Nonprofit leaders discuss the heightened challenges organizations face as they serve communities through crisis.

If you are a fund manager interested in applying for funding through the Capital Access Lab and have questions before you begin your application, please contact Brendan Cosgrove.

Interested fund managers ready to apply for funding through the Capital Access Lab can contact us through the Kauffman portal by Submitting a New Idea. To ensure you are considered as part of the Capital Access Lab, select your area of interest as “Entrepreneurship” and your strategic focus as “Capital Access.”

Ross Baird Ross Baird helped create the Capital Access Lab initiative as an innovator-in-residence in Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Read Baird’s full bio > Brendan Cosgrove Brendan Cosgrove is an investment director at the Capital Access Lab, where he leads the investment due diligence, strategy development, and deal sourcing. Cosgrove has been […]

We’ve secured five funds as part of the Capital Access Lab to date. These funds have collectively invested $3 million, catalyzing at least an additional $5 million in investments. “Your gender, where you live, or the color of your skin should not determine whether you can start a business,” said Philip Gaskin, vice president of […]

We know that entrepreneurs who are historically left behind due to race, ethnicity, gender, or geography have more challenges accessing capital to start or grow a business. Existing structures and strategies do not support the majority of entrepreneurs, with many facing persistent market gaps: Gender Venture capital data showed that all-women founding teams raised 2.2% […]

The Capital Access Lab is a national pilot initiative that aims to find, promote, and scale innovative investment managers, providing new kinds of capital to underserved entrepreneurs and communities in the United States. The Capital Access Lab works in conjunction with ImpactAssets to invest in the funds. The Capital Access Lab pilot is designed to […]

How do entrepreneurs in the Heartland – Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska – perceive challenges compared to entrepreneurs nationally? We asked Heartland and nationwide entrepreneurs to rank the order of the three to five most challenging barriers from a list of 13 barriers to discover what matters most to them.

This working paper analyzes one important factor of entrepreneurship – new business applications – in the first 16 weeks of 2020 and historically. Week 16 in 2020 ended on April 18.