Building regional resilience: A free service is helping entrepreneurs get started

A free service is helping budding entrepreneurs looking for ways to get started or to scale up.

iAccelerate Director Tamantha Stutchbury, regional entrepreneurs hip manager Ainslie Tweedie and Natasha Berta from the iAccelerate RISE team.

A group of women in the NSW Southern Highlands with a cool-climate plant nursery; a local in the Shoalhaven keen to move forward with a green waste collection business; and a resident in Bega with plans for a queer collective are all assisted by the University of Wollongong’s iAccelerate RISE program, which provides free support to regional and rural businesses.

Ainslie Tweedie, the university’s regional entrepreneurship manager, says the RISE course has been specifically designed to build resilience in rural and regional communities, to help grow businesses and drive economic recovery after a recent run of disasters such as floods, bushfires and the Covid pandemic.

“We very much have an interest in supporting our regional campuses,” she says. “Part of our mission is to support our community.”

In its first year in 2022, after bushfires devastated southern NSW, RISE supported 90 entrepreneurs with their businesses, creating 300

new jobs, according to the university, and 63 per cent of businesses were founded and led by women.

Regional and rural businesses in NSW often face challenges finding entrepreneurial support and resources, according to the University of Wollongong. Many of these businesses are in key industries like eco-tourism, advanced manufacturing and food production, but they lack the tools to scale up.

The RISE program can provide tailored support for these regional businesses, along with practical workshops and networking opportunities. Its course of six to eight weeks is designed to help business-minded community members learn how to gauge their client base and understand how to market and sell their products and services more efficiently, Tweedie says. There are usually between 10 and 15 community members in each intake.

Kristi Bryant, who founded a start-up, Bushwalking Mama, which runs bush walks and nature play for children in the mountains, says RISE gave her a lot of assistance planning her business.

“It was great,” she says. “I had started and completed similar courses before, but the combination of mentorship, modules and discussions in RISE was really different. One of the biggest takeaways for me was the idea of failing fast; just rip the Band-Aid off. That mindset shift was really helpful. The structure of the program was excellent — the flow, the progression — it allowed space for failure, and that’s where improvement happens.”

The free RISE courses are run by a professional facilitator via sessions held either in person or online. Tweedie says: “The value of it is that people learn from the facilitator but they also learn from each other. There is a really strong sense of community in these groups; they’re very supportive of each other.”

Course attendees learn how to develop a pitch that can be used to attract paying customers, investors and the media, and the course culminates in a live pitch event. RISE also includes optional mentoring sessions with an industry expert.

A blended program, RISE allows attendees to work from anywhere, at their own pace, using the online course content as well as joining in-person and online facilitated sessions, Tweedie says.

Men and women, the employed and the unemployed and people of all ages have taken advantage of the free course.