Stockton, CA
Launch Pad Foundation is helping catalyze momentum and opportunity in Stockton!
The city of Stockton, CA, is once again leading the nation.
In 2012, this was not a good thing. The city filed for bankruptcy, giving it the dubious distinction of being, at the time, the largest American city to do so.
Several years later, the city was at the frontier of urban innovation. A new mayor led a philanthropic partnership to support the nation’s first municipal-led guaranteed income demonstration.
Today, Stockton is once again poised to be a pioneer. Stockton will be at the fore of leveraging Opportunity Zones to catalyze economic renewal through entrepreneurship. It will do this through a new partnership with Launch Pad Foundation and Grapevine. The achievements of this partnership in Stockton will be available to other cities across the country.
Like many cities around the country, Stockton has struggled with issues of economic equity. While a handful of U.S. metro areas have leapt ahead of everywhere else, there has also been economic divergence within cities and regions. Even within the same metro or city, individual neighborhoods can experience wildly different economic outcomes. In Stockton, with lower incomes and higher poverty rates than other cities, this divergence is a major challenge.
Opportunity Zones offer a chance to mitigate divergence by spurring entrepreneurship, investment, and growth in underdeveloped areas. How? Increasing access to entrepreneurial opportunity by closing gaps and removing barriers. In too many places—including Stockton—entrepreneurship is celebrated but remains out of reach for most people.
Launch Pad Foundation addresses this challenge, focusing on the expansion of entrepreneurial opportunity to more people in more places. Through scholarships, education, and programming, Launch Pad Foundation helps strengthen economic resilience through entrepreneurship. The Foundation is the nonprofit arm of Launch Pad MGMT LLC (Launch Pad), a national network of coworking spaces in midsize markets.
With locally inspired workspaces, events, and a venture fund, Launch Pad helps build strong entrepreneurial communities—these are at the core of economic renewal for Stockton and cities everywhere.
In many places, however, disparities in entrepreneurial opportunity persist because potential entrepreneurs, and the community-based organizations that support them, do not have access to the resources they need. Launch Pad Foundation addresses these disparities by helping entrepreneurs with connectedness, support, and know-how. These are key ingredients that, matched with an OZ-driven infusion of financial capital, can help entrepreneurs and their communities.
The partnership between Launch Pad Foundation, Grapevine, and Stockton will enable many organizations to support and join such work. Grapevine is a platform for crowdfunding philanthropy and helps broaden participation in opportunities like this. In many communities, collective impact is the framework used to advance large-scale social change through broad cross-sector coordination. In our city, we’re excited to have the Reinvent South Stockton Coalition as a key community partner to unlock collective impact across a variety of community-based organizations. In Stockton, in addition to entrepreneurial opportunity, the support offered could include restorative justice efforts, nutritional workshops, or building the capacity of local healthcare nonprofits.
This, we hope, will become a national model that more cities will adopt as they work to leverage their OZs and expand entrepreneurial opportunity.
Nonprofits in this fund
Launch Pad Foundation
For development in the city of Stockton, CA
New Orleans LA 70130 US
Any donations made into this account through this fund will be directed in support of the Launch Pad Foundation in Stockton, CA.