ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Eva Ndreko, from left, pitches her idea Scholar Jet to Manny Argiro and Deangelis Correa at the EforAll Inaugural Pitch contest held at KIPP Academy.
By MATT DEMIRS
LYNN — Innovators seeking guidance and opportunity gathered Wednesday night for Lynn’s first business and nonprofit idea pitch contest at KIPP Academy.
The competition, inspired by ABC’s Shark Tank, invited North Shore residents to apply for the chance to win money, and work with mentors, specialists, and other business owners to take their plans to the next level. The contest drew about 26 applicants, with 12 businesses participating.
Eight contestants presented their ideas to judges and audience members. Three cash prizes were awarded to first, second, and third place while the audience voted for a winner of their own who was also awarded a cash prize.
Lynn native Dharma Cortes, of Mi Plato es Su Plato, took home first place and the $1,000 check for her community kitchen business dedicated to improving the health and livelihood of low-income Latino residents.
“This is amazing,” Cortes said. “I’m so happy and surprised. I never imagined I would be able to win. It was a tough competition.”
Second place went to Lynn’s For The Culture, a business dedicated to build, inform, inspire, and engage young urban millennials. Recently, their team hosted a GlowUp event at the Lynn Housing Authority where teens got their makeup and hair done for prom at no charge. They received a $750 check.
Third place and the fan favorite went to a pair of Lynnfield brothers, Gabriel and Sebastian Fadel and their nonprofit organization 96 Bricks, a charity created to provide Legos for disadvantaged youth. The two teenagers were the youngest presenters at the event.
“We first got the idea when we were on vacation and visited the refugee camps,” Gabriel said. “We realized there wasn’t much being provided in toys and short term alternative education and we had so many Lego bricks at home, we thought we should try to collect and distribute them as a charity.”
Since they became an official non-profit, they have collected 100,000 Lego bricks. Their first distribution will be in July at the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, and for the Syrian refugees in Greece.
The event was hosted by EforAll, an organization that fosters an entrepreneurial ecosystem in mid-sized U.S. cities that have struggled with decades of poverty and decline, in order to accelerate economic and social impact. Serving cities such as Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River, and New Bedford, EforAll expanded to Lynn earlier this year.
Since 2012, they have created 271 jobs, raised more than $7 million, and generated $5.2 million in revenue.
“Lynn hits our definition of the kind of city and area EforAll wants to be,” said CEO David Parker. “There are all these mid-sized post-industrial cities trying to figure out how to get their economies revved up. We want to see entrepreneurship from local people of the city of Lynn to move the city and people forward.”
EforAll plans on having two more pitch contests in Lynn by the end of the year.
“There’s a lot of different people in the city of Lynn with different backgrounds, languages, places of origin that all comes together in Lynn,” said Kevin Moforte, the Executive Director for the Lynn site. “It just has everything you want in a city to explode.”
An entrepreneur himself, Moforte said he wished he could have met EforAll when he was beginning his soap-making business two years ago, to seek guidance as a young business owner.
“As soon as you decide you want to start a business, you are immediately flooded with a million questions because you realize you don’t have all the answers. You don’t even know where to start on all the things you need to get accomplished,” he said. “I feel like EforAll provides that kind of structure where you can compress that and do it in a very professional way that really increases your chances of success.”
EforAll will be offering a free three-month intensive accelerator program where entrepreneurs get workshops, are paired with mentors, and become educated to start their own business.
“If you grow up privileged and you want to start a business, you probably have the education, the network and maybe the capital,” said Development Director Tracy Sopchak. “We work with people who have all these barriers: the education, the network, and the funding. We provide the accelerator program to provide entrepreneurs these things.”
These meetings will switch off between the Lynn Chamber of Commerce and KIPP, but dates and times haven’t been set.
EforAll intends to go national, Sopchak said. “Our goal is to be in at least 50 cities by the year 2024.”
Matt Demirs can be reached at [email protected].