Category: Stories

Building the Community Compost Company

Sometimes the most important questions come from the simplest observations. For Eileen Banyra, 15 years of sitting in city planning meetings talking about waste without substantive action led to a question that would reshape her life: “How do you restore the soil to help create healthy biomes?”

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Baking Bread to Building Trust: Rethinking Capital for Small Business

I grew up baking bread with my dad at the Firehouse Café in Hudson, NY. It was the kind of place you could smell before you stepped inside: warm, familiar, and real. My dad opened it in the early 1990s, and I spent my teenage years learning how to show up, keep my word, and treat people with respect. The café didn’t make a ton of money, but it taught me more about entrepreneurship than any textbook ever could.

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