Why Holy Family University launched the resource site Philly Venture Hub

Philly-area founders have a new place to find connections to grow their startups.

Donald Goeltz has always had an interest in business. After a long career of working for large companies, and spending some time as an entrepreneur, he eventually brought that passion to Northeast Philadelphia’s Holy Family University as a professor in the School of Business and Professional Studies.

Once he started teaching, he said, Holy Family University’s value of serving the community led him to become more specifically interested in social entrepreneurship, which he defines as an enterprise where “at least part of its purpose is to have a positive social impact.”

As a former founder himself, Goeltz said he is regularly thinking about ways to create impact. A goal in his classes is to teach his students how people in business think and help them carry that knowledge into whatever career they pursue.

He recently launched the Philly Venture Hub, a site that shares resources for local entrepreneurs. His the goal to fill out the site with as many resources as possible — everything from investor opportunities to university programs to mentoring organizations to events to networking groups to incubators — and then add in more of a focus on social entrepreneurship later.

“[I] learned that studying social entrepreneurship is hard to do in a vacuum, that is many of the same people, resources, funding sources, mentoring — all of the ecosystem as we now call it — is there for both types of commercial ventures as well as social ventures,” he said.

The project reminds of Philly Startup Leaders’ Philly Startup Guide, but is more interactive. Take a look:

Check it out

Goeltz has been working on Philly Venture Hub for about three years, but said he was finally able to get the project to completion when he received a grant from Holy Family’s Ray and Mildred Taylor Awards. This project is part of Goeltz’s ongoing entrepreneurship research focused on network building in business. The site itself is a tool he can use to monitor how people network and the effects of building a network.

There are about 200 resources currently on the site; Goeltz’s goal is to grow it to 500 over the next few years. He’s started the process of building relationships with resource hosts in Philly’s business ecosystem, and hopes to continue that as he adds more resources to the site.

Look out for more in this realm from Holy Family: Goeltz credits social entrepreneurship as the reason the university “backed into” the business community in Philadelphia, “and we’re building different programs trying to expand our coverage,” he said.