Find Your “Village” with VELA
Micro-grants that seed and connect education entrepreneur founders.
Are you an education entrepreneur? Do you know one looking for start-up support and a community of entrepreneurs dedicated to doing education differently?
VELA Education Fund opened another round of their microgrant applications this month, and applications close next Monday, April 22.
Stand Together Trust is fortunate to partner with the VELA Founder Network as they support a robust community of education entrepreneurs who are creating bespoke learning environments and ecosystem builders inventing the tools to support these dynamic education options emerging on the new frontier of education. This growing community leverages the entrepreneurial spirit in educators to respond to the unique needs and desires of students and their families. In short, VELA is the nation’s leading community of entrepreneurs providing alternatives to conventional schooling by providing early capital, access to a thriving community of entrepreneurs, and connections to resources and support.
VELA’s mircogrants range from $2,500-10,000 and are reserved for founders enabling families to pursue alternatives to conventional schooling as their primary learning experience. To learn more about this round of microgrants, visit: https://vela.org/apply/
You can hear Meredith Olson, founder and CEO of VELA, discuss “Funding Out-Of System Education” on Manisha Snoyer’s Teach Your Kid podcast. Manisha, a VELA grantee herself for her entrepreneurial work in education, shares about being able to call up other founders for encouragement and support in times of need, even though they too are balancing hectic and busy schedules. She summarizes the support of the VELA Founder Network this way, “Community is so important. When you’re feeling lonely or not enough, it is just everything.” Meredith responded,
“When we started VELA we thought the work was primarily going to be about seed funding… what we saw almost immediately is that, of course, there is value in seed funding… but we saw organic and authentic networking building among founders… Groups are coming together once a month sharing knowledge and working together… That knowledge sharing, that network building that happens is truly enabling people to learn, improve and get better, each of them as independent founders competing in the market, but they are very collaborative, and they want to improve and get better together.”
To “meet” more members and entrepreneurs in the VELA Founder Network, visit VELA’s Stories page. Share this post with a friend or head to https://vela.org/apply/ to apply!