Many issues challenge our Island community. One of the biggest is the cost of housing, and another is the shortage of year-round jobs that pay a decent salary. Due to our seasonal resort economy, and the low wages of many service industry jobs, families often have to work multiple jobs and long days to make ends meet. Many of our youth don’t return to the Island after college because they can’t find work here that pays enough to find housing.

If we had more higher paying year-round jobs, more people could afford housing and we wouldn’t losing our young and middle class families.

With the highest percentage of self-employed people in the commonwealth, the Island also has many creative, entrepreneurial people trying to start or build their own businesses. Unfortunately, the Island is not a very friendly place to start a new business, in part because we don’t offer the incentives, training, incubators, mentoring and other supports available in many communities on the mainland to foster economic development.

To address that issue and spark the growth of small businesses, some interesting efforts began in 2016 and are rolling into 2018.

We now want to engage the broader community in the effort.

In May 2016, the Martha’s Vineyard Donors Collaborative brought the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce’s Blue Economy Team to the Vineyard for the first introduction of the Blue Economy Project. Funded by the Seaport Commission, the project launched listening tours of the Cape and Island communities to discuss economic development priorities.

Inspired by work that had begun on the Cape, the donors collaborative and others created a Shark Tank-type pitch contest in February 2017. The Perfect Pitch Contest attracted 18 applicants, ten of who competed for $5,000 in cash prizes at the Old Whaling Church — amazing in February with little publicity. People had great ideas and incredible drive, but we also heard the challenges they faced trying to start or grow a business here. This convinced us that more had to be done.

With some of the competitors from the contest and others, we vetted a group of entrepreneurs, attracted a group of volunteer mentors and began to offer monthly drop-in mentoring to ten startups from May to November. All the startups said it was helpful, and we got useful feedback.

Simultaneously, there have been efforts to determine what works elsewhere. To that end, visits were made to New Bedford’s innovative economic development collaborative to explore partnering opportunities, to Springfield to see a model of mentoring and an accelerator at Valley Venture Mentors, and to Seattle to visit ImpactHub. We are consulting with Massachusetts Center for Small Business Development, as well as developing relationships with mentoring services elsewhere including models at MIT and MassChallenge. One goal is to find best practices and adapt them to the unique circumstances of the Island.

Two weeks ago we held a facilitated discussion with a group of Islanders from diverse backgrounds — including the arts, banking, strategic planning, The Chamber of Commerce, SCORE, investing and entrepreneurship — who came together for two hours to discuss how to create a more robust community on the Island to support entrepreneurs and small businesses of all types. While a great first step, all agreed that this was a discussion that will take more time and more participation from people to be successful. Our goal is to create a supportive ecosystem for small business development on the Vineyard.

We want our first steps to be inclusive, collaborative and impactful, and are looking for thoughtful input from existing programs, local government, experienced business people as well as startups and small businesses and those who support them. Many local businesses are crafts or hobbies that could be scaled with the right support. We recognize that an inventory of current or possible resources needs to be done as part of the process of creating a plan for supporting this ecosystem.

Our goal is to create a strategic vision and create a plan to create a supportive small business ecosystem on the Vineyard. Organic strategic planning needs to be inclusive. It also needs dedication from those who see the good of the community, not just their own specific needs. Topics still to be determined include exactly what form support should take, ranging from virtual communities, resource creation and partnering with off-Island resources to a possible longer term goals of a co-working campus that is supportive of small businesses and startups and a loan and/or an angel fund.

Strategic planning needs to include benchmarks for success, such as an increase in the number of successful small businesses and year-round jobs, opportunities for skill development and capacity building, increase in higher paying jobs, and more collaboration and sharing between all the entities interested in supporting economic development.

We are looking to include more people in the discussion so we can craft a mission and vision that serves all and encourages maximum participation.

This is an active, inclusive group eager to create real results.

We plan to meet again to continue the discussion on Monday, Jan. 29 from 9 to 10:30 a.m.

If you are interested in joining us, please reach contact Nancy Gardella at the chamber of commerce at [email protected].

Katherine Putnam is a business consultant living in Edgartown.