Initially Cohort of Small business Homeowners Graduate from Lehman’s Rising Tech Mentorship Application

Twenty-8 compact small business owners in the Bronx are the very first cohort of college students to entire an emerging technology mentorship application piloted by Lehman College’s School of Continuing and Qualified Reports (SCPS) in conjunction with the Verizon Foundation.

Beneath the initiative, which introduced in Oct, the enterprise house owners participated in eight hrs of know-how coaching via Zoom. They ended up also paired with a Verizon worker volunteer and mentor group for seven weekly sessions, exactly where they protected topics these as financing, marketing and advertising, competitive examination, and proposal writing. Extra on-simply call enable was available by cellphone, e mail, and text. The enterprise house owners will go on assembly with their mentors, as required, for 15 a lot more months.

The method is the consequence of a two-calendar year $100,000 grant that Verizon awarded to the SCPS’s Bronx Tech Incubator middle past December, to establish absolutely free training workshops in 5G systems, device understanding, synthetic intelligence, and other internet-primarily based applications for 250 small businesses throughout the 5 boroughs. In unique, the program was created to attract small small business owners who are veterans and minority and girls-owned businesses (MWBEs).

April Horton is a Verizon federal government affairs official and stated, “Small firms are the lifeblood of our communities.” She added, “Verizon’s partnership with Lehman demonstrates our dedication to supporting local MWBE’s in our communities, and producing a route to ensure all those businesses are prepared to embrace technological innovation.”

Vincent Navarro, the Bronx-born founder of a small health care program business called SciGence, Inc. that focuses on nurses’ electronic finding out, was enthusiastic about his long run soon after completing the application. “I have a distinct comprehension of the route forward [and] the trajectory of my company,” Navarro explained.

SCPS released its next cohort of university student small business entrepreneurs this month. The software will also develop to four other CUNY educational facilities, which will oversee 8 far more cohorts by the finish of 2021. The other CUNY faculties are the School of Staten Island, Queens College or university, Manhattan’s Baruch College, and the New York Metropolis Higher education of Technological innovation in Brooklyn.