Last year, we launched the City Fellowship at Company Ventures. In collaboration with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the City Fellowship is a cohort of extraordinary social impact entrepreneurs enabling a better future for our city. Many members of the fellowship have started their companies and organizations to address issues of economic equity and/or climate justice, influenced by their own lived experience as New Yorkers.

Today, we're excited to announce the City Fellowship's second cohort.

We established the City Fellowship because we believe that the expertise embedded in the venture community can and should be made available to a broader audience than the people who typically have access to these resources. Our program allows us to leverage our expertise, connectivity and other resources to support the goals of each fellow in the cohort. At its core, the 6-month program will offer the fellows access to our ecosystem and the ability to build and develop connections to venture, government, corporate, and technological resources to achieve the next milestones in their journey. The program specifically centers the experience of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), and women entrepreneurs.

The second cohort, which kicks off on February 9, includes the following organizations:

Good Call Technologies(Jelani Anglin and Kim Belizaire) is using technology and community organizing to provide immediate access to legal support. By providing access to immediate legal representation, individuals are given a chance to prevent lifelong consequences for wrongful charges.

Abulé(Toyosi Babalola) is an intricate social care network that leverages the ancient wisdom of community-driven, value-based care, and the concept of trade by barter with powerful AI neural network algorithms.

Monuments (Emiola Banwo) is an AI-powered CRM that helps climate projects efficiently engage local stakeholders, saving months of planning and millions of dollars in costs. 

Miren (Gabriela Ariana Campoverde) is building software to streamline lending for microlenders, non-profit lenders, credit unions and community banks.

Inner City Green Team (Brigitte Charlton-Vicenty and John H. Johnson) is creating access for over 500,000 NYCHA residents that have been excluded from participating in NYC's recycling, electronics, textiles or food scrap collection programs. 

Annie Cannons (Laura Hackney) is training, preparing and connecting individuals who have experienced human trafficking with sustainable careers in tech. By equipping survivors with technology experience and engineering skills through training and project-based learning, AnnieCannons is elevating access to opportunities that affected communities need to break exploitation. 

Cadence OneFive (Bomee Jung) is building software to speed up decarbonization of multifamily buildings, in which low-income and marginalized people disproportionately reside.

Cambio Labs (Sebastián Martín) is a nonprofit that creates educational programs that transform students into founders of businesses or organizations driven by social and environmental missions.

Represented Foundation (Noel McKenzie) is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit investing human capital into the development of Black and Brown social (impact) entrepreneurs to create the best world possible.

Onsite Kids(Carmi Medoff) is developing high quality, modular child care centers and operates them onsite as an affordable “return to work” benefit for hourly-earning, frontline, paycheck-to-paycheck parents.

Snappable (Lulu Meza and Andrew Levin) is a point of sale system that enables food stamp (SNAP) recipients to purchase fresh food at farmers markets easily and without stigma and expedites payments from these transactions for local farmers. 

ConConnect (Andre Peart and Daniel Justiniano) is building LinkedIn for the justice-impacted community and a new class for direct service providers to streamline their work through technology. 

Thimble.io(Oscar Pedroso) is making STEM education accessible to underserved kids through high quality hands-on STEM programs (school day and after school), and providing training to non-STEM teachers.

Seeds of Fortune (Nitiya Walker) is supplying strategic college prep resources and personal finance techniques for young women of color to increase financial security in minority communities. About 80% of high school alumni have ⅔ of college covered and are offered $10,000 more than the national average per year.

Shine Registry (Emily Wazlak) is a gift registry platform for founders, small business owners, and the communities that care about them. More than 500 registries have been created and our users have raised as much as $12K at business showers. 

The first cohort of the City Fellowship was composed of founders representing 14 organizations—from childcare solutions and job training to sustainability efforts for historically marginalized NYC communities. Their achievements include acceptances into Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund and Black Founders Fund, the Obama Foundation Scholars program at Columbia University, Visible Hands 2022 Flagship Accelerator, and the Basque Culinary Center's “Culinary Action! On the Road,” a prestigious international entrepreneurship program for food tech startups.

We’re so excited to welcome our newest cohort, and will be providing updates throughout the fellowship. Keep up with us on our website, our blog, LinkedIn, and Twitter.