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Entrepreneur Activity Flourishing in Parkville

HomeTag "Breakfast Lunch & Dinner"

Entrepreneur Activity Flourishing in Parkville

November 07 2018 Innovation Destination: Hartford CT Lifestyle 0 comments Tags: Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, Connecticut, CT, Dance Collective, Hands On Hartford, Hartford, Hartford CT, Hartford Denim Company, Hartford Flavor Company, Hog River Brewing Company, IdleWilde Printing, Parkville, Parkville Sessions, Parkville Sounds, Real Art Ways, reSET, Tainted, things to do Hartford, VASU Tribe, what to do in Hartford, what’s happening in Hartford

Located on the west side of Hartford, the Parkville neighborhood is a hub for arts and entrepreneurship.

Innovation Destination Hartford enjoyed connecting with a variety of startups and organizations throughout Parkville. Check out our feature stories to see what’s happening.

reSET

reSET Director Ojala Naeem remembers driving by the building in Parkville and having an “a-ha” moment. “The space was exactly what we were looking for to enhance our presence in the community,” she says.

Ojala notes her favorite thing about working in with Greater Hartford’s entrepreneur community is “the diversity in types of businesses and activities—there are a lot of communities engaging each other. Hartford is small but there is so much happening.”

VISIT: resetco.org
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Breakfast Lunch & Dinner

Breakfast Lunch & Dinner recently formed a relationship with reSET that focuses on community. BL&D hosts and co-hosts a variety of events throughout the year supporting local small business owners and entrepreneurs, including KNOW GOOD Market and Early Bird Social Club.

READ: Hartford-Based Social Enterprise Company Shares Updates
VISIT: www.breakfastxlunchxdinner.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram

Hartford Denim Company

Hartford Denim Company is located steps away from reSET on Bartholomew Street. “We really always liked this neighborhood,” says Co-Founder Dave Marcoux.

Dave emphasizes that it was important for them to be located in Hartford. “It’s where we we’re from. Our network is here. There’s also a really rich history of manufacturing here in Hartford.”

READ: Hartford’s Own—Hartford Denim Company
VISIT: shop.hardenco.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram

VASU Tribe treatment room, located inside the Arbor Art Center in Hartford, CT.

Vasu Tribe

Vasu Tribe, a yoga studio and organic spa is located in the Arbor Arts building.

“Parkville is a very creative district and it’s a great community of ‘creative entrepreneurship’—entrepreneurs whose business is an extension of their art,” says VASU Tribe Co-Founder Holly Wheeler.

READ: Women-Owned, Hartford-Based Yoga and Spa
VISIT: vasutribe.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram

Hands on Hartford

“This Parkville location is a nice fit for us,” says Hands on Hartford Communications Manager Kate Shafer. ”We chose this neighborhood partly because of the access to public transportation, but also because it’s such a great up-and-coming, diverse, interesting, and vibrant community.”

One of Hands On Hartford’s innovative programs, the Café at Fifty-Five, supports the organization’s mission to serve neighbors, engage volunteers, and connect communities.

READ: Hands On Hartford: Strengthening the Community In Hartford
VISIT: www.handsonhartford.org
FOLLOW: Facebook | Twitter

Hog River Brewing Company

Hog River Brewing Company is located diagonally across the street from Café at Fifty-Five and, conveniently, in the same building as reSET.

“To be successful, entrepreneurs need to take the bull by the horns and blaze their own path. This is what we see every day in Parkville,” says Founder and Owner Ben Braddock. “Creative minds are challenging the old ways of doing things and creating new opportunities. I firmly believe that entrepreneurship and small businesses make a difference. Entrepreneurs have drive and passion with so much riding on the line. These are the people who can make change.”

READ: Hartford-Based Hog River Brewing Shares Updates About the Startup
VISIT: hogriverbrewing.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

IdleWilde Printing Company

“We didn’t know this location [in Parkville] would create part of our story and part of our identity to be this kind of hip, accessible business in a cool, industrial area of Hartford. It feels authentic. It feels like a home base for us. So, it was a little unintentional, but that decision has kind of shaped what we are,” admits Co-Founder IdleWilde Printing Company Connor Millican.

“It feels like we’re directly contributing to the growth of the city with this printing company helping a lot of other local creative businesses build their brand,” he adds.

READ: Hartford-Based Printing Company Finds Its Place in Parkville
VISIT: idlewildeprinting.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram

Tainted Inc.

Located in Hartford’s Arbor Arts building, Tainted Inc. collaborates with local artists and non-profits to host workshops events throughout the month.

What’s great about Hartford is that everyone is doing the best they can. It’s truly a magical place. We’ve seen so much support and love for this city—people really want it to grow and build. It’s real. That’s why we don’t want to leave. The businesses, artisans, and community are always here for each other.

READ: Tainted Shares Updates About the Startup
VISIT: tntdinc.com
FOLLOW: Facebook and Instagram

Hartford Flavor Company

Local distillery Hartford Flavor Company hosts all kinds of in-house events at their Parkville location, including mixology classes and live music.

“With new ventures creating more excitement we are meeting more and more people who are recognizing the trend. It’s heartening to see folks who live outside Hartford acknowledge what is going on now,” says Co-Founder Tom Dubay.

READ: Hartford Flavor Company Founders Share Updates
VISIT: hartfordflavor.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter

Hartford-based Parkville Sounds provides a creative space for musicians.

Parkville Sounds

“I wanted to stay in Hartford because I love Hartford,” says Parkville Sounds Founder Stephen Cusano. “I found this place on Park Street in the Parkville neighborhood. I guess the entrepreneurial part of me had a vision. I saw a need in the Hartford area for local musicians and people passing through needing a facility where they could create.”

In conjunction with CPTV, Parkville Sounds recently rolled out The Parkville Sessions, a four-part music series that provided a guided tour of the Hartford neighborhood of Parkville, sharing unique stories about how Parkville is being revitalized by emerging innovative businesses.

READ: Parkville Sounds Provides a Creative Space for Musicians
VISIT: www.parkvillesounds.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

The Dance Collective

Dance Collective Founder Jillian Foley created her Hartford-based dance troupe to provide innovative platform for dance and create choreographic and leadership opportunities for women. Jillian has close ties to the Parkville neighborhood, she is Operating Officer at Parkville Sounds and producer of Parkville Sessions. Her dance troupe has performed in key places of interest throughout Hartford, including Hog River Brewing Company, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Riverfront Recapture.

READ: Hartford-Based Dance Collective Empowers Creative Women
VISIT: www.thedancecollective.org
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram

Founded in 1975, Real Art Ways is a multidisciplinary arts organization that is committed to the Hartford community.

Real Art Ways

“I like the fact that there is a range of people here, people from so many backgrounds. That connection to a bigger world is an important part of what draws people to cities,” notes Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. “There is more potential in Hartford than there has been at any other time since I’ve been here. There are some wonderful people here who are really committed to Hartford as a place.”

READ: Real Art Ways Drives Hartford’s Alternative Arts Community
VISIT: www.realartways.org
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

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Hartford-Based Social Enterprise Company Shares Updates

September 17 2018 Innovation Destination: Hartford Social Impact Startups, Startups, Where Are They Now? 0 comments Tags: Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, community, Hartford, KNOW GOOD Market, reSET, social impact, startup social enterprise

Where Are They Now? Follow Up with Breakfast Lunch & Dinner Co-Founder Jeff Devereux

Breakfast Lunch & Dinner Co-Founders Jeff Devereux (right) and Onyeka (Ony) Obiocha.

Innovation Destination Hartford spoke with Jeff Devereux, Co-Founder of Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, in December 2016. (Read: Hartford-Based Social Enterprise Startup Committed to Community.) At that time, BL&D was working on “creating collective culture” in Hartford. The company has made significant progress since then. Most notably, it formed a partnership with reSET and is finalizing details for a collaborative retail space in Hartford.

IDH Website Curator Nan Price checked in with Jeff for some updates.

NAN PRICE: BL&D has been busy since our IDH feature. Let’s start with the reSET partnership. How did that come about?

JEFF DEVEREUX: BL&D Co-Founder Onyeka (Ony) Obiocha and I met at reSET’s first accelerator class in 2013, when reSET had just moved to Pratt Street in Hartford. We’ve been connected and peripherally involved with reSET for a long time since then. We encouraged them to move to Parkville and were excited when they did.

We forged the partnership because we felt the need to build a stronger entrepreneurial community. Last fall, Ony and I took road trip. I ended up out in Oakland and visited their Impact Hub co-working space, which shared a lot of similarities to reSET. It was an amazing hive of activity. I was inspired, and I realized: This is what we need in Hartford.

NAN: What is BL&D adding to reSET?

JEFF: We’re responsible for community, including coworking and events. We think entrepreneurship and social change are social in nature, so the closer we can get those people to one another, the better we’ll all be.

With reSET, our focus is to get more ground-up businesses and organizations involved. This fall, we will be launching regular convenings—forums to provide opportunities for discussion and learning around topics including social enterprise, community development, the business of art, technology, media, and journalism.

NAN: BL&D recently announced plans for Niche, a collaborative retail space in Hartford. Tell us more.

JEFF: Niche will be a brick and mortar retail location for local brands, fashion, and goods.

The Know Good Market created great sales opportunities specifically for food vendors, which was encouraging. BL&D felt the need and desire to create local revenue generation at a larger scale for these other local businesses. Not a lot of retail in the Hartford region is locally owned, which makes it challenging to promote and grow a local brand.

And, with the advent of ecommerce, there’s not a lot of energy being put into local brick and mortar retail, even though brick and mortar is still much greater than ecommerce . We thought there needed to be more support of local business growth. We hope that brands will succeed in Niche and be able to then open their own store around Hartford.

NAN: How did you find the space?

JEFF: It was a natural progression. Our partner Josh Jenkins has been working in the back of How Bazaar in Hartford for more than a year as his design space and cut and sew facility of his menswear brand demuerte. So, we’d been eyeing the space and, when it became available, we jumped on the opportunity to utilize the rest of the space.

BL&D formed a partnership with How Bazaar where we plan to sell goods up front and have space for makers (tailors, fashion brands, etc.) in the back. BL&D will be responsible for the half the space, as far as curation, and How Bazaar will be responsible for point of sale for the entire space.

NAN: When will Niche open?

JEFF: We’ve been working on the buildout over the last few months and anticipate a soft opening at the end of September and a grand opening in October.

The process has been great so far—there’s been a lot of interest. We received a couple dozen applications from people who are interested in the space.

The hope is for Niche to become an active retail space. If we do our jobs right, we could create a successful retail space in Hartford’s West End that supports the growth of local brands.

Brick and mortar retail is suffering, with a lot of high-profile bankruptcies and likely more to come. We believe if we can be creative, find new avenues, and support local, we’ll be able to help fill empty spaces and create some local ownership in the void left by the big-box stores and mall closings.

Niche seemed like a good solution. The West End isn’t far from being a destination shopping space. We want it to be a thriving retail space. We’ve seen this “concept shop” idea growing recently in larger cities like Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. It’s kind of modeled as an antique store—brands are essentially renting space in the store as part of a larger retail space. The idea is that it can act as a stepping stone.

NAN: It’s a great way of supporting local economic growth.

JEFF: Right. We’re hoping to capture attention of national and international vendors too, so they can test the market in Hartford. The idea being to allow that to bring attention to the brands in the store and make brands think about Hartford. And local vendors—or even startups—can test their business assumptions, either by renting space at Niche or renting the space out for a more elaborate pop-up experience.

NAN: Any other notable collaborations?

JEFF: Yes. We’ve connected with Jasmine Jones, who launched Aislin at the beginning of 2018. The quarterly magazine that covers Greater Hartford arts, culture, and lifestyle. We loved what she was doing and wanted to find a way to help her grow the product as a business.

When we saw the magazine, we thought: This is a beautiful thing. We need more of this. How can we help? So, the plan is we’ll be running a campaign in the fall to help establish subscriber base.

When we started BL&D, we knew we needed to be in charge of doing our own media. We made a conscious effort to create our journal/blog, monthly newsletter (known as the Feast Up) and we’ve dabbled in podcasts and video content all to cover the things we thought needed to be covered and to build our brand. We’re excited about doing this with Aislin. Jasmine is covering a lot of things we wanted to cover so it made things easy. We want to support the growth.

Local media serves a vital purpose. The problem is, there’s not robust media in Hartford or the region. That’s why we need more of what Innovation Destination Hartford is doing. The more people know, the more they’re able to solve their own problems and better connect with their community. With good information sharing, it’s easier for things to be sustainable.

Find out more about Breakfast Lunch & Dinner

VISIT: www.breakfastxlunchxdinner.com
FOLLOW: Facebook | Instagram

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Social Entrepreneurship Enthusiast

May 17 2017 Innovation Destination: Hartford Entrepreneurial Insights 0 comments Tags: Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, community, Connecticut, entrepreneurship, Hartford, InnovateHealth Yale, New Haven, social entrepreneurship, Yale Center for Business and Development

Onyeka “Ony” Obiocha is co-founder of Hartford startup Breakfast Lunch & Dinner and the Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and InnovateHealth Yale.

From social entrepreneurship to community development, Onyeka “Ony” Obiocha has made a significant contribution to the community in Hartford—and now New Haven. In February 2017, Ony was included in Connecticut Magazine’s “40 Under 40,” which recognizes young professionals who are making a difference in Connecticut.

A co-founder of Hartford startup Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, Ony is currently the Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and InnovateHealth Yale. There, he is working to help connect students with entrepreneurial resources at Yale, accelerate social and environmental entrepreneurship across campus, and develop opportunities for community engagement.

Innovation Destination Hartford Website Curator Nan Price spoke with Ony about the importance of community building and what it means to be a social entrepreneur.

NP: Congratulations on being recognized in the latest 40 Under 40. Connecticut Magazine referred to as a “social entrepreneur.” What does that identity mean to you?

OO: To me social entrepreneurship means leveraging business practices to create a positive, material social impact. If you ask 10 people that same question you’ll probably get 12 different answers, but that’s the definition I go by.

NP: You were noted as being one of the people at the forefront of the concept of forming bonds among people living in a community in Hartford.

OO: As much I appreciate Connecticut Magazine for such praise, I can’t claim myself, or Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, has been on the forefront of the community building movement in Hartford.

If anything, Breakfast Lunch & Dinner has been successful by building on the work that was done before our time—everyone from Hartford Denim Company holding bazaars at their Arbor Street location in 2014; Hartford Party Starters Union bringing Janelle Monae and Andrew W.K to Hartford in 2010; to Tim and Linda Wolfe hosting independent sold out shows in Bushnell Park decades ago.

For years, individuals and organizations in Hartford have been providing opportunities for people to form bonds through fun events. Where Breakfast Lunch & Dinner differs from our predecessors is through our ability to activate these bonds for a common goal. We believe if you get people in the same space (social engagement), you can create tighter community bonds (social cohesion), tighter community bonds will lead to individuals working together to better their community (collective action), resulting in social, economic, and sustainable community development.

My favorite example of this is BiciCo—working with Justin Eichenlaub, we helped grow Hartford Slow Roll, a biweekly organized bike ride around Hartford. Once people started to create bonds around biking they wanted more resources to pursue this hobby.

At the time there was no bike shop in Hartford, so Breakfast Lunch & Dinner developed BiciCo, a community bike shop built to fit the unique needs of Hartford bikers. From there, we reached out to the Center for Latino Progress (CLP) to use the empty retail space on the first floor as the physical location for BiciCo and for CLP to serve as the long-term community partner. In a span of less than two years we went from a couple people riding bikes around downtown Hartford, to raising over $9,000 and BiciCo becoming a thriving community resource

NP: What would you say is your strongest contribution to Breakfast Lunch & Dinner?

OO: It’s a tie between my ability to incorporate various viewpoints when creating a plan of action and my ability to incorporate a funny gif into any Slack conversation.

NP: How are you working to build those kinds of communities now that you’re in New Haven?

OO: During my time as a small business owner in New Haven I spoke with countless individuals who wanted to work with Yale but didn’t know how to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth. When I was hired at Yale I was ready to flip tables and make a case for the importance of working with the people who make this city great. But, when I got to Yale I was shocked by the number of students, faculty, and staff who genuinely wanted to use Yale resources to work with people in the community but just didn’t know where in to begin. After seeing the opportunities from both sides, I now work to build formal and informal connections between the two communities.

Outside of my job I’m on the Board of Cityseed, a nonprofit organization that seeks to provide access to fresh, local food for all New Haven residents. The success of the KNOW GOOD Market taught me how effective food is in bringing people together, so Cityseed allows me to deploy those lessons learned into the New Haven community.

NP: Let’s talk about your startup experience prior to Yale University and Breakfast Lunch & Dinner.

OO: Prior to Yale and Breakfast Lunch & Dinner I was the co-founder of A Happy Life and the Happiness Lab along with Vishal Patel. A Happy Life was a coffee roasting company in Wallingford, CT that invested 100% of net profits into the communities where we sourced our coffee. The Happiness Lab was a coffee shop and community space in downtown New Haven that was recognized by the National Retail Federation as a retail outlet that exemplified excellence in careers, community, and innovation.

During my time at the University of Connecticut, I helped launch a startup tech company, but my time building A Happy Life and the Happiness Lab taught me a lot about resilience, passion, and the importance of listening—three attributes all entrepreneurs need to be successful.

NP: Do you have any advice for anyone who is launching a social entrepreneurship startup?

OO: The first thing I would say to anyone interested in launching a social enterprise is: Don’t do it. The startup culture has been romanticized to the point where few people truly understand the amount of grueling work it takes to even make the first dollar, much more grow a viable business imbued in social responsibility.

If the person is hardheaded enough to push forward, then I would say just listen. Listen to everyone, solicit advice from your 9-year-old cousin and 90-year-old grandma. Every perspective should be valued and taken into account; it doesn’t all have to be implemented, but it should be heard. If you listen to your customer and build something they would pay money for you have a business.

NP: What’s next?

OO: Nothing is really next; I’m just trying to do what I’ve been doing but better. Continue to listen, continue to learn, and continue to do the work I’m meant to do.

To learn more about Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, read our interview with Co-Founder Jeff Devereux: Hartford-Based Social Enterprise Startup Committed to Community

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Hartford-Based Social Enterprise Startup Committed To Community

December 09 2016 Innovation Destination: Hartford Startups 0 comments Tags: Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, community, Hartford, KNOW GOOD Market, social impact, startup social enterprise

Jeff Devereux, Co-Founder of Breakfast Lunch & Dinner, talked about the importance of being a part of the community in Hartford and why his startup is committed to being a social enterprise.

NAN PRICE: BL&D has three other founders, how did you all come together and how did you develop the idea for the startup?

JEFF DEVEREUX: It kind of came about over time in small steps. Josh Jenkins, Onyeka (Ony) Obiocha, Quenton Narcisse, and I all met through Ony. We were all looking for things to do in Hartford and looking for good reasons to get our friends together to do stuff.

Hartford’s KNOW GOOD Market—an initiative of Breakfast Lunch & Dinner—takes place once a month, April through October.

One of the first things we did sort of informally was we threw some fundraiser parties in downtown Hartford. We charged a suggested donation and raised money for friends who were doing a bike drive for Hartford kids.

We did two or three other fundraisers and then we began to formalize it. The first big thing we got some traction on was when we launched the KNOW GOOD Market. There was clearly a need for bringing people together and doing things people found interesting and fun. We officially launched BL&D in early 2015.

NP: Who is coming up with all of these ideas?

JD: It’s the four of us. There’s probably an individual person who has some responsibility for the initial idea, but it’s the four of us often coming together. One of the things we say is if the four of us can agree that this is something worth doing, then it’s something worth doing.

Our central idea was to be in-house incubator of our own ideas. Being able to incubate and get things off the ground is attractive to us because we had one business in Hartford, but one business isn’t really going to make an impact. We need a lot of different things in Hartford to really make an impact.

NP: There’s obviously a community focus. Why is the social enterprise aspect important to your startup?

JD: Ony and I have backgrounds in the social enterprise space. We’re both very passionate about it. We wanted to see if there was a way to combine those things.

BL&D divvies up our work into two different sections: We are either doing our own in-house venture building—we are creating our own projects or ideas—or we are doing that as a consultant for clients.

We’re also trying to address culture, which is not easy. People know what it looks like, but they don’t know how to deal with it. We know that when you create new things they have an impact on culture.

So everything we do is attempting to bring people together. If you have a culture in which people from different backgrounds are actively engaging with each other, then they’re dealing with their own problems face-to-face and not in their own pockets of people who aren’t talking to each other.

Essentially we’re allowing people to do their own work and do their own problem-solving so we don’t have problems down the road because people haven’t talked to each other. It’s problem avoidance. It’s how we hope that that will happen.

We’re trying to figure out how to actually make that a reality in terms of how we track it. We just started a project with the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College. We’re going to have a student help us to build out the scholarly, academic argument for it.

We’re kind of transferring the idea of collective culture into this idea of social cohesion, which is the idea that if you have five people here and you have five people over there, how are each of those individual people connected to all of the other people in the group? Does one person have a one-to-one connection with everybody else in the group, or half the people in the group?

NP: That’s interesting because you and I just talked about that before the interview—how we keep ending up at the same events and we know many of the same people.

JD: Right! And now we know each other.

All of our work we say fits into one concept, which is creating collective culture. What that means to us is we’re trying to bring people together from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different jobs, and different identities in general.

NP: When you say “creating collective culture,” are you talking about in Hartford, Greater Hartford, Connecticut?

JD: I think the easiest thing to say is in Connecticut. Most of our focused work, as far as venture building goes, is in Hartford. We’ve also done work in New Haven, mostly for clients.

NP: Let’s talk about your clients. What kinds of projects are you working on and how are people finding you?

JD: The consultant work kind of came to us, we never really tried to get clients. We hit a lot of different niches with people because we’re young and doing creative things. There’s not a ton of people doing that kind of stuff locally. So I feel like that’s been an in for us a lot of the time. We obviously have a community focus to what we do. And I think those two things are attractive to enough people where we’ve gotten a fair amount of consulting work out of it.

We’ve done projects in a couple of different spaces, but most them end up having a social enterprise/creative edge.

We just finished a project with the New Haven Free Public Library. They’re in the process of exploring opening a café—sort of like the kitchen at The Hartford Public Library. So we helped them with the baseline things, like looking at what current library patrons want and different potential partnerships and business models the library could explore. That was our first contract with them. Maybe there will be more contracts down the line.

Another good example of the work we do is that we’ve done crowdfunding projects. We get involved helping to build the crowd in the first place that then goes on to fund a project. One of the other more public things we were involved and was helping start BiCi Co. in Hartford, which is a community bike shop.

We also run something called the HTFD Slow Roll, which is a community bike ride in Hartford. That was a way to begin to build the bike culture and organize it a little bit. Then we ended up launching a crowdfunding project for BiCi Co. We involved from the beginning but we essentially ended up being the consultants for the crowdfunding project.

NP: How is your startup contributing to economic growth in the Greater Hartford region? Are events like the KNOW GOOD Market bringing people into the city and helping small businesses generate income?

JD: We certainly like to think so. I don’t think anyone is living off of the KNOW GOOD Market just yet, but we have been keeping data about the event and how many people come.

A line forms for a local food truck at the April KNOW GOOD Market.

We started in September of 2015. We had two pilots. This is our first full year running it and we’ve had more than 2,500 people come. Combined we’ve had vendors making tens of thousands of dollars. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of impressions on social media. Clearly that’s having some type of impact.

We know that for the small businesses that participate, they’re excited because it’s a good business opportunity for them. It’s once a month, April through October—and we have the KNOW GOOD Holiday Bazaar planned for December 10. It’s not going to make all of their money for them for the entire year. We hope it is a piece of that pie—but an important one.

Having ways for small businesses to support themselves and create building blocks for them to move on is a big piece of the picture of what we’re trying to build. So we’re not only trying to create collective culture, we try to fill gaps in the business world so there are stepping stones.

We do a lot of work in the arts and creative community as well. And we’re thinking all the time: How can we create businesses that support creating stepping stones for artists? Where are those steppingstones? How are local artists able to support themselves along that path?

Right now those paths probably aren’t really fully there. We have pieces here and there, but there’s not a nice path here, which I think is part of the reason why we lose people at the end of the day, because they can’t find the step they need here, they need to go find it someplace else.

NP: Let’s talk about your connection to Hartford.

JD: Josh and Ony grew up in Windsor together. Quenton is from Bloomfield. My connection to Harford was through Trinity College. After I graduated I moved abroad for year and then I moved back to start my original business, Hartford Athletic Club. HAC is now part of BL&D, one of our in house ventures.

I was working abroad when I launched the startup. I actually enrolled in the reSET accelerator program while I was away. I remember finding out about reSET and thinking: I’m trying to create a social enterprise, this is exactly what I need. This couldn’t be a better fit.

NP: What are your plans for BL&D moving forward?

JD: We’re creating an online multimedia platform for Hartford. We often find ourselves not knowing about things that are going on in the city. We know about things because we go out of our way to find out—we go out of our way to be involved in the community. I just don’t think there’s good places to share that information citywide.

NP: So how do we solve that?

JD: We hope that this platform will help do part of that. We want to create an online place that’s focused on sharing-Hartford specific information, whether it’s events, culture, arts, civic stuff, or sports. The Hartford Courant has a much bigger job than that.

You can find The Hartford News in and cafés and coffee shops, but it’s not online. So one of the things we’re doing is we partnered with them and we’re going to put their content online. And then we’re hopefully building out a website that will have video, audio, and events content. We hope to have a few other community partners, which you’ll recognize, and then we’ll be able to have corralled a lot of information and put it in one place.

NP: When you talk about a platform, are you talking about building a website and a social media presence?

JD: Yes. We’re hoping it will be not only a website but also an app.

NP: Would that be branded under Breakfast Lunch & Dinner or is this is a whole other thing?

JD: This would be a venture we create.

NP: What’s the timeframe?

JD: We’re hoping to get pilot stuff out in the next couple of months and then we hope it will be something that launches in early 2017. A lot of our other projects have had pretty strong grassroots, low-budget aspect to them. We can get things off the ground fairly nimbly. But if we want to do this well, it’s going to have real costs or really strong partnerships and a depth to it so that’s really going to take some time to get all of those things in order. But we are very excited about it.

When we talk about BL&D, at some point we end up talking about is the idea that cities in general are receiving a lot of revived interest from businesses. The millennial generation likes to live in cities and be close to other people.

We’re trying to be so involved in everything that’s going on that it’s going to go well and it’s going to go well no matter who you ask. I think that’s the important piece here. If Hartford is going to get better, we want to make sure everyone is a part of that.

Learn more about Breakfast Lunch & Dinner at www.breakfastxlunchxdinner.com.

Interested in learning more about Hartford’s Parkville community? Read our article: Parkville—A Neighborhood for Hartford Entrepreneurs.

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