photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Kiva Hall, the home of Haskell Indian Nations University's School of Business, is pictured Monday, Dec. 4, 2023.

Haskell Indian Nations University is one of four tribal colleges and universities in the country that’s been awarded a Tribal College Small Business Achievement Grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration, good for $250,000 per year for up to five years.

The grant will allow Haskell to open a Small Business Resource Center, the Center of Entrepreneurial Indigenous Prosperity, on campus in Tecumseh Hall. On Monday, faculty with Haskell’s School of Business told the Journal-World more about their plans for the grant, which they said is a first for the university.

“I really think great things will come from this,” Jessica Burghart, an instructor with the School of Business, told the Journal-World.

Burghart said the purpose of the grant, simply speaking, is to facilitate training and other supports for emerging small businesses. Services will be free of charge and open to all, and the center could even be operating by the beginning of 2024, Burghart said.

Mackie Moore, dean of the School of Business at Haskell, told the Journal-World that it could be a resource that doesn’t just kick-start new businesses but also encourages them to get involved in Lawrence’s broader business community. Some entrepreneurs, for example, might want to participate as a vendor at the Lawrence Farmers’ Market but don’t know where to start when it comes to acquiring the proper licensing and insurance. Moore said those are barriers the center will seek to help clients with navigating.

“Some of it’s funds, money’s always an issue, but also some of it’s just confidence,” Moore said. “Some of it’s saying ‘Hey, you can do this. Let us show you, hold your hand and help you do it.’ Their success ultimately is our success. That’s the thing with Haskell — our main goal is nation-building, and a foundation of nation-building is creating an educated population that can protect our sovereignty and build our economy.”

But if all goes to plan, the Center of Entrepreneurial Indigenous Prosperity won’t just be a resource for people in Douglas County and northeast Kansas who can make it there in person — it’ll be able to assist budding entrepreneurs anywhere in the country. Burghart said she intends for there to be an online component to the center that could widen its scope.

For one example of how that might look, if a Haskell student returns home and finds that their family member, a gifted beadwork artist, is looking to start a business to sell their work but doesn’t know how to register or market it, they can take an online training course facilitated by the center.

“The more that we offer these kinds of training, we’re hoping (for) the impact of economic development in all sorts of areas that may just … need a little bit of work (to) be able to thrive,” Burghart said.

Besides actually opening the Center of Entrepreneurial Indigenous Prosperity’s doors, one of the first steps will be hiring a program director to run its day to day operations. That position will be funded through the grant, Burghart said, and will likely get a hand from some Haskell interns and members of the university’s American Indigenous Business Leaders chapter.

Winning the grant was possible in the first place because Haskell presented a forward-thinking outlook plan. Burghart said that a key part of that plan was to eventually create incubator spaces for new businesses. Moore added that the plan also identified artists and food vendors as the types of entrepreneurs that the center might see the most interest from.

“We’re looking at stuff like, with the food vendors, having a commercial kitchen where we can offer trainings and stuff like that,” Moore said. “Food handlers, people could come in and use it to make a batch of cookies that they’re selling at a store and then scale up. I think that’s the thing, with incubation it’s about how do we help our entrepreneurs scale up?”

Moore said the grant fits into the bigger picture of Haskell’s School of Business, which is growing — the university began offering an entrepreneurship associate’s degree in the fall. That could be a draw for clients at the center who decide they could use some additional education, he said.

It helps that Burghart and Moore both already have helping small businesses on their resumes from earlier in their careers. Moore previously worked for the Cherokee Nation’s Small Business Assistance Center and later as a bid assistance coordinator, and Burghart spent a few years as a small business advocate for Honeywell in Kansas City, Missouri.

Moore expects that as the Center of Entrepreneurial Indigenous Prosperity grows, so too will Haskell’s footprint in the landscape of Lawrence as a whole.

“That’s one of the things that I think these grants are affording us is the ability to grow our program through community,” Moore said. “…The opportunity for Haskell’s community to grow lies beyond 23rd Street — how do we get our entrepreneurs there, and also how do we get the community to come in?”

Business owners who are interested in seeking services from the Center of Entrepreneurial Indigenous Prosperity can contact Moore at mmoore@haskell.edu or Burghart at jburghart@haskell.edu.