Admissions Blog

Celebrating the 5-year anniversary of Columbia Startup Lab

By EMILY TAO
Posted Jul 05 2019
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If you are interested in social entrepreneurship, you will find plenty of resources to research in this post.

Last month the SIPA community helped celebrate the five-year anniversary of the Columbia Startup Lab. A co-working space located in New York's Soho neighborhood, the Lab has more than 40 startups from all over Columbia campus and is the result of a partnership between multiple Columbia schools -- including SIPA.

To celebrate this space that provides Columbia alumni entrepreneurs to work full-time on their ventures, SIPA Dean Merit Janow, Professor Sarah Holloway, and several SIPA alum were in attendance.

Pictured above is Professor Sarah Holloway, who teaches Social Entrepreneurship and Nonprofit Financial Management at SIPA and runs the Management Specialization – a set of courses and activities that support knowledge and skill building in non-profit, for-profit and social enterprise management. (She also holds an MPA from SIPA!)

Manal Kahi MPA '15 is pictured next to Professor Holloway. She is a Startup Lab alum with Eat Offbeat, a startup that delivers authentic ethnic meals prepared and delivered by refugees resettled in NYC. To find out more about Manal and Eat Offbeat, you can check out her interview on the Sincerely, Hueman podcast. (Incidentally, the podcast was created and is hosted by Camille Laurente MIA '16.)

Pictured below is Shanna Crumley MIA '18 (she's been profiled on our blog before here), who co-founded Bitae Technologies with Gemma Torras Vives MPA '18. They combined data protection, strategic management and refugee policy to create blockchain-based credentials for refugees and migrants.

Congratulations to Columbia Startup Labs and everyone involved! You can keep up with more news like this on SIPA's LinkedIn. For those of you interested in social entrepreneurship, I hope this is a good starting point for you to figure out what resources are available to you and what other connections you can make through Columbia to support your venture.