Programs · Outreach
Extending access to knowledge, opportunity and the hospitality innovation community.
The Foundation’s work is not limited to its own Accelerator programs. Outreach is a developing area through which the Foundation may create additional ways for students, emerging professionals, entrepreneurs, and community organizations to benefit from hospitality and innovation knowledge, relationships, and resources.
PROGRAM STATUS:
Exploring possibilities.
The activities described on this page are potential forms of future outreach, not currently available standing programs. The Foundation will launch specific outreach initiatives only when funding, partners, policies, and operating capacity are in place.
Community access
Outreach can take different forms depending on who we are trying to reach and what would be useful.
Some opportunities require financial access. Others require a mentor, an introduction, exposure to a field or a structured program. The Foundation can use different approaches rather than forcing every participant through the same pathway.
Access
Scholarships & Sponsored Participation
Reduce financial barriers to programs, events, education and other opportunities where cost might otherwise prevent a promising participant from taking part.
Guidance
Guided Mentorship
Create structured mentor relationships around defined goals, particularly where participants may not already have access to experienced professionals or industry networks.
Exposure
STEM & Hospitality Innovation
Introduce students and young people to the technology, engineering, design, entrepreneurship and operational systems that exist behind the hospitality experiences they already know.
Opportunity
Workforce & Career Connections
Help connect emerging talent with internships, work-based learning, employers, mentors and career paths across hospitality, technology and entrepreneurship.
Partner-delivered programs
Some communities already have the relationships. The Foundation can help bring additional programming to them.
Community organizations, entrepreneurship support organizations, schools and workforce programs often understand their participants better than an outside organization ever could.
Rather than asking those participants to find their way into Proxenia independently, the Foundation can work with trusted organizations to deliver adapted versions of Tier 1 and Tier 2 Proxenia Accelerator programs within communities where entrepreneurial resources and industry access may be less readily available.
The partner remains connected to the people it serves while the Foundation contributes curriculum, hospitality-industry context, mentors, subject-matter expertise and connections to the broader innovation ecosystem.
A partner program might include:
- Adapted Tier 1 or Tier 2 curriculum
- Founder and mentor matching
- Hospitality-industry speakers and subject-matter experts
- Customer discovery and business validation
- Connections to other entrepreneurship resources
- Pathways into later Proxenia Accelerator programs where appropriate
From exposure to experience
Learning becomes more useful when there is somewhere to apply it.
Outreach can also help create the connections between education, professional experience and employment that are often difficult for students and emerging professionals to navigate on their own.
Internships
Connect students and emerging professionals with organizations where they can gain useful experience while contributing to real work.
Work-Based Learning
Create practical projects, job-shadowing and guided experiences that provide a clearer view of how hospitality and technology work together.
Professional Connections
Help participants meet practitioners, employers and mentors who can provide context that is difficult to gain from coursework alone.
How outreach grows
The Foundation does not need to operate every opportunity itself.
Many organizations are already doing effective work in education, workforce development, entrepreneurship and community support. The Foundation can be most useful where its hospitality focus, programming, mentors, research or relationships add something those organizations do not already have.
That may mean delivering a program together, providing scholarships, connecting participants with mentors or employers, contributing hospitality expertise, or supporting an existing initiative rather than creating a competing one.
Work with us
Outreach works best when it begins with a community need and the right organization to help address it.
If your organization serves students, entrepreneurs, emerging professionals or communities that could benefit from hospitality-industry access, mentorship, entrepreneurship programming or workforce connections, we would be interested in exploring what could be useful together.