PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 2, 2026
LOCAL INVESTMENT SENDS IOWA-ROOTED ENTREPRENEURS TO NATIONAL STAGE
Seventeen Innovators to Present Community-Born Frameworks at USASBE Summit
WATERLOO, IA — Seventeen Northeast Iowa-rooted entrepreneurs have been invited to present their work at the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) national conference in Salt Lake City on February 19, 2026, following collective investment by six local organizations committed to ensuring community knowledge earns national recognition.
The Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa (CFNEIA), an anonymous CFNEIA donor, the Black Philanthropy Fund, Cedar Falls Business & Professional Women, and four additional local partners have raised nearly $30,000 to support entrepreneur participation in a national conference. This investment enables entrepreneurs whose insights were forged navigating uncertainty and high-stakes tradeoffs to share their decision-making frameworks with up to 160 entrepreneurship faculty, researchers, and ecosystem leaders from across the country.
“When you walk into the Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa’s lobby, you see the ‘Moment of Truth,’ the faces and stories of local innovators with deep life experiences on the wall,” said Dr. Lindi Roelofse, founder of The Qii Institute and Visiting Research Fellow at North Carolina A&T State University (NCA&T). “These funders are ensuring those stories don’t remain symbolic. They become blueprints for how communities nationwide navigate economic disruptions.”
FROM LOCAL WISDOM TO NATIONAL FRAMEWORK
The entrepreneurs will co-design the Regenerative Intelligence Summit alongside researchers from North Carolina A&T State University, one of the nation’s largest research-intensive Historically Black Universities, which provided Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, ensuring the research meets rigorous ethical and scientific standards. “NCA&T is delighted to partner in this work because of our deep history of advancing community-rooted, ethically grounded research,” explained Dr. Megan Weber, Assistant Professor of Management and Co-Principal Investigator on the study.
Together, they will formalize lived, place-based decision intelligence into frameworks that can be taught, replicated, and compensated as intellectual property.
Their work builds on patterns documented across more than two centuries of entrepreneurial adaptation, from Freedman’s Bank (1865) to contemporary initiatives such as the I Believe Leadership & Sports Academy’s Midnight League Basketball program.
“We are proud to invest in this innovative approach that provides local entrepreneurs the opportunity to lead at the national level, and share their lived experience to drive community change. CFNEIA is grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this critical research,” said Kaye Englin, President & CEO of the Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa. When current leaders eventually transition, we want the next generation to inherit tested frameworks, not fragmented memory.”
THE LOCAL CONTEXT: CLOSING THE “KNOWLEDGE LEAK”
Black Hawk County has long experienced what researchers describe as a “knowledge leak”: when community innovators such as Jimmy Porter (founder of KBBG Radio) or Lisa Ambrose (Armani Community Services) pass away, the decision-making intelligence that sustained their organizations often disappears with them. Each generation is forced to rebuild rather than advance proven models.
The February 19 summit addresses this by translating local wisdom into research-grade frameworks that communities can retain, teach, and build upon.
NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS: LEADING INDICATORS
USASBE’s invitation signals that what is emerging in Northeast Iowa carries broader relevance. As communities across the country face climate disruption, economic transition, and institutional volatility, adaptive intelligence developed under constraint is increasingly valuable.
This work exemplifies what entrepreneurship research must increasingly take seriously, shared Jennifer Capps, USASE’s Executive Director. Communities generating solutions under real constraints. Rural entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, women, and minority entrepreneurs are not edge cases; they, like so many others, are the faces of entrepreneurship. USASBE is proud to provide a collaborative platform for this important work.
Only about 3 percent of business decision-making research focuses on high-volatility environments, even though roughly a quarter of the world’s population is living and working under those conditions today,” said Roelofse. “Northeast Iowa entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty every day. The insights they generate aren’t edge cases; they’re practical lessons the rest of the country needs as communities work to build trust, resilience, and opportunity in a rapidly changing world.
Following the summit, participating entrepreneurs will return with national professional networks, documented frameworks, and toolkits designed for other communities facing similar challenges. Their Moment of Truth educational case studies stand to reach as many as 48,000 students annually through USASBE’s university network.
SPOTLIGHT: BUILDING ALTERNATIVES WHEN SYSTEMS FAIL
One participant, ReShonda Young, founder of Bank of Jabez and a serial entrepreneur born and raised in Waterloo, Iowa, exemplifies the adaptive intelligence the summit will formalize.
After winning a federal lending discrimination lawsuit in 2020, Young began building an alternative financial institution to directly address systemic exclusion.
“Sometimes building a just alternative isn’t just possible, it’s necessary,” Young said in her Moment of Truth narrative. “Sometimes fixing broken systems is harder than building new channels.”
WHY THIS SUMMIT MATTERS
This collaboration represents:
- First IRB-approved practitioner research at USASBE conference scale
- First community-funded cohort of entrepreneurial co-researchers presenting at national conference
- First test of voice-centered methodology translating lived experience into peer-reviewed frameworks
The Regenerative Intelligence Summit sets a precedent for how entrepreneurship research can honor and formalize community knowledge, ensuring that solutions born under constraint receive the recognition, compensation, and institutional support traditionally reserved for university-based innovation.
The summit takes place on February 19, 2026, in Salt Lake City as part of USASBE’s annual conference. A local learning experience is being planned for Spring to build on the Summit outputs and maximize the local learning. Moment of Truth authors’ stories are freely available non-commercially under Creative Commons at www.theQii.org
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MEDIA CONTACT:
Dr. Lindi Roelofse
The Qii Institute
[email protected]
(319) 464-0752
ABOUT THE QII INSTITUTE
The Qii (pronounced: key) is a scientific research nonprofit institute that studies how communities sustain themselves through disruption and translates lived experience into practical frameworks, ensuring locally generated solutions can scale without loss of integrity or community ownership.
ABOUT USASBE
The U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) is an inclusive professional association advancing entrepreneurship education through bold teaching, scholarship, and practice. USASBE serves entrepreneurship educators, researchers, and ecosystem leaders throughout the US as well as on a global scale.
ABOUT NORTH CAROLINA A&T STATE UNIVERSITY
North Carolina A&T State University is the nation’s largest historically Black university and a leading research institution, recognized for pioneering ethical research protocols in community-engaged scholarship.
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