Fresh Start Business Incubator
becomes the Community Innovation
Collaborative
February 9, 2022
To better support the current and future entrepreneurs in our communities, Fresh Start Business Incubator and LifeWorking Coworking are excited to announce our next evolution in service offering with the creation of the Community Innovation Collaborative (CIC). The CIC is a 501c3 public charity created to collaborate and organize with our broad set of Lake County community partners focused on entrepreneurship and innovation for entrepreneurs, small businesses, non-profit corporations, and students – with an emphasis on underserved and under-resourced communities. The CIC will be physically located in LifeWorking locations and offer extended programming to students from kindergarten through high school and to startups free of charge. The newly formed 501c3 will be made up of LifeWorking’s Community Innovation Center, CIC Business Incubator (formally Fresh Start Business Incubator), the Student Innovation Center which incorporates the CIC Student Incubator and K-12 STE2AM programming through its partnership with the Chocolate Chips Association.
LifeWorking’s Community Innovation Center is a physical space that provides flexible workspace, collaboration space, event space and programming to entrepreneurs, small businesses, non-profits and corporations in our communities.
The CIC Business Incubator will provide our diverse community of small businesses, non-profits and women, veteran & minority-owned businesses with Mentorship, Advisory and Capital resources in collaboration with our community partners.
The CIC Student Innovation Center will be anchored by a for-credit Student Incubator leveraging a proven lean startup curriculum for student startups with a focus on building pathways to jobs and higher education equitably via entrepreneurship and innovation and targeting high school students in the surrounding communities who currently do not have access to this type of opportunity.
The goal of the CIC is to provide a physical and collaborative environment that brings innovation to the forefront of the communities we serve through exposure, access and mentorship in a way that can be scaled to serve additional communities in the future.
We would like to thank all the mentors and clients that have worked with Fresh Start over the years, and we are excited to continue working together in a way that offers even greater value to our communities because as we like to say at the CIC; No one element of our community stands alone.
Steven Whittington
President – Community Innovation Collaborative
John Edgcomb
President – Fresh Start Business Incubator
Co-Founder & CRO Applicant Advantage
LifeWorking’s Community Innovation Center is a physical space that provides flexible workspace, collaboration space, event space and programming to entrepreneurs, small businesses, non-profits and corporations in our communities.
The CIC Business Incubator will provide our diverse community of small businesses, non-profits and women, veteran & minority-owned businesses with Mentorship, Advisory and Capital resources in collaboration with our community partners.
The CIC Student Innovation Center will be anchored by a for-credit Student Incubator leveraging a proven lean startup curriculum for student startups with a focus on building pathways to jobs and higher education equitably via entrepreneurship and innovation and targeting high school students in the surrounding communities who currently do not have access to this type of opportunity.
The goal of the CIC is to provide a physical and collaborative environment that brings innovation to the forefront of the communities we serve through exposure, access and mentorship in a way that can be scaled to serve additional communities in the future.
We would like to thank all the mentors and clients that have worked with Fresh Start over the years, and we are excited to continue working together in a way that offers even greater value to our communities because as we like to say at the CIC; No one element of our community stands alone.
Steven Whittington
President – Community Innovation Collaborative
John Edgcomb
President – Fresh Start Business Incubator
Co-Founder & CRO Applicant Advantage