Venture For America to Help Rhode Island’s Young Entrepreneurs

Venture For America to Help Rhode Island’s Young Entrepreneurs

The new, national non-profit, Venture for America (VFA) will begin recruiting at top at top college around the US for the 2012 academic year. Venture for America is meant to do for entrepreneurship what Teach for America has done for education. The program hope to bring young, talented grads first to low-income Rhode Island communities, and later expand to US cities, that historically struggle to attract the top college graduates.

"The purpose of Venture for America and its Venture Fellows program is to drive more of the nation's top talent to job-creating enterprise in our communities" said Andrew Yang, Brown University grad and Founder of Venture for America. "Many of our best and brightest want to learn how to build businesses, and this program will give them the training, real-life experience, mentorship and network to do so. Venture for America will also centralize on-campus recruitment for start-ups that currently lack the resources." Venture for America’s ultimate goal is to create 100,000 U.S. jobs by 2025 and to train hundreds of future CEOs and founders.

Applicants of the VFA program will attend a training institute at Brown University and have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to experienced entrepreneurs and investors with the possibility to receive seed funding at the conclusion of the program. Each applicant will be entered into a database that will be made available to approved companies for recruitment purposes.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Rhode Island college students are lucky to have such an esteemed program hosting an event right in their backyard. More than 50 venture fellows will be taking jobs at start-ups in Providence and other cities around the area this upcoming fall.

VFA held its first Providence Start-Up Summit at RICIE last week where many Rhode Island based start-ups attended.