By Eliana Tallarida, news correspondent
Established and aspiring entrepreneurs came together Wednesday at a cafe night in Seaport to promote innovation and networking within the innovative community.
A first-time addition to HUBweek, the “Fall Cafe Night: District Hall’s Fourth Birthday Party” event celebrated the success of cafe nights while bringing together people ranging from street clothing artist Black Picasso to growing yoga franchise Core Yoga.
The event was part of the Venture Cafe Foundation’s Cafe Night series, which brings entrepreneurs together to network and develop professional relationships. This particular cafe night takes place four times a year in District Hall, a not-for-profit center and free public workspace.
“We are the first free-standing civic innovation center in the world,” said Becky Donner, the event director, on District Hall’s success.
Donner said establishing District Hall was part of Venture Cafe Foundation’s mission to provide resources for innovators and entrepreneurs to succeed. The event became part of HUBweek because many HUBweek sponsors already work closely with Venture Cafe Foundation.
“Cafe nights are modeled off how our nonprofit got started, which was through these networking events,” Donner said. “Which are really informal and are meant to get you the kind of connections you need to start a business.”
Usually, Cafe Nights are structured with information tables and demos, but because Wednesday’s event celebrated District Hall’s fourth birthday, it featured bright neon lights, party hats and glow sticks. Entrepreneurs set up booths advertising their products, which ranged from poets writing on the spot for attendees to a booth of Northeastern representatives advertising employment opportunities for master’s students in the D’Amore McKim School of Business.
Anyone can attend Cafe Nights, but Donner said the Foundation is trying to attract more students.
“We’ve actually been identifying areas where we could have more impact and one of those areas is with college students,” Donner said. “We have free offices, we have free programs, we have all kinds of free resources.”
Donner said many people who worked the event were Northeastern alumni. One such alumna was Sara De Simas, a communication studies and graphic design combined major who graduated in December 2016. De Simas said cafe nights like this are especially helpful to meet people from all different sectors of the innovation community.
“I think a lot of networking events in the Boston ecosystem are segmented to just tech or a specific silo,” she said. “Our cafe nights, we try to bring various sectors of the innovation community together so they can build meaningful relationships that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.”
Kevin Wiant, executive director of the Venture Cafe Foundation, said the Foundation also hosts events in Cambridge and Roxbury. These happen once a month in Roxbury, quarterly at District Hall and weekly in Cambridge, where they began approximately seven-and-a-half years ago.
“We now average about 500 people coming to that event each week,” Wiant said of the Cambridge cafe nights. “Based upon the success of that, we were asked to get involved with designing and then operating District Hall, which opened up in 2013.”
Event attendee and 2016 Northeastern alumna Hudson Klebs said not everyone comes to these events with the intention to network.
“Not necessarily to network, but to see what is happening and meet some random people,” Klebs said. “This is my second cafe night, but I have been to other events.”
De Simas said all of the events in the Greater Boston area have different goals, but they all serve the purpose of growing a community of innovators.
“We are all connected, so hopefully people who go to these events also cross-network and go to the other events and meet people there too,” De Simas said.
