July 22, 2015
Handout Art/Philadelphia Fashion Incubator
From left to right: Philadelphia Fashion Incubator members Jovan O'Connor, Victor Richardson, Amanda Stearns, executive director Elissa Bloom, Papa Owusu, Conrad Booker and Ashli Reese.
The executive director of Philadelphia Fashion Incubator, Elissa Bloom, will be speaking as part of The White House's Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, to be held July 25 and 26.
The purpose of the global meeting of minds is to inform policy on how to support young and female entrepreneurs, as well as to highlight programs that are paving the way for emerging, scalable businesses. President Obama, who will be speaking at the event, first hosted the entrepreneurship summit in 2009 in Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a by-now-famous speech to the Muslim world.
Bloom said she was invited by the State Department after meeting the State Department's director of global entrepreneurship while at last year's National Business Incubator Association International Conference. She'll be speaking on two panels: one about the business needs of the creative economy and another about her experiences with Philadelphia Fashion Incubator as a resource and, more importantly, how that can inform incubators across the globe.
"We’ll be talking about specialty incubators for everything from agriculture to fashion and talking about how these incubators support the niche sector we’re working in," Bloom told PhillyVoice. "I’m specifically going to be talking about how the fashion incubator has been a perfect storm of collaborative, creative efforts between the civic, corporate and academic communities -- all coming together with a main mission of supporting emerging designers in Philadelphia."
The Philadelphia Fashion Incubator, founded in March 2012, is sponsored by the Center City District, the City of Philadelphia, Macy's, as well as Drexel, Immaculata and Philadelphia universities and Moore College of Art and Design. Twelve still-standing fashion companies have emerged since its inception.
The panels will be available for live stream this weekend. Bloom's incubators panel will be held Sunday from 9:30-11 a.m., with the creative economy panel starting immediately after from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. You can watch the panels here.
