Begin Your Journey

Foundations of Impactful Entrepreneurship

This one-day program is designed for experienced civic builders, former civil servants, and mission-driven professionals who are curious about the entrepreneurial journey.

We know that entrepreneurship is not the first choice for many professionals. It can be intimidating! Our primary objective is to help give you the confidence to explore this one-of-a-kind professional adventure, knowing that you already have the tools you need to succeed.

Foundations of Impactful Entrepreneurship is about big picture thinking, the entrepreneurial mindset, and building with purpose. We’ll talk about how entrepreneurship can facilitate systems change, and about how aligning actions, structures, and human experience can lead to more resilient organizations and strategies that stick.

Of course we’ll touch on the business model canvas briefly and introduce you to additional resources in the ecosystem that may be well suited to support your unique needs. But don’t worry, but we’ll save the nuts and bolts of business creation for a different day.

Thank to the amazing team at Workbox, Dupont Circle, for graciously hosting us!

Key Topics:

Leading Edge: Mastering Your Mind for Resilience, Creativity, and Agility

In times of transition and change, one of the most powerful tools we each have is the mindset we bring to how we face challenges, navigate uncertainty, and forge new paths ahead. By training our mind to master resilience, creativity, and agility, we can learn to survive and thrive with courage and calm, generate innovative solutions, and bring an entrepreneurial spirit to how we live, work, and lead.  

In this interactive workshop, Amita Shukla introduces a simple yet powerful framework for training the mind. Attendees will walk away with practical tools and new insights that they instantly can apply to bring their best state of mind to how they transform their own work and lives. 

Speaker: Amita Shukla (LinkedIn)

Amita Shukla’s journey has spanned roles as a writer, teacher, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor. Her work is guided by a passion to unlock human potential, which inspired her to start Vitamita in 2012. She is the author of United Mind: Rethinking How We Lead Our Lives, Work Together, and Change Our World (2022) and Enduring Edge: Transforming How We Think, Create, and Change (2014). Amita regularly advises individuals and organizations and has presented over 100 keynotes, talks, and workshops to audiences from leaders and entrepreneurs to high schools and book clubs.  

Amita teaches Personal Leadership Development at the NIH (FAES) and previously served on the adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins, where she taught graduate courses on leadership. Earlier, she spent close to nine years as a healthcare venture capital investor at New Enterprise Associates, where she worked with leading researchers and entrepreneurs to advance cutting-edge health innovations. Her prior roles include startups, through which she was an inventor on 10 patents. 

Amita has served on several nonprofits boards and was the longest serving director at Maryland’s Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), to which she was appointed by Governors Martin O’Malley and Larry Hogan and served under Wes Moore. Amita holds a BA in biochemistry from Harvard, where she was a Senior Editor at the Harvard Crimson, and an MBA from Stanford. Learn more at Amita on her website.

Building with Purpose: Public Value, Human Centered Design, and the Innovation Trifecta

Innovation can be most effective when it sits at the intersection of public value, human-centered design, and creative problem-solving. Public value ensures that new ideas create meaningful benefits for communities, from equity and trust to civic engagement and well-being. Human-centered design grounds innovation in empathy, co-creation, and real-world context, ensuring that solutions are practical, accessible, and embraced by the people they serve. When combined in the innovation trifecta, these elements align the “why,” “how,” and “what” of change-making, providing a framework that empowers leaders and organizations to deliver transformative results with lasting social impact.

During this session, Colin will present a high-level look at the opportunities and challenges facing those who want to build for-profit ventures with public impact and share practical ways to live your values while navigating the realities of startup life. 

Speaker: Colin Steele (LinkedIn)

Colin Steele is the executive director of the Public Value Lab and a consultant to Georgetown University and other schools of international affairs. His career has combined education, innovation, and international affairs across the academic, public, and private sectors. Highlights include serving as a strategic advisor to senior leaders at Georgetown and Fletcher, several years of public-sector consulting with Noblis, and coaching/facilitating in the altMBA and Akimbo workshops created by Seth Godin.

Since February 2025, Colin has been creating and leading peer-networking and entrepreneurial skill-building workshops to help former public servants find new ways to support themselves and serve their communities. Colin studied international relations at Georgetown and Fletcher, and is a proud AmeriCorps alumnus.   

Demystifying Finance for Founders

We know that the thought of getting funding and managing finances for a new organization can be really intimidating, especially for someone who may already been a little overwhelmed by all of the to-do items on an ever-growing list. During this session, Autumn will describe how new ventures can get started financially, in language everyone can understand. This session will touch on common funding structures, introduce ways a founder or small business owner can access capital, and present key considerations and tradeoffs in sustaining nonprofit and for-profit enterprises.

Speaker: Autumn Gorman (LinkedIn)

With a career spanning entrepreneurship, finance, and organizational strategy, Autumn helps leaders and founders make sense of how ideas take shape and grow. As the previous Managing Director for Innovation in the Private Sector Engagement Hub at USAID, Autumn pioneered and institutionalized innovation to catalyze capital and engage the private sector. Throughout her 12 years at the Agency, she designed and led initiatives that mobilized finance, built capacity, created new partnerships, and strengthened market systems to drive sustainable growth. Earlier in her career, Autumn founded two companies (one for fun: a film production company) and she now helps with her husband’s collectibles business. She is known for translating complex financial concepts into practical insights and for creating structures that help new ventures and teams turn vision into results.  

Seeing Beneath the Surface: A Systems Thinking Approach to Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurship

Most entrepreneurship workshops focus on ideas, markets, and models. This one starts somewhere different. During this workshop, we’ll begin by looking beneath the surface. We’ll explore how complex social challenges, from education and climate to public trust, are shaped by intertwined systems of policy, culture, power, and narrative. Before designing a solution, it helps to see that living system clearly.

In this interactive session, participants will use a “systems problem tree” framework to map the roots, branches, and soil of an issue they care about. This exercise will help reveal how causes and effects overlap and where new possibilities might hide. Through guided reflection and conversation, participants will explore their own place in the system: the roles, leverage points, and small experiments that can begin to shift patterns over time.

Participants will leave with fresh insight into the system they care most about, a clearer sense of their niche within it, and a mindset for building ventures and initiatives that are both impactful and sustainable.

Speaker: Kim Kucinskas (LinkedIn)

Kim Kucinskas is the Director of Organizational Transformation at Humentum and Project Director of the TIME (Transforming Institutional Models for Equity) initiative, a global effort to reimagine how social impact organizations adapt and thrive amid systems-level disruption. She leads programs that help international NGOs, funders, and civic networks translate complexity into strategy—building the mindsets, capabilities, and structures needed for equitable and regenerative change.

With a background in leadership development, systems thinking, and organizational design, Kim brings extensive experience facilitating sector-wide learning, futures thinking, and collective transformation processes. She is recognized for connecting strategic insight with grounded practice, helping mission-driven leaders navigate uncertainty and align purpose, values, and action in pursuit of lasting impact.

Speed Intro to the Business Model Canvas

Our plan is to empower and motivate you to begin thinking about what’s possible. Yet once you have some ideas bouncing around, you’ll want to start to capture them and sort through what might be a viable path forward.

To help you do this, we’re going to host a rapid-fire session to quickly introduce the components of a traditional Business Model Canvas and the Impact Business Model Canvas. This will be a fun, low-stress, interactive session to get you thinking.

Speaker: Patty Simonton (LinkedIn)

Patty is the founder and executive director of the Big Table Institute. An IEDC certified Entrepreneurship Development Professional (EDP), Patty has spent much of her career working to support startups and facilitate entrepreneurship to help build and strengthen resilient communities.

Most recently, Patty served as a strategic initiatives manager for the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation, and as the director of the former Innovation Lab at Bethesda Green, where she guided the program to become a federally recognized entrepreneurship support program. Patty is the current president of the Maryland Business Innovation Association.

Event Details

Date and Time

October 28, 2025: 9am – 5:00pm

Location

Foundations of Impactful Entrepreneurship will be held at Workbox Dupont Circle, located at 1333 New Hampshire Ave NW #200, Washington, DC 20036.

Workbox is located immediately next to the South exit of the Dupont Circle metro station on the red line.

Price

$80 includes all workshops and materials, coffee, lunch, and light snacks.

In-Person

Foundations of Impactful Entrepreneurship will be held entirely in-person. Sessions will not be recorded.

Agenda
  • 9:00am: Doors Open
  • 9:30am: Program Begins
  • 10:00am: Leading Edge: Mastering Your Mind for Resilience, Creativity, and Agility (60 minutes)
  • 11:00am: Networking break
  • 11:20am: Public Value, Human Centered Design, and the Innovation Trifecta (60 minutes)
  • 12:20pm: Lunch on site
  • 1:15pm: Demystifying Finance for Founders (70 minutes)
  • 2:35pm: Seeing Beneath the Surface: A Systems Thinking Approach to Purpose Driven Entrepreneurship (70 minutes)
  • 3:55pm: Speed Intro to the Business Model Canvas (25 minutes)
  • 4:20pm: Debrief, wrap-up, and networking
  • 5:00pm: Event ends