‘Create something amazing': Topeka event merges community and business opportunity

Yahoo

28-02-2025

The Topeka Startup Community event allows aspiring or established entrepreneurs to connect with industry leaders and visionaries to build a thriving ecosystem, writes Mark McCormick. (iStock/Getty Images Plus)
Healthy communities have certain things. Schools. Hospitals. Banks or credit unions, or both. Businesses that support little league baseball and Pop Warner football. Community gathering places for recreation and for public discussions.
At their best, they have insular qualities, meaning much of what you need already exists there. There's a healthy interconnectedness. They have heartbeats. They breathe. They have organs and strong, economic circulation delivering life-giving oxygen to those organs.
In his own way, Michael Odupitan is building just such a community. His Topeka Startup Community event runs from 1 to 4 p.m. Friday at 1301 S.W. Topeka Blvd. The event will allow visitors and aspiring or established entrepreneurs to connect with industry leaders and other visionaries to build a thriving, startup ecosystem.
'Whether you're a founder, investor, or simply passionate about business growth, this is your chance to help create something amazing,' said Odupitan about his event, which is sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation, Kansas State University, and Network Kansas.
This event is to develop personal connection, professional collaboration, and business creation in the region, or in short, 'to connect, collaborate, and create.'
That's consistent with Omni Circles, the nonprofit Odupitan started in 2019. It is designed for early and mid-stage entrepreneurial development where people can help each other find resources and training, while building a climate of 'ubuntu,' or humanity. Because I am, we are, and because we are, I am.
In addition to working space and entrepreneurship support, it also offers free mowing services, mentoring, help finding startup capital, mentoring and more.
'If we're ever going to be a community that thrives, it has to be through economics,' said Odupitan, whose connection to our social fabric developed as a social worker. 'Let's show Topeka we can build a community. We create pathways to success. We help people develop opportunities and we help crate leaders.'
Communities without connection wither into painful and even deadly dysfunction.
Dying communities tend to have death economies. An abundance of liquor stores and tobacco shops. High-fat, high-calorie fast food. Pawn shops selling guns. Few, if any, employment opportunities. There's often violence. Vast food deserts with no fresh fruit or vegetables, and sadly, funeral homes, an endpoint for chronic illness and violent crime.
This is precisely what environments of 'want' or opportunity scarcity create.
Odupitan saw this growing up in a high-crime neighborhood in West Palm Beach. He was the youngest of four that his heroic mother Josephine Odupitan raised working multiple odd jobs just so that the ends could see each other if they could not in fact meet.
She worked in nursing homes, was a certified nursing assistant, and was always helping and serving other people.
'She was always giving back,' he said. 'That's just the way that she was. She was a joy to be around.'
Odupitan lost his mother in 2015. The loss sent his mind plunging. His mother's legacy was one of joyful giving. He wondered what his legacy might be. He spent a lot of years away from his family, in Illinois, in Oklahoma, in the Kansas City metro area, and 15 years in Topeka, trying to achieve but never quite seeing those dreams come to fruition.
He ultimately decided to put down roots in Topeka and to build the very thing he did not have growing up, a connected community. The road to parity — economic, social, or otherwise — runs through community business success.
Too often, however, Black communities temporarily galvanize behind an emotionally charged incident, like in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. That incident drew people out of their homes and into community activism nationwide.
But when that energy faded people defaulted to the old habits of siloed survival.
Odupitan suggests not living in such a tragedy driven way but building ties and businesses that last. Communities are not necessarily just expressions of who we are as individuals, but rather, what we share and produce as families and as neighbors.
In a nation that tends to promote 'low-road capitalism' where wages stagnate and exploitation often prevails, Odupitan said community entrepreneurs should have a heart for service and for helping people develop and thrive.
'I live for this purpose,' he said.
Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.