Our Why
We strive for a Colorado, and a nation, where innovation and economic mobility is driven by talent and interest, regardless of parental wealth, race, gender, or zip code.
We believe the answer to the challenges of both individual economic mobility and Colorado business success resides in connecting and supporting homegrown talent into regional career pathways.
the colorado paradox
Colorado ranks 2nd in the nation for postsecondary degree attainment (the 2nd highest average in the nation), yet only 22% of Colorado residents graduated from a Colorado K-12 school. We are importing talent while our own young people, especially those in rural and underinvested communities, are being left behind.
97% of Colorado's top in-demand jobs require some postsecondary credential. Only about one in five Colorado high school graduates will obtain one.
Meanwhile, the cost of staying has become prohibitive. Communities across the Western Slope have seen median home prices increase by over 100% in recent years, squeezing out the very families that built these towns. In the absence of a pathway to a family wage career, the majority of rural students will not be able to stay, or return, to their home community.
Regional Workforce Development
Talent is the number one challenge facing Colorado businesses. There are currently 2.7 open jobs for every unemployed person in the state — a gap that costs Colorado an estimated $46 billion in GDP annually.
Our solution is to invest in the young people already here. Homegrown Pathways works across four school districts on the Western Slope (Montrose, Delta, Ridgway, and Gunnison) to connect students to career pathways, entrepreneurship opportunities, and the skills that regional employers need.
social Mobility
For the first time in modern history, most young Americans are on track to be economically worse off than their parents. The pathway from effort to opportunity has narrowed — and it has narrowed most sharply for rural youth.
This is not simply an issue of economic equity and opportunity. These unprecedented realities are a primary driving force behind our increasing political, geographic and racial tensions and divisions, the continuation of which poses an existential threat to our long-term development, stability, and prosperity.
The Lost Edisons
Entrepreneurship & Intrapreneurship
Research by economists Raj Chetty and Alex Bell, among others, reveals that parental wealth is more important than interest and skill in determining who becomes an inventor. Children born into the richest 1 percent are 10 times more likely to be inventors than those born into the bottom 50 percent. A student with parents in the upper quintile in parental wealth that performs below average in math is still more likely to become an inventor than a student who performs in the top quintile in math but whose parents are in the bottom in parental wealth. Simply put performance and potential is not the primary driver of the innovation talent pipeline in the United States; parental wealth is the lead driver.
Meanwhile, economists estimate that if women, people of color, and children from rural and low-income families became inventors at the same rate as men from high-income families, innovation in the United States would quadruple. If innovation in the United States quadrupled, it would fundamentally change the direction across everything from economic mobility to environmental and even national security.
Homegrown Pathways aims to not only build pathways into existing businesses, but to foster entrepreneurship and community-driven innovation through intrapreneurship.
What is Intrapreneurship?
Intrapreneurship is using entrepreneurial skills and approaches within an established company to create new products, services, processes, or business models. Intrapreneurship is essential to the success of existing businesses across all sectors and through our model and through connections to partners’ models, we aim to build Colorado’s pipeline of innovators with the entrepreneurial mindset, self-efficacy and confidence to create new solutions within existing local businesses.
Importance of Entrepreneurship in Rural and Underinvested Urban Communities
Entrepreneurship is an essential pathway to economic mobility especially in rural and underinvested urban communities. In partnership and support of organizations like Startup Colorado, local chambers of commerce and workforce development centers, we aim to directly support building the state’s entrepreneurial pipeline. Our goal is to create the experiences, resource information and social capital necessary to drive new business creation and community-driven innovation at scale.
