Bespoke video and workbook series
Project DEEP offers a newly launched series of six cinema-quality video courses centered around key topics in entrepreneurship, investing, and ecosystem building. Each course is taught by world-class subject matter experts with lived experience and features a complementary course workbook. Project DEEP also offers a community discussion and networking platform, a series of live webinars with course instructors and expert guests, and additional ways to explore, learn, and connect. These courses cover topics that are essential to success, but often not explicitly taught in other spaces.
Community partnerships
The Project DEEP team also provides direct support to Utah-based entrepreneurs by working with leading community partners to offer education, coaching, and other technical assistance. The Sorenson Impact Institute is partnered with two leading community organizations, Women’s Business Center of Utah (WBCUtah) and New Pattern (NPU), to offer interactive entrepreneur training programs. Designed by WBCUtah in collaboration with NPU, the Mind Your Business cohort program includes peer and expert learning, individual projects, mastermind group meetings, and more to support participating entrepreneurs in measuring, accelerating, and sharing their progress. Learn more here.
Impact measurement
Project DEEP also aims to contribute to the wider ecosystem around best practices for supporting overlooked entrepreneurs – and removing the systemic barriers they face. As part of this, Project DEEP also includes an intensive focus on impact measurement across all workstreams. This starts with measuring the impact of the video courses and community partnership and extending lessons learned into a wider impact measurement framework that can be replicated elsewhere and drive change. Learn more about Project DEEP’s impact here.
Unlocking Potential: Financing Women
and Women of Color Owned Businesses in Utah
To continue the efforts of Project DEEP, in 2023 JPMorgan Chase provided additional grant funding to the Sorenson Impact Institute to better understand the challenges facing entrepreneurs today. The second phase of Project DEEP seeks to understand the capital needs, financing landscape and barriers to accessing capital specifically for women and women of color entrepreneurs in Utah. Building upon the growing body of national research addressing the challenges faced by underserved entrepreneurs, Sorenson Impact Institute produced a thorough report, “Unlocking Potential: Financing Women-and-Women-of-Color-Owned Businesses in Utah.” Learn more.