Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Creating Space: A Pop-up Café Series

Cultivating an opportunity incubator

Dawn Nelson
4 min readSep 18, 2023

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The Sunday Dispatch ~ September 17, 2023

A simple café space on a Tuesday morning. Photo by author, © Dawn Nelson.

In my last dispatch, I mentioned investing in and developing economic hubs throughout the full parameters of a city. While there is much social emphasis on increasing population density of downtowns and urban centers, I think we should also consider cultivating multiple nodes across an urban area. Innovative hubs along city edges can include incubator spaces for startups and other initiatives and cultivate new opportunities.

One of the reasons I feel strongly about innovation and incubator spaces is because I grew up in an area with extremely limited opportunities. As a teenager, I would walk for an hour to work in a pizza kitchen. There were only a few employment options if you did not have a car, and even if you did, it was still a 30 minute drive to urban areas with more opportunities.

Space to cultivate opportunities should not be so scarce.

I think about this often as I focus on an underappreciated side of my town that could use more creative attention.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about coffee these past few months. It started with visiting a popup social lounge specializing…

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Dawn Nelson

Artist, writer, strategist ~ writing creative nonfiction, memoir, essay. WIP: 0100 Series & a morning bulletin. Sometimes a Sunday Dispatch. Sometimes all 3.