Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center

Renaissance SoMa (South of Market San Francisco) was our largest San Francisco hub for entrepreneurs and is home to the Women's Business Center (WBC) in partnership with the USSBA. In 2024, SoMa and the WBC served 442 small businesses. Services included 1,239 hours of one-on-one advising, 172 workshops and courses on business planning, financial management, bookkeeping, operations, and management, with specialized trainings for starting a food business, launching a childcare business, and navigating contracting and procurement. We also offered sessions in digital marketing, e-commerce, AI, technology integration, and access to capital. Our low-to-no-cost programming, along with events such as Women Mean Business, Coffee and Community, and marketplaces, connected business owners with new customers and collaborators.

Renaissance East Bay provided small business training, one-on-one consulting, and access to capital, networks and other resources to traditionally underserved individuals in Alameda and Contra Costa counties with an emphasis on the cities of Richmond, Antioch, Oakland and Pittsburg. We engaged motivated emerging and established entrepreneurs from communities that lack small business investment, educational resources, and entrepreneurial histories, and face discrimination by race, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, or past incarceration. Our clients are 93% very-low-to-moderate income.

Renaissance Bayview: In 2024, Renaissance continued to provide virtual and in-person business support services to aspiring and emerging entrepreneurs in Bayview Hunters Point, one of the most marginalized and under-resourced communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through our Contractors Initiative, Renaissance Bayview worked intensively with small construction businesses, delivering training and mentoring support, while helping small business owners secure contracts that created quality jobs for residents in the community. We also provided business support services to brick-and-mortar retail businesses throughout the city with a primary focus on the communities of Fillmore, Visitacion Valley and Bayview Hunters Point.