CASE STUDY

Western North Carolina Capital Landscape Assessment

Client: Dogwood Health Trust

THE CHALLENGE

Western North Carolina is emerging as a dynamic, entrepreneurship hub in Southern Appalachia, recognized within the top emerging communities for startup activity and innovation, and home to over 45,000 active small businesses. However, the regional entrepreneurial investment and support ecosystem has traditionally been very fragmented and opaque, with lack of clarity for both founders seeking support and investors seeking to align for co-investment along a comprehensive enterprise growth continuum. This has resulted in less than an estimated 5% of regional businesses being in a position to secure formal debt, quasi-equity, equity, and other supporting services needed for them to grow and thrive.

SOLUTION

Dogwood Health Trust (DHT), a unique regional philanthropy with a $2 billion+ endowment focused on enhancing the social determinants of health and wellbeing, engaged Shining Rock Ventures in collaboration with Lilly Consulting Group to conduct a comprehensive, forensic inquiry into the WNC capital landscape. This entailed a series of four dozen interviews with debt, equity, and supporting service providers active in the WNC region.

This was complemented by contextual data analysis and public-source resource scanning to develop a comprehensive set of landscape matrices aimed at demystifying the ‘who, what, where, when, and how’ of capital services for emerging entrepreneurs. In addition, additional framing recommendations helped to support DHT in the design and implementation of their Economic Opportunity and Impact Investing strategies for the WNC region.

WNC Capital Landscape Assessment Report

OUTCOME

  • The WNC Capital Landscape Assessment report was featured in a regional in-person convening, with a vibrant presentation and Q&A, and has been widely circulated and cited by existing and emerging investors and service providers seeking to improve visibility, access, and alignment across the capital continuum for the region.

  • This has informed the creation of at least two new venture/impact investor vehicles focused on the WNC region, enabled DHT to commit over $100 million in philanthropic capital toward a broad range of impact investing (through both Program Related Investing and Mission Related Investing), and accelerated collaboration and partnership activities between and among a range of debt, equity and business support organizations that previously worked largely independently of one another.

Sarah Thompson, Dogwood Health Trust

Jesse and the Shining Rock Ventures team were phenomenal to work with. They helped distill our big-picture ideas into an actionable plan for the assessment, then executed the work beautifully, with much communication and iteration throughout the process. The report’s aggregated list of the region’s capital providers, and identification of which phases of the entrepreneurial lifecycle those providers are actively funding, is adding value to the work of all players in the ecosystem.

— Sarah Thompson, VP Community Investment, Economic Opportunity, Dogwood Heath Trust