Accelerate Enterprises That Benefit The Community

Mission:  To engage entrepreneurs and investors in a fun but disciplined, collaborative approach to develop business plans and teams that are investment ready and that benefit the community. Once the teams are funded, incentivize continued mutual support through cross ownership and the growth of an entrepreneurial community that develops and supports strong teams, business models and practices including great communication and transparency.

Vision:  To help generate at least $20 million in local investment in local companies by 2020 with regular luau/showcase/networking events supported by accelerator programs and co-working space along with a virtual space with media, tools, meeting and webinar space, and databases  To be part of a national network of similar exchanges providing mutual support.

Why:  The history of the last eight years have made it clear that there are serious problems with our economic and finance system.   A part of the solution is to engage people more critically in the the small scale economic activity in their own communities where they can make a more visible difference.  In many ways we are going “back to the future” since most of our economies were built around community exchanges including the Honolulu Exchange which operated from 1900 to 1976.

History:  The Hawaii Community Exchange (formerly Friends of the Hawaii Local Exchange) is currently a project led by David Fisher under the umbrella of the Tri-Isle Resource Conservation and Development Corporation on Maui.   In November 2012 we started the transition from being a research project to an educational program starting with Maui’s venturing ecosystem and regular venture forums.   We learned that there was interest from investors but few firms ready for investment.

 

Current Status -  Our current strategy is to develop an accelerator program which we hope to launch in the summer of 2019.  More.