertained the audience in the interim.
The second-place prize, $5,000, went to Jakyra "Ky" Simpson for STEAM Sneakerheadz, an education business that uses hip hop and sneaker culture to expose students in grades 7 to 12 to STEM concepts. Third prize, $2,500, went to Alex Colon and Tabitha Benitez, creators of Ripple Effect, who are looking to open Ripple Hub, a coworking space for artists, musicians and other creatives.
Finishing fourth was Lili Meng, founder of CoCarting, a e-commerce platform that provides sharing and chat features so friends and family can shop online together; fifth was Brooklyn Smith-Jones' BK Shanae Candle Co., offering workshops making scented candles out of nontoxic materials.
"We thought what they offered was exceptional," said Amanda Bakay, one of the five panelists. "The judging was incredibly close."
She and her fellow judges, she said, looked closely at the long-term sustainability of the contestants' business models and at the social impact, "which we thought was really strong in our winner."
All the presenters explained how their business ideas grew out of personal experience. Smith-Jones said entrepreneurship seemed out of reach to her as the child of a single mother working three jobs, so she "decided to be the change she wanted to see." Colon and Benitez said they created Ripple to provide the fellowship, mentorship and access to resources that they struggled to find in their own artistic careers.
Meng said the idea for CoCarding came from trying to shop for her niece; the platform has 500 test users and is launching its mobile app next month. Farbo said thrifting let her nurture her creativity and individuality when she was growing up "a poor kid in the 90s," and turn limitations into opportunities. Simpson said she loved science communicators like Bill Nye but didn't see enough diversity in stories and textbooks when she was growing up, so she decided to "show up and show out" as Ky the Chemist.
Farbo said Assets' program was beneficial from start to finish.
"It was amazing to be challenged to approach things in a different way than I typically do. … To have the structure and the feedback and the peer review and the collaboration of this project was invaluable."
Photos
(Photos: Tim Stuhldreher | One United Lancaster)
