Shoals Business Incubator Receives Grant to Connect Rural Business

The Shoals Business Incubator (SBI) has been awarded a Rural Business Development Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in support of Project ASCEND (Agile Strategies Connecting Enterprises to New Demands).

Project ASCEND includes 3 main interconnected activities focused on building local businesses’ ability to grow sales and jobs - Broadband Business Bootcamp, Strategic Doing Workshops, and the UNA Institute Fellows Project. Individually, these programs have shown their success at growing small businesses, and combining them into a collaborative experience will allow companies to advance at a more rapid rate.

“This project will involve quarterly phases,” states SBI Executive Director, Giles McDaniel. “Those phases include project initiation, cohort training, and project closeout. We expect these phases to be separate with some overlap during the year-long funding period.”

The ASCEND project aligns with the numerous economic development priorities in the northwest Alabama region. Since 1992, the Shoals Entrepreneurial Center (SEC), the predecessor of SBI, has aggressively pursued its mission to stimulate job growth and economic diversity in the Shoals region of Alabama by providing resources and flexible infrastructure for the benefit of high impact emerging companies. In the past decade, the SEC has expanded its reach beyond site-based incubation and into emerging support for small businesses outside of the traditional model for incubation.

“Being a part of these external incubation efforts have culminated in projects such as Shoals Shift, a collaborative community development forum for entrepreneurship in the digital economy,” remarked McDaniel. “Now the ASCEND project will expand upon these successful ventures by launching them into small businesses in rural areas of our community.”

The USDA’s Rural Business Development Grant program is designed to provide technical assistance and training for small rural businesses - businesses with fewer than 50 new workers and less than $1 million in gross revenue. The award totals $115,500 and will cover direct and indirect expenses with a grant ending date of August 30, 2020.