Stephenie Overman Archives - Page 2 of 9

Reaching the majors

Reaching the “major league” in academic research boosts Old Dominion University’s clout in attracting top talent and grants, emphasizes the university’s vice president for research.

Achieving the R1 research classification “enhances the reputation of the university,” says Morris Foster, and “helps in the talent [recruitment] area … [because] some students will only go to an R1 school, [and] some faculty will only work at an R1 school.”

In December 2021, the Norfolk-based research university joined the ranks of 146 U.S. four-year institutions that have earned Research 1 classification, the top research ranking awarded by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. To qualify for the designation, the university had to meet benchmarks in 10 areas, including number of research doctorates awarded, total research expenditures, aggregate level of research activity and number of research staff. Four other Virginia universities — George Mason University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Tech — have R1 status.

Having R1 status also provides an “intangible benefit’ when applying for research grants, according to Foster. “It helps to be seen in that big league. It’s recognized at the international level.”

ODU, with more than 18,300 undergraduates and 4,600 graduate students, is “a comprehensive university,” Foster says, with seven major colleges and schools: the College of Arts and Letters; the Strome College of Business; the Darden College of Education and Professional Studies; the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology; the College of Health Sciences; the College of Sciences; and the School of Cybersecurity. Additionally, Eastern Virginia Medical School is expected to merge into ODU as of Jan. 1, 2024, which would include medical, nursing and public health schools. ODU is also working to establish a new School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations, as well as a School of Data Science.

‘Stamp of approval’

Kevin Leslie, ODU’s associate vice president for innovation and commercialization, calls the R1 classification “a lagging indicator. … It’s a public acknowledgment of what we already know internally that we can do. This is a stamp, a seal.”

So far, Leslie says, there isn’t enough data to determine how the R1 designation has helped attract faculty, students and industry partners, but “it gives people one more reason to attend or be employed here. It shows you have sustainable opportunity” at a time when “everybody is competing for doctoral students.”

Foster and Leslie note that ODU is already known for its strong maritime research, and the school has received recognition for its business, education, engineering, nursing, career development and cybersecurity programs. The university has longstanding collaborations with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab).

New growth areas for ODU, Leslie notes, include data science and biomedical and health research.

ODU’s proximity to the Port of Virginia makes it an ideal place to conduct wide-ranging maritime-related research, according to Foster, covering “everything from resilience to supply chain to oceanography. A large percentage of our graduates go into jobs in maritime — shipbuilding, shipping activities, the military.”

ODU’s associate vice president for maritime initiatives, Elspeth McMahon, believes the university’s R1 designation helps make it even more marketable in the region, especially when working with federal entities like the Navy and Coast Guard. She calls the designation “a huge win for the university. There’s so much opportunity. It’s been a whirlwind.”

McMahon coordinates ODU’s extensive and varied programs related to the maritime industry. That includes being involved with the university’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC), a multidisciplinary applied research and enterprise research facility in Suffolk. Two entities there have a maritime focus: One is the Virginia Digital Shipbuilding Program (VDSP), which conducts applied interdisciplinary research and development to speed the adoption of digital innovations in the industry. The other is the Maritime Industrial Base Ecosystem (MIBE), which works to strengthen the Hampton Roads economy through collaboration among the region’s business, academic and government partners.

Helping train a skilled workforce is a key part of that mission, according to McMahon. To attract future maritime workers, “we create programs for high schools and middle schools. We use virtual reality to show what maritime skills are.” In return, “we receive a great amount of support from the industry.”

She also works to promote maritime career awareness among graduate and undergraduate students in ODU’s Batten College of Engineering and Technology.

One of the university’s newest ventures is the School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations, which is awaiting approval from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). The school’s approach will be interdisciplinary, “with a maritime flavor,” McMahon says. “Maritime corporations in Hampton Roads need people in IT, HR, logistics, operations, cybersecurity.”

Last year, ODU co-hosted OCEANS, a biannual conference for global marine technologists, engineers, students, government officials, lawyers and advocates, co-sponsored by the Marine Technology Society and the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society.

It’s just another example, says McMahon, of how “ODU is really getting out there nationally and internationally. This puts us on the map as a maritime-centered university.”

Gymama Slaughter, executive director of ODU’s Center for Bioelectronics, says the university has many biomedical research projects primed for commercialization. Photos by Mark Rhodes

Applied research

Tom Allen, an ODU professor of political science and geography, also says that while the R1 designation is “an acknowledgement, a recognition, of the volume and the quality” of research being conducted at the university, it also provides an advantage when he and fellow researchers submit grant proposals to agencies such as the National Science Foundation.

Allen’s research focuses on coastal resilience and rising sea levels. ODU’s waterfront campus in the coastal city of Norfolk makes it an ideal laboratory for research on flooding and climate change. In March, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) reported that Norfolk had the highest rate of relative sea-level rise on the East Coast for the fifth year in a row.

Allen leads the climate and sea level rise program at ODU’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience (ODU-ICAR), which partners with cities, businesses, nonprofits and rural communities to test out practical applications for university research.

“We approach with broad and deep technology,” he says. “We have street sensors that predict flooding impacts. Drones are being used to map some of the problems better. We work with autonomous systems vessels that are operated remotely.”

The program is using a dense network of sensors and computer models to monitor the impact of rising sea levels on wetlands in Hampton Roads.

And with funding from a $1.2 million NASA grant, Allen and his fellow ODU researchers are harnessing artificial intelligence to construct a digital replica of the Hampton Roads area — complete with buildings, homes and a transportation network — for modeling sea level rise. “The focus of our digital plan is on people and flooding,” he notes, but he says the model also could be used for other types of research projects.

The goal is to “bring things together and see the future,” he says. “What if something like Hurricane Isabel happened again? We could predict the impact and then go back–
wards and work with planners and say, ‘What might we need to change for a better outcome?’”

Not all their coastal resiliency efforts are high-tech, though.

For instance, to help protect area wetlands, ODU is planting tidal marshes, echoing a federal approach used in the Gulf of Mexico. “If we lose wetlands,” Allen says, “there’s the risk of a ripple effect on fisheries, beaches, water quality and tourism.”

Additionally, each year, during the highest tide of the year, ODU faculty, staff and student volunteers use blue flags, eco-friendly paint and chalk lines to take data and project future high tides. The “Blue Line Project” is a collaboration between ODU, Norfolk and NOAA.

‘Icing on the cake’

One of the next big steps for ODU, Foster notes, is its planned integration of Eastern Virginia Medical School. “It would be a significant transformation to add a medical school campus and a chance to grow our population health studies,” he says.

For Leslie, ODU’s “next stage” involves improved efforts to advance biomedical research from the lab to the marketplace.

“We want to coordinate better as a whole. We want to support things from start to finish,” says Leslie, who previously was executive director of the Hampton Roads Biomedical Research Consortium before this year joining ODU, where he oversees marketing and commercialization of staff and student research.

Gymama Slaughter, executive director of ODU’s Center for Bioelectronics, points out that the university has a long list of biomedical research projects in the pipeline. “We’re looking at targeted drug delivery that would enable the body to kill cancer. There’s biofabrication, the printing of organs. We’re collaborating on triple-negative breast cancer research. We’re looking at what prevents wounds from healing,” she says. The goal is to “propel research that we can take all the way to consumers.”

Slaughter, who was already on ODU’s faculty when it received the R1 designation, says she joined ODU “because of the tremendous amount of resources available to underrepresented groups,” such as ODU’s Graduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (G-RISE), a program designed to boost diversity among Ph.D. candidates in biomedical-related disciplines.

G-RISE is funded by a National Institute of Health NIGMS grant; it accepted its first cohort in May 2021. Among the benefits of G-RISE are a 6-week summer doctoral bridge program, internships at biotechnology companies and government national laboratories, and academic and social workshops.

Now, “being R1, we have the visibility” to put even more resources into recruiting and providing benefits for underrepresented groups, says Slaughter. “We have done a tremendous amount of work to get us here. Now people recognize us and the research that happens here. It’s an historic moment.”

One doctoral student in the G-RISE program is Erem Ujah, who is studying biomedical engineering and recently co-published a journal article on an “ultrasensitive tapered optical fiber refractive index glucose sensor” designed to detect early prostate cancer.

As an R1 research institution, “our research will be seen more, and we’ll be able to continue” working toward their long-term goal of extending life expectancies for prostate cancer patients, Ujah says, adding that the designation “puts us on the status of Johns Hopkins or Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Alexander Hunt, another G-RISE scholar who also is researching early prostate cancer detection, says ODU researchers are now working with human samples “to see if these devices will actually work. We’re working on being able to take the test at home. The end goal is to commercialize it.”

Hunt earned his undergraduate degree from ODU and was acting on Slaughter’s recommendation to pursue a Ph.D. when ODU landed the coveted research designation.

“I already knew what the university had to offer,” he says. “R1 was the icing on the cake.”

At a glance

Founded

Old Dominion University was founded in 1930 as a two-year college to train teachers and engineers as an extension of William & Mary and Virginia Tech. It gained independence in 1962 as Old Dominion College and began offering master’s degrees in 1964 and doctoral degrees in 1971. It was renamed Old Dominion University in 1969.

Campus

ODU has seven major academic colleges and schools. Its 337-acre Norfolk campus is bordered on two sides by the Elizabeth and Lafayette rivers. The school also operates regional higher education centers in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Hampton.

Enrollment¹

Undergraduate: 18,363

Graduate: 4,656

In-state: 20,178

International: 717

Students of color: 11,590²

Employees

1,595 instructional faculty;
3,405 total employees

Tuition and fees

In-state undergraduate tuition and fees: $12,262

Out-of-state undergraduate tuition and fees: $32,662

Room and board: $14,652

Average financial aid awarded to full-time freshmen seeking assistance: $15,987

¹ Fall 2022 enrollment statistics | ² 2021-22 data | ³ 2023-24 rates

The ol’ college try

Snacks and energy drinks are often the fuel for young entrepreneurs burning the midnight oil while perfecting their pitches and products. But for some University of Richmond students, snacks and energy drinks are their products.

Grace Mittl, a 2022 UR graduate, is co-founder and CEO of Absurd Snacks, a food allergy-friendly trail mix devised during Bench Top Innovations, a yearlong course that lets UR students guide a food or beverage concept from idea to commercialization. It “allows people to test their entrepreneurial itch,” Mittl says. “If you fail, it’s OK.”

Mittl’s nut-free snack, created during UR’s inaugural 2021-22 Bench Top Innovations course, is now sold at several Richmond grocery stores and convenience stores. Next up is TwinTail Brews, a sugar-free energy drink produced by the 2022-23 Bench Top class.

These are just two examples of the numerous ways that Virginia’s universities are providing students real-world experience with startups.

For instance, the University of Mary Washington’s Center for Economic Development offers a student entrepreneur education program, StartUpUMW, and the University of Virginia has several entrepreneurship centers across multiple colleges with focuses on technology, nonprofit startups, licensing inventions and more.

In past decades, higher education’s efforts to cultivate entrepreneurship were largely the purview of business schools or of university technology transfer offices. But these days, colleges and universities are casting a wider net in encouraging startup ventures.

For example, at the Old Dominion University’s Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, faculty, staff and students of any major can collaborate and start businesses.

Virginia Tech’s Apex Center for Entrepreneurs is also interdisciplinary and “provides any Hokie, from any major and any year the opportunity to engage in all phases of the entrepreneurship.”

In Mittl’s class, students worked in teams and presented their product pitches to a panel of judges who decided which project the whole class would work on.

“I was elected CEO of the class and had rights to the [intellectual property] as the original creator of the recipe,” Mittl says. She and class COO Eli Bank decided to continue running and growing Absurd Snacks after graduation in May 2022.

“That was super far off from my plan,” she says. “I had a job lined up in digital marketing. I had an interest in the food and beverage industry, but I wouldn’t say it was in the cards to start a business.”

Her company now has 25 accounts, primarily natural grocery stores in the Richmond area, she says, adding that Absurd Snacks plans to take on three student interns this summer.

Joel Mier, a lecturer of marketing in UR’s Robins School of Business, is creator of the Bench Top program. A number of factors led to the decision to focus the program on the food and beverage industry, he says. First, UR executive-in-residence Shane Emmett is the former CEO of the Health Warrior health food brand, which he and his co-founders sold for an undisclosed amount to PepsiCo Inc. in 2019. Also, the university has an industrial kitchen where students can test products and then scale up commercially. And, Mier notes, food is “one thing that everyone participates in every day.”

A former vice president of marketing at Genworth Financial Inc., Mier started his career in various leadership roles at three Silicon Valley tech startups. That’s the kind of environment that comes to mind when people think of startups, but Mier wants to demonstrate that “innovation happens everywhere,” not just in tech, and he enjoys hearing “students from all walks of life say, ‘I didn’t know what I was capable of.’”

At George Mason University, students and faculty are “a subset” of the people served by the Mason Enterprise Center, according to Paula Sorrell, associate vice president of innovation and economic development. The center offers programs, services and resources for entrepreneurs of all experience levels.

Students and faculty take part in the center’s Mason Innovation Exchange — the MIX for short — which is home to a makerspace and fabrication lab, a digital media lab and a startup incubator, offering everything from metal fabrication to business mentoring.

Another key part of Mason’s program is to connect students with entrepreneurship-related internships, Sorrell says. And through the National Science Foundation, it is part of a regional consortium aimed at providing experiential entrepreneurial training to academic researchers in science and engineering.

GMU is also a hotbed of biotech research; the Institute for Biohealth Innovation includes about 300 faculty and thousands of students focused on researching infectious diseases, cancer, reproductive health and other medical conditions.

One success story is Shrishti Singh, a postdoctoral fellow at GMU who plans to form a company to produce a photoacoustic imaging technology for doctors to visualize early-stage, precancerous tumors without resorting to invasive surgery — a development that Singh hopes will lead to the survival of more patients.

“This technology gives patients better diagnostics for colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and more, and can improve their prognosis,” Singh said in a statement, adding that her goal was to develop technologies that “make it from the research bench to the bedside of the patient.”

Building an ecosystem

Even though William & Mary is best known as a liberal arts “public Ivy,” it’s also a research university where professors are quietly producing innovative technology — and are less quietly trying to create an entrepreneurial network to support it.

Local capital isn’t as available in the Williamsburg area as it is around larger state research universities like the University of Virginia or Virginia Tech. “We don’t have much of a real startup ecosystem” in the region, acknowledges Jason McDevitt, director of W&M’s Technology Transfer Office.

But under the leadership of W&M President Katherine Rowe, the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the nation has been developing and encouraging entrepreneurship among students, faculty and the community through the Alan B. Miller Entrepreneurship Center, part of the university’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business. In partnership, W&M’s Tech Transfer Office has also been actively supporting the development of an ecosystem to commercialize university research in areas ranging from health technology to environmental protection and artificial intelligence.

“It’s a grab bag of different things. We’re always trying to find something that is commercially viable,” says McDevitt, whose one-person office plays a key role in bringing university research to market.

“I provide guidance and advice to students and faculty looking to develop their technologies, particularly university-owned technologies,” he says. That guidance “can range from technology development to business development to manufacturing to legal to anything else such that our technologies become useful to the public.”

That can include licensing patented and unpatented technologies “to big companies, small companies and startup companies,” McDevitt says. The university also helps form some spinoff companies based on licensing intellectual property created by students, faculty or staff.

Much of the research work at W&M is hands-on, says Dennis Manos, CSX professor of physics and applied science, and the university’s vice provost for research.

“The research has a practical basis; it’s not just scratching an itch. Each day a new problem arises. Solving those problems is what researchers are all about,” Manos says. W&M faculty and students “work sometimes cheek by jowl with industry and government to solve problems of interest and importance in providing fundamentally useful things.”

W&M inventors are rewarded with 50% of the net revenues from licensing activities. That’s at the high end of the range that universities are required to offer, McDevitt says. W&M’s earnings are reinvested in supporting research at the university.

Dennis Manos, a physics professor and William & Mary’s vice provost for research, says the university’s researchers are hands-on problem solvers focused on practical applications. Photos by Mark Rhodes

Most universities with significant research funding have some type of technology transfer office, all of which have the same general goals: to manage the university’s patent portfolio, to license technology and to promote commercialization of research products and processes.

Some universities have formal entrepreneurial seed funds to help spur spinoff companies, but W&M does not. However, McDevitt says that the university’s Tech Transfer Office does make some small grants from its licensing proceeds.

Valuable stock

One source for commercialized research tools at W&M is the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), founded as the Virginia Fisheries Laboratory in 1940 through the efforts of the then-chair of the W&M biology department. It’s now among the largest marine research and education centers in the United States, with a front-row seat to the effects of sea-level rise.

The institute’s mission includes conducting research in coastal ocean and estuary science, educating students and providing advisory services to policymakers, industry and the public. William & Mary’s School of Marine Science is also based there.

VIMS’ research has helped revitalize Virginia’s oyster industry, which had suffered from overharvesting, pollution and disease, McDevitt says. “Our disease-resistant oyster bloodstock is widely licensed to hatcheries along the East Coast, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay.”

Oyster health is a major part of Jessica Moss Small’s job as director of VIMS’ Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center (ABC), which was started with state funding in 1997 to address the oyster problem. A portion of VIMS’ funding continues to come from the state — in 2022, it received $27 million — and “our primary focus is breeding in Virginia environments,” Small says. However, the impact of the center’s oyster innovations stretches from Maine to North Carolina, where its oyster strains are sold commercially.

When royalties are paid by the hatcheries, “the payments are made to W&M’s Tech Transfer Office directly and then 80% of that income is paid to ABC, which helps fund the unfunded portion of our operations,” Small says.

Although Small started in the field of molecular biology, she came to VIMS
almost 20 years ago to complete her Ph.D. and became the aquaculture center’s director a year and a half ago.

“I really like the applied aspect” of the research, she says, and “the resources are tremendous. We have a brand-new facility,” the 22,000-square-foot Acuff Center for Aquaculture, which houses a shellfish research hatchery. “It’s state of the art. We’re becoming the hub of shellfish research.”

Health technology

W&M physicist Ran Yang led development of the Britescope, an AI-assisted laryngoscope that helps paramedics insert breathing tubes in patients’ tracheas with greater precision. Photos by Mark Rhodes

Other commercialized research at William & Mary is directed at solving health problems by drawing on resources from a variety of departments, including computer science and physics.

One disease W&M researchers are tackling is Parkinson’s, a progressive disorder that affects the nervous system and has no cure. Nearly one million people in the U.S. and more than 10 million people worldwide have the disease, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation.

Gang Zhou, a W&M computer science professor and inventor known for his work on smart health, is leading an interdisciplinary research team that’s tackling a Parkinson’s symptom known as “freezing of gait,” a temporary inability to move while walking.

The condition “is so dangerous,” says Ph.D. candidate Ken Koltermann, a member of Zhou’s team. “The patient doesn’t know it’s going to happen. It increases the risk of falling.”

A computer science scholar, Koltermann started at W&M studying hardware security, but his interest shifted. “I was introduced to a former student who was setting up a project for Dr. Zhou,” he says. “I became interested because my grandmother had Parkinson’s. This project kind of hits home to me.”

W&M’s team is collaborating with Virginia Commonwealth University’s nursing and medical schools on the project.

“We are the computing side. VCU is the health side of things,” Koltermann says. Together, the researchers created wearable sensors to help users keep walking as normal and avoid falling.

The sensors are attached to a patient’s ankles and send data via Bluetooth technology to a smart phone, which “acts as the brain,” according to Koltermann. With that data the phone determines whether a freeze is occurring. If so, it sends tailored vibrations to ankles.

In an effort to bring the product to market, “we’ve applied for patents through William & Mary and have received at least one commerialization grant,” says Koltermann, who is waiting to hear about another grant.

Meanwhile, William & Mary is also celebrating the imminent commercial launch of Auxulin, a dietary supplement co-invented by McDevitt that’s used to reduce the duration and magnitude of hyperglycemia for people with diabetes.

The patent for the supplement is being licensed by W&M to a startup company, which will pay sales royalties to the university. Auxulin Pharmaceuticals’ founders are Dr. Gary Ritz, an Ohio-based podiatrist, and his son, W&M Mason School of Business alum Tommy Ritz, both of whom have Type 1 diabetes.

In W&M’s physics department, Ran Yang leads a team of students in the Engineering Physics and Applied Design program who have engineered a smart laryngoscope. Known as the Britescope, the device uses AI to help paramedics insert a breathing tube into a patient’s trachea with greater precision. Although the Britescope is not yet licensed for commercial use, it’s still drawing plenty of attention, including from Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp., which approved a grant for the device last fall through its Commonwealth Commercialization Fund.

Now, in addition to being a physics lecturer, Yang’s learning to become a businessperson, she says, which brings up a whole host of new questions to research: “What is the revenue model? Do I want to license it or start up and run a company? I’m working with business mentors to find a clear pathway.”

McDevitt is among those mentors. “Jason helps me to navigate looking for patents. When he sees opportunities, he brings them to me,” Yang says. “William & Mary is supportive of faculty innovation, especially if you can bring it to the real world.”

AT A GLANCE

Founded

The second oldest university in the United States, William & Mary was established in 1693 under a royal charter signed by King William III and Queen Mary II of England, Ireland and Scotland. It became a public university in 1906.

Campus

Stretching across 1,200 acres in downtown Williamsburg, William & Mary’s campus includes the Martha Wren Briggs Amphitheatre, Lake Matoaka and College Woods. Its Wren Building, built in 1700, is the oldest U.S. university building still in use.

Enrollment (fall 2022)

Undergraduate: 6,797

Graduate: 2,251

Employees

The largest employer in Williamsburg, William & Mary employs 2,845 people.

Faculty

680 full-time and 165 part-time faculty

Students

Female: 58%

Male: 42%

Minority students: 32%

International students: 6%

Virginia residents: 60%

Tuition, fees, housing and financial aid (2022-23)

In-state tuition and fees: $23,970

Out-of-state tuition and fees: $47,196

Room and board: $13,534

Average financial aid awarded to full-time, in-state freshmen seeking assistance: $27,548
(2020-21)

Ready for launch

Virginia’s version of the business accelerator doesn’t always rely on the traditional model of sponsorship by angel investors who provide capital for startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity.

Here in the commonwealth, “it’s more founder-focused,” and accelerators are often run by nonprofit organizations, says Conaway Haskins, vice president for entrepreneurial ecosystems at Richmond-based Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp., a state government-related nonprofit that supports economic development-oriented Virginia-based startups through early-stage seed funding and other efforts. “There’s not as close a tie-in to investors.”

The reason for that may be that Virginia innovators who were involved with typical Silicon Valley-style accelerators had mixed experiences, Haskins says. These accelerators generally provide funding in exchange for equity in the company.

The Virginia approach, he says, generally allows startups to go through the intensive accelerator process “without investment being so much of a carrot.”

For the 12-month period ending June 30, 2022, VIPC provided about $960,000 in grants to support programming and operations at about a dozen accelerators, incubators and innovation hubs around Virginia. (Formerly known as the Center for Innovative Technology, VIPC also offers direct support for select startups through its commercialization and investment divisions.)

The accelerator experience can be intense for entrepreneurs, filled with scheduled classes, mentoring and peer-review sessions, with programs often running as long as 12 weeks.

Small business owners sometimes graduate from business accelerators to incubators, which typically provide long-term assistance, including office space. Some organizations, such as 757 Collab in Norfolk, run both accelerators and incubators or hybrid programs.

While accelerators and incubators are often associated with high-tech startups, their Virginia counterparts often offer programs tailored for a wider variety of industries, though some may target a particular sector that needs development assistance locally or statewide, Haskins says.

‘Mom-and-pop businesses’

That type of industry-focused approach is on display at Capital One Financial Corp.’s Richmond-based Grow@1717 accelerator program, located within the bank’s Michael Wassmer Innovation Center in the city’s Shockoe Bottom area. The nonprofit accelerator meets the needs of “Main Street, mom-and-pop businesses,” says Toria Edmonds-Howell, the center’s community engagement manager.

Grow@1717 launched as a pilot accelerator program in 2019. Two years later, the accelerator hosted a cohort of minority restaurant owners. In 2022, it focused on home-based child care providers, selected and funded in partnership with ChildSavers, a Richmond nonprofit that provides children’s mental health services and child care resources. Grow@1717 also has partnered with other organizations, including Lighthouse Labs, an equity-free, early-stage startup accelerator also based in Richmond.

“Child care is a hot topic coming off the pandemic,” says Edmonds-Howell. “When we wrapped up with the restaurant owners, there was an article [published about it] with a picture of an owner in her restaurant with her baby on her hip. That was an ‘aha’ moment for us.”

The child care program finished in November, with each of its seven participants receiving a $5,000 grant. To date, 19 small businesses have graduated from Grow@1717, and the accelerator has invested $145,000 in local small businesses and nonprofits.

DeShonda Jennings, owner of DJ Shining Stars Preschool in Chesterfield County, appreciates what she’s learned from Grow@1717’s free accelerator. She used the $5,000 grant her business received to make improvements to her facilities. “They taught us how to work on our business, not just in our business,” she says.

Grow@1717 plans to host another cohort this fall, but hasn’t decided on its focus, says Edmonds-Howell. “If it’s like in the past, there will be an ‘aha’ moment.”

About a 90-minute drive south from Richmond in Norfolk, 757 Accelerate also works on a focused model, seeking to aid “underrepresented founders,” explains Executive Director Evans McMillion. “We’re trying to remove barriers — not just financial barriers — for women, people of color and military veterans.”

757 Accelerate is part of 757 Collab, a nonprofit innovation network that also supports startups through its 757 Angels investment arm and its 757 Startup Studios incubator program. Participation in all 757 Collab programs is free.

Since 2018, 757 Accelerate has hosted five cohorts, with participants from 32 companies that have created more than 450 jobs. Accelerator participants receive $20,000 in seed capital without having to relinquish equity.

Following 12 weeks of training in a variety of topics, ranging from legal issues to marketing, investment pitches and more, each accelerator session concludes with an investor roadshow. Founders travel by bus along the mid-Atlantic to pitch their business ideas to angel investors. “It’s very competitive,” McMillion says.

Meanwhile, 757 Collab’s incubator counterpart, Startup Studios, has helped more than 70 early-stage entrepreneurs since its 2021 establishment in downtown Norfolk. Participating founders receive six months of free office rent, vendor discounts and access to mentors as well as programming on topics like those offered through 757 Accelerate, says Startup Studios Program Manager Hunter Walsh.

Mach speed

Initially, Mach37 in Tysons looked a lot like a tech-focused Silicon Valley-style accelerator, but its scope has expanded.

Created in 2013 with state funding as a division of the Center for Innovative Technology, which in 2021 rebranded as VIPC, Mach37 is now owned and operated by VentureScope, a Tysons-based consulting and venture investment company. Mach37’s name refers to “escape velocity,” the minimum velocity needed to escape earth’s gravitational field, mirroring the notion of what it takes for a small business to launch successfully.

Mach37 was created with a goal “to grow the next generation of cybersecurity [companies],” says Mach37 Executive Director and CEO Jason Chen, who’s also VentureScope’s CEO. And Mach37 has launched more than 70 cybersecurity companies, Chen says, but now, “we’ve opened the aperture,” and have expanded the accelerator’s scope to a more diverse range of tech companies, with more emphasis on artificial intelligence.

Jennifer Addie, Mach37’s chief operating officer and strategy director, says the accelerator has been looking “at what’s going to be on the horizon in space, satellites, deep fakes — things where they wouldn’t think of themselves as a cybersecurity company.”

The accelerator’s 90-day program emphasizes validating product ideas and developing relationships that produce an early customer base and investment capital. “Workshops are meant to fill gaps in skill sets or answer business model questions or develop solutions,” Chen says. “The answers are in the market. We want to give them time to go into the market.”

Mach37 does not charge cash to participate but has an equity fee, which is typical of the venture capital model.

Virtual acceleration

Many business accelerators and incubators are based in large cities, but Haskins notes that the pandemic has expanded the field. With virtual programming proliferating, organizations are increasingly able to reach startups in rural and remote areas, but local organizations also are being proactive by building entrepreneurial ecosystems in small towns and rural localities.

For instance, Shenandoah Community Capital Fund in Staunton offers Startup Shenandoah Valley (S2V), which aids entrepreneurs in the valley region from Winchester to Buena Vista. It’s a largely virtual accelerator but includes some in-person meetups and leadership coaching sessions, says Katie Overfield-Zook, entrepreneurial ecosystem builder for SCCF.

SCCF also has an incubator program in the works, which will be piloted in the second half of this year, says Anika Horn, the fund’s director of marketing and ecosystem building.

Since SCCF launched S2V in 2021, it has had five cohorts, with 40 business owners. Businesses have ranged from a cybersecurity business to a candle manufacturer to a plastic refabrication enterprise. There is a $1,000 fee. Participants work with coaches, mentors and peers.

“Peer-to-peer support is a lot of times their favorite part,” Overfield-Zook adds. “These are other people who have been in the trenches.”

In Abingdon, Virginia Highlands Small Business Incubator offers a physical site with 40 rentable office spaces, manufacturing pods, training and conference rooms, says Executive Director Cathy Lowe. About 30 of those spaces are rented by startups, transitioning companies and organizations with a tech focus. Current tenants include a microscope sales and service company, a book publisher, a financial advising group and a Virginia Highlands Community College welding class.

VHSBI also covers a lot of territory through its free Noon Knowledge training video series, which it posts to YouTube. Marketing and accounting trainings are especially popular.

“Social media has changed since 2014, so we have to keep updating classes,” Lowe says. “We keep evolving. If someone has a need, we do it.”

Chart Updated March 17

Getting down to business

In the late 1990s, Jennifer E. Clift was working as a secretary when her supervisor encouraged her to continue her education. She began taking business classes at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg.

“I wasn’t in a settled place,” she says. “I was not a traditional student. I was working full time, plus pretty much going to school full time. I was a young mother. For a while, I was arriving at 8 a.m. for classes, then I went to work, then I went back to school in the evening.”

UMW’s professors, she says, were very understanding of her needs and “so encouraging and supporting. They were not going to let me give up.”

These days, Clift, who graduated from UMW in 2000 with a business administration degree, is senior scientific technical manager and chief technology officer for the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in King George County. She holds a master’s degree in engineering systems from the Naval Postgraduate School and is pursuing a doctorate in engineering at George Washington University.

Nehemia Abel, who earned a degree in marketing from UMW’s College of Business in 2020, is pursuing a career at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Photo courtesy University of Mary Washington

In the years since Clift graduated, the university’s business education program has advanced as well. Though Mary Washington has been offering business studies for the last 100 years, its College of Business was not established until 2010.

“It’s a startup and a growth story in and of itself,” says Brian Baker, executive director of the business college’s Center for Economic Development (CED), which focuses on topics such as entrepreneurship, small business development and innovation and competitiveness.

UMW’s College of Business, he says, grew out of “a vision for discovering how the university could better engage with the broader community.”

Founded in 1908 as a normal school, or an institution for training teachers, the University of Mary Washington has a long history of teaching business and related subjects.

In 1919, at the direction of a state education board, the Fredericksburg campus began specializing in teaching “commercial” subjects. It graduated its first business teacher in 1924, the same year that commercial courses were offered in the evening to “interested townspeople.”

Over the next century, business education at the university evolved to meet the changing needs of both students and the community, school officials say.

Provost Tim O’Donnell says one reason the College of Business was established “was because our alums told us we weren’t doing enough to prepare them. Work is different now, more competitive.”

Students “need to learn to talk in the language of employers. They need to be real-world problem solvers,” says O’Donnell, who became UMW’s permanent provost in June 2022.

He praises the strong relationships that the College of Business has built with the local business community through the CED and the college’s Center for Business Research (CBR), which researches topics including issues impacting the Fredericksburg region’s economy.

“Faculty often are doing research projects in cooperation with Fredericksburg Regional Alliance,” O’Donnell says. For example, a CBR project for the alliance and the Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce assessed the growth and decline of jobs across industry sectors in the region over a 10-year period.

The CBR, which is headed up by David Henderson, an associate professor of accounting, also has conducted a study on the demographics of commuters living in the Fredericksburg region and an analysis of the costs imposed on commuters by area traffic congestion on Interstate 95.

Entrepreneurial perspective

UMW’s College of Business is “a startup and a growth story in and of itself,” says Brian Baker, executive director of the college’s Center for Economic Development. Photo by Caroline Martin

CED programs include the EagleWorks Business Incubation Center and StartUpUMW, an entrepreneurial education program.

“Everything we have added has made sense from an entrepreneurial perspective,” says Baker, the CED’s executive director.

EagleWorks offers business development services to local startups and early-stage companies. Entrepreneurs have access to professional networks, office facilities, consulting services, peer engagement opportunities and other business resources.

StartUpUMW is designed to teach students how to start and run a business. Students have access to research databases, business consultants and office space to grow their own business ideas. They’re given tools to write their business plan and guidance from the CED team. Students can receive an experiential learning credit or internship experience for participating.

UMW’s College of Business has helped place 776 interns into the community workforce over the last five years, with 223 of those interns coming directly from the CED through initiatives like StartUpUMW.

“Those interns are doing some pretty heavy lifting in the areas of accounting, marketing, sports management, strategic planning and business analytics,” Baker says. For example, several years ago, Baker and a team of students partnered with the Stafford Regional Airport to produce a written strategic marketing plan. The process included hands-on work with the Stafford Regional Airport Authority.

Taking part in StartUpUMW, “students will understand the process of preparing an idea to go to market. They will be able to do it forever. It’s like riding a bike, but it’s a tough bike to ride,” Baker says.

The CED also sponsors Eagle Innovation, a business pitch competition open to all UMW and Germanna Community College students. Three winning teams receive seed capital for their company or startup, Baker says. The grand prize is $2,000.

Through the various College of Business programs, “students benefit, faculty, businesses, the community — everybody benefits in some way. They synthesize together well,” Baker says.

The CED is also home to the U.S. Small Administration’s regional Small Business Development Center (SBDC), which serves the greater Fredericksburg area, the Northern Neck and the Middle Peninsula. This SBDC served 2,436 business clients over the past five years and “4,587 jobs have been created and retained” by those clients, says Baker, who started at UMW in 2002 as executive director of the SBDC’s forerunner. The center has also provided management education to 2,467 entrepreneurs in the region.

Recognizing that a large part of the business conducted in the Fredericksburg area is driven by federal contracting, the SBDC hosts one-on-one personalized government contracting assistance consultations with advisers from the Virginia Department of Business Assistance and the Central Virginia Procurement Technical Assistance Center.

The university has a strong partnership with one of the biggest employers in the area, the Naval Surface Warfare Center, notes O’Donnell. “We were tasked about a dozen years ago to build an education center for on-base individuals,” he says. Today, UMW’s Dahlgren Campus delivers science- and engineering-focused postgraduate courses taught locally and via distance learning from Virginia’s state universities. The campus hosts a broad spectrum of training events for the Navy, local government and private industry.

Success stories

Nehemia Abel, who graduated from UMW’s College of Business in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, says students benefit from the college’s emphasis on internships and hands-on projects. During his senior year, Abel collaborated with a team of classmates to assist an environmental and education research center with communications, marketing, business development and operations services.

Now, Abel is a U.S. Agency for International Development Payne International Development Fellow and is pursuing a master’s degree at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Also a policy and advocacy fellow for the International Rescue Committee, Abel plans to work at USAID when he graduates from Georgetown in May.

Abel says he continues to benefit from lessons he learned about critical thinking and project management from UMW’s College of Business. He’s especially glad that the business college placed an emphasis on writing, noting that it’s a skill that comes in handy for the many policy memos, reports and case studies he produces.

As a UMW undergraduate, Abel, a Burundian refugee born in Tanzania, was involved with UMW’s James Farmer Multicultural Center, which promotes awareness and knowledge of diversity issues. He also co-founded an organization to assist Burundian refugees in the Fredericksburg region pursuing higher education and preparing for the workplace. The university honored him with its 2019-20 Citizenship Award for Diversity Leadership. Since graduation, he has remained involved in promoting diversity and mentoring students at UMW. “When I go back,” he says, “I try to make sure those students are taken care of and have a voice.”

UMW’s business teachings also made a difference in Jennifer Clift’s career at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, she says.

“I work in a science and engineering organization, where there’s a lot of technical work. I’m unique at Dahlgren. A lot of scientists and engineers don’t have a business background,” she says. “I got a strong foundation with the business lessons at Mary Washington. The path that I took has been very beneficial. It’s allowed me to look at things differently.”

In particular, Clift recalls her senior capstone program. Students were tasked with profiling a business, and she chose Southwest Airlines Co. “I interviewed the businessmen and women there about what made their business successful. It was very hands-on,” she recalls. “Getting students out of the classroom is extremely beneficial. … I remember a lot of the things I learned 20 years ago.”

Last October, Clift was inducted into the UMW College of Business Hall of Fame. “An innovator and technology expert,” the college said in recognizing Clift, “she drives advancement of [Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division’s] technical capabilities through investments, partnerships and education, including academic partnering.”

In helping the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division forge partnerships with UMW, Clift, not surprisingly, says, “I started at the College of Business,” but she’s also helped established partnerships with UMW’s College of Education and College of Arts and Sciences. Last October, the NSWCDD sponsored its second robotics competition for high school students, in partnership with the university.

“It’s a well-integrated university,” says Clift, who also stays involved with UMW through efforts such as sharing her career experiences with women business students. “It’s not a stovepiped organization. We bring in everybody’s perspective.”

University of Mary Washington At a Glance

Founded

Established by the state government in 1908 as an all-women’s school to train teachers, Mary Washington, which was named after the mother of the nation’s first president, is a public liberal arts university. From 1944 to 1972, it functioned as the women’s college of the University of Virginia, becoming co-ed in the early 1970s and reorganizing as an independent college, later becoming a university in 2004. UMW’s College of Business was founded in 2010.

Campuses

UMW’s 176-acre Fredericksburg flagship campus is set in a mostly residential, historic part of the city that was the site of the 1862 Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg. The self-contained, brick-lined campus is within walking distance of downtown Fredericksburg and the Rappahannock River. In recent years, the university has expanded to campuses in Stafford County, which includes graduate-level and adult degree programs, and Dahlgren, which offers continuing education and professional development courses for the region’s engineers, scientists and administrative professionals.

Enrollment¹

Undergraduate: 3,493

Graduate: 264

Virginia residents: 90%

International students: 2.4%

Racially or ethnically diverse students: 29%

Employees

UMW has nearly 850 workers, including approximately 650 full-time faculty and academic professionals.

Tuition and fees¹

In-state tuition and fees: $14,294

Out-of-state tuition and fees:
$31,214

Average room and board:
$11,596

¹ 2022-23 academic year

A step up the ladder

Internships often help college students learn what they want to do as a profession by expanding their horizons, providing on-the-job experience or helping them change paths to follow a new passion.

For instance, an internship helped Virginia Commonwealth University student Oscar Kemp discover that his interest in domestic social work applied just as well to international policy. Another Ram, Kimesha Robinson, decided to switch her major from accounting to finance. And Chadwick Davilsaint kept doing what he loves — performing arts — but he got paid for it.

All three VCU undergrads were beneficiaries of the university’s new Internship Funding Program, which started this summer. A total of 51 students received up to $5,000 each to supplement unpaid or underpaid internships.

Oscar Kemp was a Public Policy and International Affairs fellow at the University of Michigan, with financial support from VCU’s Internship Funding Program. Photo by Caroline Martin

The university’s new funding program is vital, says Megan Hollis, VCU Career Services’ associate director of health sciences career advising. Although many students would benefit from internship experiences, often those who come from middle- to lower-income households cannot afford to take on nonpaying or low-paying internships.

“A lot of students have to make the choice between working a [paid] job and getting experience” via an internship, she says. “This way, they don’t have to work part time” to cover living expenses while interning and can concentrate on learning skills and networking opportunities.

Undergraduate college students who complete paid internships land higher-paying first jobs a year after graduation, according to research released in March by Strada Center for Education Consumer Insights.

In the past, when internships were rarely paid, only students with independent income or family wealth could participate, and although more interns receive pay now, access is uneven. Less than one-third of recent graduates participated in a paid internship, Strada reported, and “Black and Latino students, women, low-income and first-generation students are less likely to experience a paid internship.”

However, programs like VCU’s Internship Funding Program aim to increase access to internships with funding. More than 40% of the first group of VCU recipients are first-generation college students and almost half are eligible for financial need-based federal
Pell Grants.

Twenty-four percent of the VCU internship program participants received immediate offers of further employment, either full-time or part-time jobs or continued internships, Hollis notes.

Among the industries represented in the program’s internships this year were arts, biotech, business, engineering, education, financial services, health, government, law, manufacturing, retail, technology and transportation. For several students, the internships also provided international experience.

Broadening the scope

VCU’s Internship Funding Program helped Kimesha Robinson with living expenses and career support while she interned for JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. Photo courtesy Kimesha Robinson

A Danville native, Oscar Kemp is a first-generation college student who started out studying social work. This summer he was a Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) fellow at the University of Michigan’s Public Policy and International Affairs Junior Summer Institute.

“Being a Black student from a low-income community, my scope was limited,” Kemp says. He knew about social services jobs in the United States, but adds, “I didn’t know I could work for something like USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] in Africa.”

The institute gave Kemp and his colleagues extensive training in economics, statistics, health care policy and writing to prepare them for graduate school and for leadership roles in public service.

“I was meeting diplomats. We were crafting statements. We did a policy memo. They were trying to get us into the swing of things,” he says.

As part of the program, Kemp received a stipend, but VCU’s funding “closed the gap,” he says. “The internship program helped me get there and it helped me excel in that program.”

The chance to study at the University of Michigan had special meaning for Kemp, whose family has roots in nearby Detroit. “This has been my dream school ever since I was a child,” he says. “I had applied to the University of Michigan and was denied. This brings it full circle.”

Meanwhile, Leesburg resident Kimesha Robinson spent six weeks at JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s New York City offices as part of the investment bank’s Advancing Black Pathways Fellowship Program’s corporate and investment banking track.

The six-week program is designed to give students from underrepresented groups a pathway to opportunities in the financial sector. It focuses on building general business skills and exposes participants to various areas of the financial industry.

Although Robinson received a paid internship through JPMorgan, it wasn’t enough to cover her living expenses. “New York is super-expensive. It’s something I had no idea how to get help with,” she says.

Without additional help from VCU, she adds, “I don’t think I would have been able to go to JPMorgan. I was able to take advantage of opportunities. I was able to network. I got to meet a couple of vice presidents. I could stay late or come in and talk with those people,” she says, instead of perhaps having to take on a part-time job to make ends meet.

Also, Robinson says, she made a difference in others’ lives. “I got to work with a bank that helps disadvantaged groups in Mississippi and Arkansas. I helped them get clients who were usually targeted by payday lenders.”

The VCU program not only provided funding for living expenses but also gave “super-helpful” career support, according to Robinson. “They helped me navigate through the process” of applying for the internship and “they reached out to the company on my behalf” when a problem arose.

Back in Richmond, theatrical performance major Chadwick Davilsaint spent his summer as an intern at The Conciliation Lab, a social justice theater company that collaborated with VCU’s arts school.

He had the chance to help create an original script — titled “Whitesplaining” — based on research and interviews to explore whiteness through the lens of systems such as media, religion and education.

“It was very personal and emotional to be able to go through this process,” says Davilsaint, who also was a cast member in the September production. “My professor said it’s like birthing a child. It’s been a process of unlearning and looking at things from a new perspective.”

Davilsaint had been prepared to work for free at the nonprofit theater but says he was grateful to have the extra funding, which went toward housing, food and transportation.

“The internship helped me so much. I have no car; transportation is hard. I don’t have a good financial background,” he says. For students like him, he says, having the safety net of the Internship Funding Program “alleviates fear.”

Both sides benefit

As many workplaces tackle the issue of hiring a more diverse workforce, expanding access to internships makes a difference to employers, too.

Diana Villarreal, director of volunteers and community engagement for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Richmond, leads the nonprofit’s unpaid internship program, which is crucial to its support of families with critically sick children.

Villarreal typically works with five to eight interns per semester, and VCU’s Internship Funding Program has allowed some students to intern there who otherwise couldn’t afford to give their time, she says.

Megan Hollis, VCU Career Services’ associate director of health sciences career advising, says the Internship Funding Program helps students who can’t afford to take on nonpaying or low-paying internships. Hollis photo by Matthew R.O. Brown — Megan Hollis, VCU Career Services’ associate director of health sciences career advising, says the Internship
Funding Program helps students who can’t afford to take on nonpaying or low-paying internships. Hollis photo by Matthew R.O. Brown

One VCU student — Nejla Pašic — who applied for the summer term “blew us away in the interview,” Villareal says. “We had her come onto an internship role at a little higher level. She had the ability to take on more” at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU.

Pašic — a health, physical education and exercise science major with a minor in psychology — spent time interacting with patients, parents and siblings and distributing coffee, snacks and toys. She also helped oversee the family sleep rooms, places that are reserved for caregivers of the critically injured or ill children.

Pašic says she benefited from the educational experience at RMHC. “At first, I was interested in a different career path, but now I want to stick with nonprofits. It’s really great.” She also appreciated the practical benefits of the funding from VCU. “It helped me with gas. Gas was very pricey this summer.”

The internships are a win-win for both RMHC, which benefits from the skills and enthusiasm of interns like Pašic, who gain valuable experience from the organization, Villarreal says. “We help them think through their area of study and connect them with other professionals. We want to provide great professional development and work experience that helps them decide the next steps they want to take.”

In addition, she says, “we also want the students to get a solid foundation of how a nonprofit operates, in case they choose to go into the nonprofit area.”

Next steps

Beyond administering VCU’s Internship Funding Program, Hollis also is tasked with evaluating applicants, sending out information, helping them negotiate the professional world and sometimes assisting them with budgeting.

Hollis used the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ career readiness survey, which examines teamwork, professionalism, self-development, communication and other measures to help students evaluate their own competencies.

“They rated themselves at the beginning and at the end. It pushed them to think critically about what experiences they had and where they want to go,” after the internship, she says.

The decision to launch internship funding at VCU, Hollis says, “came out of our strategic plan. We learned from peer institutions. We did benchmarking with a lot of schools. We tried to tailor it to best fit our students’ needs.”

Overall, “we got positive feedback” from the first round of funding, Hollis says. The program “did exactly what we wanted it to do. It relieved [financial and life] stress.”

Kemp is now back at VCU as a senior and is researching graduate schools.

His experience this summer “shifted my graduate program focus,” he says. “Prior to this program, I believe I would have gotten a graduate degree in social work. I didn’t realize there were other things, like international affairs.”

Now, he is asking himself, “‘How can I take my social work background into international affairs?’ I’m taking French and a minor in public management.” Also, Kemp plans to travel to Rwanda during winter break, a trip devoted to “peace, healing and conflict resolution.”

Davilsaint, a junior, plans to continue his acting training. But he’s also becoming more focused on the financial realities of the entertainment industry, which is notoriously hard to break into.

“From here I’m going to develop my financial intelligence. I have to take the initiative,” he says. “I’d like to leave college with an investor mindset, so I never give up my soul to another man or money.”

After Pašic’s successful internship with RMHC, Villarreal says the organization offered the senior a part-time position as family services coordinator. “She was such a wonderful presence. She was building relationships in a professional manner and reducing stress for families.”

Robinson, who has “a couple of semesters left” to complete, says her Wall Street internship “helped me refocus on what I wanted.” She’s switched her major from accounting, because “I found out finance has such a broader reach.”

And she’s going back to JPMorgan Chase next summer: “I just got a contract.”

Founded

VCU was founded in 1838 as the Medical College of Hampden-Sydney and was later renamed the Medical College of Virginia. In 1968, MCV merged with Richmond Professional Institute to form Virginia Commonwealth University.

Campus

VCU has two campuses in downtown Richmond covering a total of 168 acres. The Monroe Park Campus houses most undergraduate students and classes. VCU’s five health sciences schools and VCU Medical Center are located on the MCV campus.

Enrollment

Undergraduate: 21,717

Graduate: 5,695

In-state: 86%

International: 1,033

Employees: 23,200+^*

Faculty

Full-time faculty: 2,441

Full-time university and
academic professionals: 3,006

Tuition and fees

In-state tuition and fees:
$15,642

Tuition and fees (out of state):
$37,588

Room and board and other fees:
$12,239

Average financial aid awarded
to full-time freshmen seeking
assistance: $18,887

* Includes VCU and VCU Health

Fighting back

Inflation and supply chain problems have pushed up the price of citric acid by 200%. That’s a problem for Crystal Wellman because citric acid is a primary ingredient in bath products she sells at Sugar + Spruce, her bath, body and skin care products shop in downtown Fredericksburg.

Wellman could try just raising prices, but she and other small business owners are instead seeking creative ways to push back against the fastest pace of inflation since November 1981. The consumer price index rose 9.1% year-over-year in June, before dipping in July to 8.5% due to falling gasoline prices.

Other ingredients used to manufacture Sugar + Spruce’s bath products have seen only slight price increases, says Wellman. But one of the shop’s top-selling products — bath bombs — cannot be made without citric acid to fuel its fizzing effect.

At the same time, “the in-store purchase amount is dropping. People are maybe holding on to their dollars a little more than normally. They’re not where they used to be,” says Wellman, who has been in business for 10 years.

“There are so many angles we’re getting hit at. We pay a lot of shipping. It feels like every time we order it’s a little different,” she says. “The margins are still very good but they’re not where they used to be. … The profit margins are from 75% to 85%.”

“People are not spending as much. It’s not tremendous, but for us as a small business, every cent counts,” says Tawann Scott of Marie’s Hair & Nail Supply in Richmond.photo by Shandell Taylor

So far, Sugar + Spruce has made small price adjustments. Before the pandemic, customers purchasing products in bulk received a discount. That incentives gone now, and prices of individual items remain the same.

Wellman has bigger ideas “to get people to put more in their basket” again. She wants to bring back the fun of in-person shopping.

“We’re having more workshops on how to make candles. People are testing out products in the store, which they couldn’t do during COVID,” she says. “I feel like people are craving the experiences. Fredericksburg has a great historic downtown. People can meet friends, go to lunch, make candles, have a perfect afternoon.”

Tawann Scott, owner of Marie’s Hair & Nail Supply, a beauty supply store in Richmond, also is feeling the pinch of inflation and mapping out ways to counter the loss of business.

“I feel people are not spending as much. It’s not tremendous, but for us as a small business, every cent counts. I don’t know if big-box stores feel it as much. We depend on our community,” she says.

As wholesale prices have gone up, “we have to increase prices, pass it on to customers,” says Scott, who opened the store with family members in October 2021.

“We’re doing a few extra things, like running a few sales to attract more people, sending out coupons. We’re on social media constantly. That’s gone pretty well,” she says, adding that her shop recently was listed on BLK RVA, a Richmond Region Tourism website dedicated to Black businesses, culture and community.

Scott’s big idea is to confront the decrease in customer spending directly. She believes many women are not coming into the shop to buy products as often because they are having their hair braided — partly because it’s easy to maintain and partly as a money-saving measure. Getting your hair braided means you don’t have to pay to get it done again for two to three months, she explains.

“There are braiding products I probably could bring into the store. I could get additional types of braided hair,” says
Scott, who’s thinking about hiring a braider to work in the shop to attract more customers.

Like Scott, 5.4 million entrepreneurs filed applications to start new businesses in 2021, 53% more than in 2019, according to U.S. Census data.

Many of those new small businesses are in the service sector, according to Steve Cooper, a volunteer in Charlottesville with SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), an organization partly funded by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The nature of service-industry businesses can make inflation a little less onerous.

“They don’t buy a lot of stuff. It’s not like a manufacturing company,” Cooper says. Often one-person operations, these businesses don’t have to pay wages, and many are home-based, so they don’t have to deal with office overhead expenses.

The bigger problem for fledgling startups, according to Donald Jennings, a SCORE volunteer in Orange, is that “people starting businesses have a Pollyanna view of funding. Banks are not going to lend for an idea. You have to have a proven product or service. Funding is self-funding and [from] family. It’s bootstrapping.”

Jennings urges small business owners fighting inflation to “eliminate any unnecessary expenses, especially reoccurring expenses. Use the infrastructure you have to the maximum extent.”

Due to rising costs for goods and wages, the cost of soft-serve ice cream cones at “Hawaii” Lin’s Virginia Beach Aqua S shop have risen from $4.75 to $5.75. photo by Mark Rhodes

Resilient industries

Coby Loessberg, president of Legendary Custom Signs & Graphics in Manassas, says his business is coping relatively well.

“The sign industry is pretty resilient to economic cycles,” he says. Although it saw some setbacks early in the pandemic when there was so much uncertainty, the industry picked up again quickly, with demand increasing for COVID-related signs and acrylic sneeze guards.

Loessberg’s sign company has raised prices in response to inflation, he says. “I tried to cover for a while, but our prices are driven by the supply chain, which is not predictable now. In some cases, materials have gone up. In some cases, they’ve gone up and come back down. Transportation costs for fuel were starting to come down, but now they’re going back up.”

Loessberg expected supply chain problems during the pandemic’s peak, “but I’ve been seeing more [problems] in the last six to nine months. Rigid material aluminum composite is harder to come by. It’s back-ordered,” he says. Before the pandemic, Legendary Custom Signs & Graphics kept a low inventory on hand, because it was easy to get supplies the next day. “Now we’re ordering three or four extra rolls of vinyl.”

The market for clear acrylic “got hit hard” because the product is used to make shields to protect cashiers and counter clerks against COVID. Manufacturers have since caught up with the demand but are now limiting production of acrylic to a smaller number of colors, according to Loessberg. “There’s not as broad an array. They’ve focused their manufacturing on the high-demand product. … It’s not like they’re going to build a new plant. They do more of one thing and do less of another.”

Madhu Garlanka, CEO of Allwyn Corp., a Herndon-based information technology services and consulting company with 200 workers, doesn’t have to worry about rising costs or shortage of raw materials. But, she points out, inflation has a significant “indirect effect” on businesses like hers.

“There’s the rising cost of people who are looking to increase their income. To retain people, you have to pay more,” Garlanka says. “As we look to source people for projects, it’s become a challenge.”

One way to meet the challenge, she notes, is to negotiate higher prices when customer contracts come up for renewal.

Another method is to take advantage of a wider hiring pool made available through remote work.

“In the past, we used to look for people local to where the client is located,” says Garlanka. “Now we’re able to hire people from lower cost-of-living areas. The workforce wants to work remotely.”

Ice cream and beer

The food and beverage industry has been especially hard hit by the rising costs of supplies and shortages of all types.

Ice cream shop owner Xiawei “Hawaii” Lin finds that “inflation is definitely causing the problem. Raw materials are costing more money. I believe it’s going to go up higher.”

Lin opened an Aqua S soft-serve ice cream franchise in Virginia Beach in December 2019. Since then, her cost for goods has gone up 20% to 30% and shipping costs have rocketed upward of 40%. Additionally, Virginia’s mandated minimum hourly wage went up to $11 in January and will rise to $12 at the beginning of 2023. Lin’s shop has about 10 employees.

Plus, she says, Aqua S faces supply problems. “We use ice cream powder from Italy. Ingredients are imported from Italy to corporate to us. There’s a limited quantity we can get.” Even products obtained locally, such as juice, are sometimes in short supply.

Mustang Sally Brewing Co. in Chantilly has seen “a pretty significant rise in costs,” says Sean Hunt, the brewery’s managing member and founder. Photo by Will Schermerhorn

Combined, those factors mean that the cost of a soft-serve cone has risen from $4.75 to $5.75. “Our profit margin was usually around 40% when we opened. Right now, I can’t tell you. Now it’s maybe 10% to 20%,” Lin says. She’s received business assistance grants, but sometimes, she says, “we don’t know how we are going to keep the door open.”

Having more products that the shop can sell during the winter would help, Lin says, but being a franchise also means restrictions.

She’s making a big push to expand beyond the storefront. “We’re doing catering, weddings, birthday parties, business staff-appreciation events. We’re selling to restaurants. We’re partnering with nonprofits to have events.”

Sean Hunt, managing member and founder of Mustang Sally Brewing Co. in Chantilly, also has experienced “a pretty significant rise in costs. Things are going up across the board generally and, in a more exasperating way, with particular products.”

His brewery’s big cost items are grain, hops and fruit. The cost of grain has been slowly creeping up over the course of the past year, while the cost of hops “hasn’t increased as much,” he says. “Fruit is very variable. It seems to be going up and down. We’re trying to figure it out long term.”

Costs of canning supplies have gone up too, he says, bringing down the profit margin on Mustang Sally’s sale of canned beer products to grocery stores.

He estimates that prices of raw goods have gone up at least 10%, and that escalates to 15% when you factor in new surcharges that shippers have instituted to make up for rising fuel prices.

For now, Hunt says, “we’re absorbing the costs to some degree. We’ve increased prices slightly. The question is, how much do we pass along? We’ll assess that more probably next year.”

In the meantime, the brewery is reassessing the types of fruit it uses. “We do a lot of fruit beers. We’re using more of the fruit that’s available,” he says. For example, “there was a product we had been making that was blackberry-based. We were going to run that for another two months, but blackberry costs shot up, so we made a tangerine fruit beer.”

The best approach to the situation, Hunt believes, is to focus on something “that’s less affected by inflation” — the customer experience.

“Our theory here is that we’re not a restaurant, not a bar. Breweries are different. We’re 100% experience. People come here for something that’s really interesting,” he says. “The end game is that somebody has a lot of experiences to choose from, but at a reasonable cost.”

To create that experience, Mustang Sally hosts lots of events and offers plenty of craft beers that customers can’t find anywhere else, Hunt says.

“We want to make sure we are producing an interesting lineup. We try to make it fascinating. You can really do anything with sour beer. We’ve had a mango coconut raspberry tart beer. It’s fun. About every four months, we have a sour fest. We’ve had a Swedish Fish marshmallow sour.”

Hitting home

“The stereotypical view is that every young lawyer wants to work from home,” unlike their older peers, observes Victor O. Cardwell, principal and chairman of Roanoke-based Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black PLC.

Indeed, 51% of baby boomer attorneys report being eager or very eager to get back to the office, but just 22% of their millennial colleagues agree with them, according to the results of a Return to Office survey published in May by Law360 Pulse and legal executive search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.

The reality, Cardwell finds, has been more complex.

At his firm, he says, he sees both senior and younger attorneys embracing the idea of working remotely — at least part of the time.

“Everybody wants flexibility,” Cardwell says. Firms looking to recruit good talent — and that would be most firms in the current tight labor market — need to keep in mind that “flexibility is one of the selling points.” That usually means a hybrid schedule, alternating in-office and remote work.

And while younger attorneys may say they want to work remotely, Cardwell says, “they went into law to work with people. … They want to be around other lawyers for the training opportunities.”

Callaghan S. Guy, an associate practicing in commercial real estate, environmental and health care law at Richmond-based Christian & Barton LLP, says that in her experience, there may not be as much of a generational divide when it comes to remote work. “I hear younger workers talking more about wanting to work from home. Younger workers are talking more about it. Older workers do it.”

Guy started at Christian & Barton in 2018 after graduating from the University of Richmond. The “default” position at Christian & Barton is working from the office, she says, but the firm has “fairly flexible” arrangements about working remotely.

In general, she says, “if people say they don’t want to come into the office, maybe that’s a problem with the office. You need to create the office you want to be in. If law firms want people to come into the office, there have to be benefits, there has to be good mentorship,” she says.

Steven D. Brown, a partner in Isler Dare PC’s Richmond office, believes that younger attorneys see the value of collaboration and contact with senior partners.

“They want that interaction,” says Brown, who also serves on the Virginia Bar Association’s board of governors. But, he adds, “it doesn’t make sense to mandate” the amount of in-office time required of attorneys.

Isler Dare, a boutique firm with 17 lawyers across offices in Tysons, Richmond and Atlanta, had experience with attorneys working remotely even before the pandemic shutdowns. Now, Brown says, “most of our folks are in the office part of the time,” working a hybrid schedule. Successful hybrid work experiences don’t depend on the size of the firm, though, Brown says. “It depends on whether the management team is willing.”

“COVID taught us we have to be flexible,” says Victor Cardwell, chairman of Roanoke-based Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black. Photo by Don Petersen

Generation Remote?

If firm leaders aren’t willing to make some accommodations when dealing with younger workers, that won’t go over well and could result in losing talent, he adds. “Gen X and Gen Y require you to modify who you are as a leader. They look at things differently than we do,” and communicate differently, says Brown, a self-described baby boomer. “That’s OK.”

Monica Monday, managing partner at Gentry Locke in Roanoke, reports that younger attorneys with less experience have been finding remote work “a significant challenge.”

It benefits younger attorneys to work in person so that “they can walk down the hall to the partner’s office and ask questions,” according to Monday. “It allows them to get professional development at the pace that they want it. Less experienced attorneys want that development and so much of that comes from partners, from working with teams.

“It’s important for firms to create a culture that values relationships,” she continues, “both with each other and with clients. That’s the glue that holds us together.”

Monday has talked with colleagues at other firms who are struggling to bring people back into the office.

“I have heard from bigger firms in bigger cities that attorneys young and old don’t want to come back. In urban areas I think it is a different dynamic,” she says, because of traffic battles and parking restrictions. But in Roanoke, where Monday works, “people have a 10-minute drive to work. If I were in an urban area, I would want to come into the office a couple of days a week, but you couldn’t pay me to come in full time. It’s not an efficient use of my time.”

At Pender & Coward PC in Virginia Beach, “it’s expected that people come into the office, but it’s not such a hard rule,” says shareholder Kristen R. Jurjevich, who has been an attorney for more than 10 years and whose practice areas include corporate and transactional law, real estate, community association matters and litigation.

“Sometimes I choose to go into the office. I really enjoy the people I work with,” says Jurjevich, adding that she appreciates a culture where some attorneys at the firm go to lunch together every day just because they enjoy each other’s company.

“I’m happy with the flexibility,” she says, but “if they said it was mandatory [to be in the office], I would have an issue.”

Jurjevich has a 2-year-old daughter, and her husband, who is not an attorney, has a job that isn’t as flexible about working outside his office.

Finding child care has always been difficult, but the pandemic has made it worse, she says. “That’s a factor. Things happen. Flexibility is key.”

Being inflexible about hybrid and remote work could result in firms losing talent, says Steven D. Brown, a partner in Isler Dare PC’s Richmond office. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown

In the loop

Keeping people who are working remotely in the loop is critical to the success of the hybrid work model, according to Brown. “We have to make sure we’re giving them the same thing. People shouldn’t suffer because they’re not in the office. People working remotely have to stay top of mind.”

That requires clear expectations and communications, he says. “For remote folks, we make sure we dial them in. We really schedule specific times” for interaction.

Using collaboration and work management software to assign tasks, track project progress, share documents and calendars, and manage other work is valuable because “it allows everybody to track and to make edits in real time. It keeps detailed status reports. It keeps folks plugged in.”

Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black has no formal mandate regarding in-office or remote work, but Cardwell believes it’s important to have senior attorneys in the office at the same time as their younger counterparts. He suggests there may be a need for some type of “core hours” when people are expected to work in the office, but he adds, “I’m not going to draw a line in the sand. COVID taught us we have to be flexible.”

Gentry Locke’s attorneys worked fully remote for just 13 weeks during 2020 because “we had associates and partners who did not like being at home and being disconnected,” Monday says. Firm leaders quickly realized “that without in-person collaboration, there was something really missing. We made a conscious decision to return. We learned that remote work and flexibility’s here to stay but you need to find the balance.”

Working remotely requires more initiative on the part of both the individual and the firm, Monday says. Attorneys who generally work remotely need to tell co-workers when they plan to be in the office, so everyone can maximize opportunities for interaction. And law firms should build team camaraderie through activities such as social hours, agenda-less monthly lunches and group roundtables, suggests Monday.

Gentry Locke has developed a more in-depth orientation program and encourages remote workers to attend key meetings in person. The firm also has its own training program, known as “Gentry Locke University,” where “we talk about the culture, about professionalism, about policies. This is where we talk about the importance of relationships, how to grow relationships, how to work with clients,” she says. “We talk about the importance of community, about bar activities and we have programs on networking and business etiquette. We try to cover all the bases.”

One thing Monday does see changing due to the pandemic’s upheaval is the dress code at law firms. “I think across the country we’re seeing more business casual. You dress for your day — are you meeting with clients, are you going to court?”

Gentry Locke generally maintains a business casual dress code in the office, she adds, allowing workers to wear jeans on Fridays if they contribute to charitable fundraisers.

When attorneys started going back to the office at Christian & Barton, casual dress was the rule rather than the exception, Guy says, but attire has been returning to pre-pandemic standards. Now, “we’re not wearing jeans in the office or anything.”

At Pender & Coward, “on average people are more often business casual unless they are going to court,” says Jurjevich. “But some people say if they dress up, they are most alert. As they say in law school: Dress to get things done.”

Battling burnout

One big concern now, Cardwell says, is how to help firm members find work/life balance and avoid burnout.

“The pandemic has shown how fragile our work lives can be,” Cardwell says. “One of the hard parts is that we don’t check out. The work environment has relocated, has gone with us. We don’t turn off — our devices or ourselves.”

Eighty-six percent of employees who work from home full time say they experience burnout, while 81% of hybrid workers and 70% of in-person workers say the same, according to career planning site Zippia. Sixty-seven percent of remote workers report feeling pressured to be available all the time, according to Zippia, and 51% feel they don’t have support from their employer to deal with burnout issues.

Burnout can hit young lawyers hard. They often are driven, Cardwell says, and “we have to try to convince them this is truly a marathon. We, as the firm, are not looking for them to burn candles at both ends and the middle. Sometimes we can see that, and we pull them aside and talk.”

To help avoid burnout, Cardwell suggests firms consider policies that restrict contacting subordinates after hours. “As senior lawyers, we have to be cognizant of sending out emails about jobs, assignments [or] queries to people who are going to feel they are responsible to respond,” he says.

Brown believes that the younger generation of attorneys has been doing a better job than older attorneys of avoiding burnout while working remotely. Younger lawyers “do a much better job of compartmentalizing, of keeping things separate,” he says. “When they’re gone, they’re gone. They are able to unplug. They take their time off when they’re given it. They don’t check in; they trust others” to keep them in the loop.

But “it’s harder for me,” adds Brown. “I’ve learned from Gen X and Gen Y about how they are able to do that.”

Watershed moment

Hampton Roads is besieged by hurricanes, nor’easters and full moon tidal surges, but it’s not just coastal Virginia homes and businesses that are threatened by increased flooding.

“Climate change is causing the state as a whole to deal with flooding and flood- related issues. It impacts a lot of people throughout the state,” says Michael Vernon, founder and CEO of Virginia Beach-based Flood Insurance Hampton Roads.

That’s because there are “more ‘rain bombs’ [and] more mega-storms,” says Vernon, describing microbursts — narrow columns of sinking air within thunderstorms that cause significant downpours and destructive, tornadolike winds. “These are tremendous flood events caused by rain that didn’t used to happen. Now more and more places are having these rain bombs for two or three days in a row. It’s becoming a statewide issue.”

Flood-related disasters in the United States have accounted for more than $850 billion in damage and losses since 2000, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which provides data on conservation science and other issues.

While flooding is a common, expensive natural disaster, many people don’t realize that flood damage is not covered by a standard homeowners’ insurance policy, says Cate Deventer, associate writer for Bankrate, an online publisher of personal finance content. In Virginia, only 3% of homeowners report having flood insurance, compared with 27% nationally, Deventer says, citing the Insurance Information Institute.

“We do get a lot of clients who are shocked by the cost,” says Will Faddis, marketing manager at Trustpoint Insurance LLC in Roanoke. “Most clients of ours who purchase flood insurance only do so because they are required by [their] lender.”

Most flooding problems in Southwest and Central Virginia are driven by losses to older properties in higher hazard flood areas, Faddis says, because new construction typically is either raised or not located in flood-prone areas.

Virginia policyholders are generally faring better than the national average following recent National Flood Insurance Program pricing changes, says Nancy Ahrens with Scott Insurance. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown

Federal flood protection

A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program provides about $1.3 trillion in coverage for more than 5 million U.S. policyholders. But, over the past 50 years, even as the frequency and cost of flood claims has soared, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) had not adjusted rates and premiums. That’s caused serious solvency problems — the program’s debt to the U.S. Treasury now exceeds
$20 billion.

First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research and technology group, and global commercial engineering firm Arup issued a report early last year warning that nearly 4.3 million residential homes across the country are at risk for substantial flooding that would result in financial loss.

Furthermore, if all of these homes were to be insured against flood risk through the NFIP, rates would need to increase 4.5 times to cover the risk, according to the report.

In late 2021, FEMA took steps to update the NFIP pricing structure, resulting in “Risk Rating 2.0,” which aims to correct inequities in the system that cause some owners with lower-value homes to pay more than they should for policies, while the reverse is true for policyholders with higher-value homes.

However, a group of U.S. senators and congressional representatives from Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and New York were not convinced that the new system is an improvement. A month after the first phase of Risk Rating 2.0 was launched in October 2021, they proposed reauthorizing and reforming the NFIP, expressing concerns about possible steep rate increases.

Nancy Ahrens, a vice president of Scott Insurance based in Richmond, says it’s still too early to tell how Risk Rating 2.0 changes are impacting Virginians. “However, flood premiums are rising in most instances on properties where there is an actual flood exposure or past flood loss,” she says.

So far, though, she adds, “Virginia is faring better than the national average under Risk Rating 2.0.”

As of mid-November 2021, 23.2% of flood insurance policies had decreased nationally, while 66% of policies increased by $120 or less a year. But in Virginia, 44.7% of policyholders saw a decrease, and 49% increased by less than $120 a year.

Under Risk Rating 2.0, premiums for policies that cover primary residences cannot increase by more than 18%, and premiums for policies covering other structures are capped at 25%.

Vernon believes that the changes have gotten off to a bad start.

“Basically, they’re using an algorithm that is very different than in the past,” he says. “As a result, changes in premiums are making absolutely no sense.”

For example, the premium price for a house directly on the ocean that is not compliant with flood mitigation requirements is now one-third the premium price of a compliant house, Vernon says. “Suddenly, it’s considered a low-risk property.”

But his biggest complaint is that the new system does not offer homeowners incentives for protecting their property, such as improving lot drainage and installing sump pumps and flood vents that allow floodwaters to flow through garages and crawlspaces.

When property owners are not rewarded for flood mitigation, Vernon says, the result is higher costs — in damages, in lost business and in people moving from the area.

The private route

Flood insurance once was offered by private insurers, but losses stemming from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 one of the worst natural disasters in American history at that point, plus other catastrophic floods, put an end to the practice.

In 1968, Congress created the NFIP through the National Flood Insurance Act, and for years, it was the only provider for residential flood insurance.

However, private flood insurance is seeing a resurgence, with private insurers recording $3.1 billion in premiums between 2016 and 2020, with the one-year total of $735 million in 2020 breaking previous records, according to Insurance Journal. As FEMA’s flood program “has fallen farther and farther in debt, it has raised premiums [and] private agents have reengaged,” Vernon explains.

Scott Insurance is seeing more private carriers, like Lloyd’s of London, offering flood insurance policies, Ahrens says, and she expects the private flood market to expand and improve in the future.

“Despite the tougher insurance market, the carriers offering private flood insurance are increasing capacity and continue to compete with and supplement FEMA.” Now, she notes, “We often secure quotes from the NFIP and the private market for our clients in order to determine the best value of coverage.”

Homeowners may find advantages with private flood insurance, Deventer says.

“It can be more comprehensive than NFIP policies, and you might have access to more coverage options and higher policy limits than you do with federally underwritten policies,” she writes in Bankrate Guide to Flood Insurance. Additionally, she says, waiting times for private flood insurance might be shorter than the 30-day period required by the NFIP.

One drawback to private flood policies is that the Federal Housing Administration has not accepted the policies on properties in high-risk flood zones. However, a proposed rule would amend FHA regulations to allow the option to purchase private flood insurance on FHA-insured mortgages for properties located in special flood-hazard areas.

Commercial coverage

Commercial property rates also have been rising over the past few years in response to natural disasters, severe weather events and rising building materials costs.

Another study by First Street Foundation and Arup projected that structural damage from flooding to retail, office and multifamily residential properties will cost $13.5 billion in 2022, increasing to more than $16.9 billion by 2052.

Although the private flood insurance market commonly provides commercial coverage, carriers have grown more sophisticated in determining whether to provide flood insurance for specific locations, “using cutting-edge modeling to more accurately determine whether they have an appetite to provide flood coverage,” Ahrens notes. “Many carriers have cut back their capacity — the amount of insurance they are willing to provide for any one location — to limit their worst-case exposure.”

A traditional NFIP flood policy can provide up to $500,000 for damage to a commercial building, and many national property carriers are spurning flood coverage due to increased severity and frequency of flood losses, Ahrens says.

At the same time, lenders who provide financing for commercial buildings are demanding that the borrower purchase flood coverage, regardless of whether the location is in a FEMA-designated flood zone. Lenders and/or investors “have also put ‘insurance-to-value’ requirements at the forefront, so they are contributing to an increase in demand of higher limits and quality in coverage,” she says.

Flood insurance is adapting to the change in climate. The trend now, Ahrens says, is for agents and brokers to develop “bespoke insurance programs” that involve both the NFIP policies and the private market. The good news is that solutions are available.

Each carrier pays losses for specific locations it insures, Ahrens says. In addition, some flood policies are written to exceed NFIP policy limits.

Faddis believes the private market better protects clients, “given that most NFIP policies max at [$500,000] of building coverage, where private markets can get up to $4 million and higher.”

For strained property owners, the hope is that this trend toward increased reliance on private insurance, as well as efforts to beef up the federal program, will tame the surging costs of flood insurance caused by hurricanes, nor’easters and rain bombs.

New IDA director is no stranger

When Kristy Johnson moved to Halifax County from Georgia in 2008, the community welcomed her family with open arms, she says.

Now she has the opportunity to return the favor as the new executive director of the county’s Industrial Development Authority.

Johnson’s no stranger to the organization. She’s worked for the IDA since 2009 in various roles, starting as operations manager, then in marketing and business development before moving up the ladder to deputy director. Prior to that, she was mayor of the town of Halifax and served on several local chamber of commerce committees.

Johnson became the IDA’s executive director in mid-September, replacing Brian Brown, who was terminated by the IDA board in October 2020 after a little more than a year on the job. A few months after the firing, IDA board member Rick Harrell said, “We made that change because we saw an operational weakness. It wasn’t any … malfeasance of any kind.”

That’s not a problem he sees in Johnson. “She is strong in the operational area,” says Harrell. “One of the things I know she’s going to concentrate on is existing business.”

Johnson sees the major focus of the IDA as supporting the area’s existing businesses, promoting retention and expansion. Her role in that? “Getting to visit our existing industries and hear their challenges and opportunities and support them in their endeavors, and improving our community that way,” she says.

Johnson would like to be more targeted about recruiting outside industries that would complement existing industry, for example, needed suppliers or services. She plans to do that by meeting with existing industry plant managers, HR managers and others on a regular basis. The biggest challenge she’s heard so far from businesses coming out of the pandemic is re-establishing a feeling of safety for employees who may have left the workforce.

In her new role, she has done a lot of listening. And at the end of the day, she says, the IDA needs to re-establish itself as a partner “not just in words, but in action.

“My goal is for us to continue to do good work and those relationships will begin to repair themselves and our efforts will become evident that we mean what we say when we say we want to be a community partner and support and try to recover from this turbulent period.”

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Select Region or Brand

Upcoming Event

byline: Stephenie Overman

Reaching the majors

‘Stamp of approval’

Applied research

‘Icing on the cake’

At a glance

The ol’ college try

Building an ecosystem

Valuable stock

Health technology

AT A GLANCE

Ready for launch

Getting down to business

University of Mary Washington At a Glance

A step up the ladder

Broadening the scope

Both sides benefit

Next steps

Fighting back

Hitting home

Watershed moment

New IDA director is no stranger