Fort Lewis College will receive $401,000 from the federal government for small-business development and entrepreneurship programming as part of Colorado’s fiscal year 2023 federal funding bill.
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper secured $129.3 million of the funding for 94 projects through the congressionally directed spending process.
“Coloradans know best what their communities need,” said Hickenlooper in a news release. “These projects are examples of how everyone wins when Washington listens to the needs of the people we serve.”
The funding is supposed to help rural Coloradans by providing workforce development and business education resources. The project attempts to build and strengthen regional pipelines for more qualified and diverse business professionals, which has been a common theme among Durango educators at the college and high school levels.
Programming will be offered at the Fort Lewis College Center for Innovation. People using the Center’s services range from high school students to small-business owners and entrepreneurs. It will discuss topics such as entrepreneurship, innovation, business model canvassing, marketing and customer development.
FLC Dean of Business Administration Steven Elias said the programming will be mostly for the community but FLC students may participate as well. The funding will cover the cost of renting the FLC Innovation Center space, travel to partnering schools like San Juan College and New Mexico State University as well as funding technology needed for the courses.
“I think Durango actually does a great job of providing some of these resources, like with the Small Business Development Center,” Elias said. “This is really just to be able to provide funding for programming that we weren’t able to before.”
Previously, FLC frequently relied on partnering with other schools and other small business development entities for programming, but with the addition of funds, FLC will be able to provide more programming on its own.
Elias said offering this programming is important to Durango specifically because of the number of small businesses the community has.
“A couple years ago, 80% of businesses in Durango were 10 employees or less, and so they may or may not have all the expertise for every aspect of their job, whether it’s marketing or HR,” Elias said.
The programming is meant for new businesses in the early stages of development to help them understand how to grow in a rural community like Southwest Colorado.
The Center offers coworking space as well as access to technology and infrastructure that may be hard to come by for new enterprises that want to get off the ground. Businesses that want to grow are given assistance, such as advanced education, access to funding and specific guidance to attract investors.
FLC also received $1.3 million from the state through the congressionally directed spending process for the school’s Collaborative Nursing Workforce Education Degree Program.
FLC and the University of Colorado Anschutz College of Nursing are partnering to create a four-year degree in nursing, offered at FLC’s campus. The Nursing Collaborative will attempt to provide solutions to nursing shortages in rural areas, health inequities in diverse communities and the profession’s need for diversification.
The first cohort of nursing students will begin in August 2023 and graduate in May 2027.
tbrown@durangoherald.com
(A previous version of this article published on Dec. 21 said that Fort Lewis College had received state funding for the small-business development and entrepreneurship programming. This was incorrect. FLC received federal funding for the programming)
