**Most pitch competitions are one night. Winners leave the stage with cash but without any support for what's next. Our Pitch & Prosper is three parts, and the night is the shortest of them.**

**Prepare.** Four weeks. Nine Durham founders met every Tuesday and workshopped each other's pitches. Near-peer coaching, week after week; nobody prepared alone.

**Pitch.** One night in front of a community that votes. No judging panel, no experts at a table, $7,500 on the line. However, every founder leaves with answers: an introduction, a first customer, a referral to whoever does the hiring.

**Prosper.** Eight one-on-one sessions of strategic and financial planning. This is where a check becomes a decision, a decision becomes a plan, and a plan becomes a business that is still standing next year. And the next. 

That third part is the whole reason we built this. Handing a founder money and walking away is easy, and it mostly does not work. Sitting with them for eight sessions while they figure out what the money is actually for is slower, harder, and the reason any of it matters.

Where your gift goes

**$1,500** carries one founder through all three phases
**$500** funds a prep night for all nine
**$200** funds one coaching session in the Prosper phase
**Any amount** goes straight to the next cohort

Every dollar here funds the program, not the prize on the stage.

**Community is capital. Share today.**

Fund the Founders: echo's next nine

echo is a nonprofit hub where youth and adult entrepreneurs build businesses, relationships, and opportunity together.

echo is a nonprofit entrepreneurial community hub in Durham, North Carolina, built around a simple belief: no entrepreneur should have to build alone.

We support youth and adult entrepreneurs with the relationships, practical learning, tools, space, and access to capital they need to move from idea to action and from survival to sustainable growth. Our work is especially focused on founders who are too often left out of traditional business networks, including necessity-driven entrepreneurs, women, people of color, young people, and founders without inherited access to wealth or professional connections.

Our model is rooted in Entrepreneurs Building Entrepreneurs. We do not see entrepreneurs as passive recipients of services. We see them as builders, teachers, mentors, customers, collaborators, and investors in one another.

At echo, a founder might come in with a business idea, a stuck point, a messy question, or a need to create income. They may join a peer group, meet with an experienced entrepreneur, attend a workshop, prepare for a pitch, record content in our studio, find a contractor, or make the connection that helps them take the next step. A young person might enter through a paid internship, business incubator, design challenge, or leadership opportunity and leave with new skills, real work experience, a stronger network, and a clearer sense of what is possible.

Our Entrepreneurial Community Hub makes this work visible and accessible. It is a place where people come to work, meet, learn, teach, create, facilitate, rest, reset, and be in community. Unlike a traditional coworking space, echo is designed around relationships first. We want entrepreneurs to find more than a desk. We want them to find people who will challenge them, support them, hire them, refer them, invest in them, and help them grow.

We also believe entrepreneurship can create a stronger local economy when resources circulate within the community. Whenever possible, echo hires local entrepreneurs, contracts with our members, pays youth for their work, and purchases from small businesses in our network. A donation to echo does not stop with a program or event. It can become a contract for a local caterer, a stipend for a teen intern, a scholarship for a founder, a grant for a growing business, or paid expertise from an accountant, designer, coach, marketer, or attorney.

This circular approach helps people earn, learn, lead, and reinvest in one another.

Since 2024, echo has reinvested more than $275,000 into entrepreneurs and young people through grants, contracts, internships, stipends, scholarships, awards, and paid opportunities. In 2025 alone, we served 540 teens, supported 42 business launches, and delivered more than 1,200 hours of entrepreneurial education. Across echo and the organization that preceded it, we have supported hundreds of founders and tracked businesses launched through our programs since 2019.

Donations help us keep this work accessible.

Your gift may help provide:

• A membership scholarship for a founder who cannot yet afford monthly dues
• Coffee and food purchased from a local entrepreneur for a community gathering
• A paid internship or leadership opportunity for a young person
• Legal, accounting, marketing, or human resources support for a small business owner
• Pitch coaching, business advising, workshops, and peer support
• A microgrant, pitch award, or creative capital investment
• Access to professional meeting space, media equipment, and business tools
• Programs that connect adult entrepreneurs with young people through mentorship, internships, contracts, and shared learning

A $25 gift may help cover materials, meals, or transportation for a participant. A larger gift may sponsor a workshop, provide a scholarship, pay a local entrepreneur for their expertise, or help put direct capital into the hands of a founder. Every contribution helps us lower barriers while investing in people who are already building solutions, businesses, and opportunities in their communities.

echo’s mission is to transform lives through entrepreneurship. Our vision is a community where entrepreneurship removes barriers to ownership, income, leadership, and possibility.

We are building more than a set of programs. We are building community infrastructure: a place, a network, and a system where youth and adult entrepreneurs can return throughout the year, get what they need next, and contribute what they know.

When you give to echo, you help an entrepreneur keep going. You help a young person see themselves as a leader and creator. You help a local business earn revenue. You help knowledge, relationships, and capital move through the community instead of around it.

You help make sure more people have a real chance to build something of their own.

Echo System

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We are a nonprofit, so instead of charging fees we rely on the generosity of donors like you.

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Echo System

Fund the Founders: echo's next nine

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