Adam Torres and Angie Rowe discuss Octane’s Medical Innovation Forum.
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Show Notes:
Listen to Octane’s Medical Innovation Forum coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Angie Rowe, President & CEO at Beyond Blindness, explore Beyond Blindness and Octane’s Medical Innovation Forum.
Watch Full Interview:
About Angie Rowe
As a non-profit executive and board member, Angie Rowe offer extensive leadership experience across multiple disciplines with hands-on experience building stakeholder communities and organizational capacity.
About Beyond Blindness
Beyond Blindness, formerly Blind Children’s Learning Center, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the mission to empower children with visual impairments and other disabilities to achieve their fullest potential. Areas of service include Early Intervention, Education + Enrichment, and Family Support (outlined below), which help children, no matter their abilities, live full and rewarding lives. The Beyond Blindness team embraces a people-first approach and values family, connection, impact, inclusion, stewardship, and optimism.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I am in Irvine, California at the medical innovation forum. And my guest is Angie Rowe, Angie.
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. All right. So we’re on day two of the conference. I just got to ask, have you been to one of these conferences before? Is this one of your first? No, I’ve been to many of the octane conferences. Yeah. So this is my second octane conference. So you’re a veteran.
How many have you been to or how many years you’ve been going? Roughly, roughly about three, about three years. Usually attend their ophthalmology tech forum in June and then we participate in this one. I just went to their last one, the cardiovascular tech forum, and then this is my second one. So I wasn’t around for Octane for June, but next year you better believe I’m going to be there.
I’m a big fan of their, of the conferences so far and getting to know more about the organization. I have to ask, what keeps you coming back? We work with Octane kind of year round. We have a board member on our board of directors at Beyond Blindness that is their business development person here.
And a lot of the companies that participate in Octane’s programming are sponsors of ours, corporate sponsors of Beyond Blindness. And also, I’m a graduate of their non profit accelerator program, which is their program that they run called Beyond Blindness. They have it both for, for like kind of VC companies that are in early stage startup and want to look, get funding for whatever they’re trying to launch.
So they were doing that for a long time with these early stage companies and they took that platform and they applied it to the nonprofit sector and they allow nonprofits to apply. There’s about five or six people in each cohort and we go through the same kind of. Program that they put their early stage companies through and we learn how to do our value proposition We look at our competitive landscape We come up with a market analysis and we really hone our pitch and one of the really cool things about the program is I’m gonna be pitching today at the end of the day at 430 in their community impact set Segment with three other companies graduated from their non So very exciting.
And you first person that I’ve in that went through the non So maybe just talk a litt because I’m just curious. fantastic program. I can for allowing me the oppor Kind of early on when they had just gotten started. I was in the spring of 2021 cohort with four other nonprofits. We were kind of their COVID class kind of coming out of COVID.
So we did everything online, but they have a great group of mentors that we work with, Linda DeMario, Paul Seismick, and a few other people. And then they have subject matter experts from the community that are both in the not for profit and for profit space. And they give us basically. They give us a pitch deck and they say, you need to do this for your organization.
Well, a lot of times as a nonprofit, you, you don’t, I always say that a nonprofit is a 501 C three is your tax status. And we’re really the only business entity that does that. uses their tax status to define who they are. Nonprofits are a business, right? And we, I have a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet and I have metrics and deliverables.
I have to raise so much money through contracts with state and federal and local agencies and school districts. And then I also have to do philanthropic fundraising and come up with money to pay. you know, my staff provide services for all the kids that we see. So we, it’s just that our profits go back into programs and serving more people with special needs, right?
So to, to, like, get yourself in that mindset. I’ve always been that way. That was what my training was in the nonprofit space is that you’re a business and I have to perform. So my profession has been kind of going into nonprofits that are in these difficult places and maybe are struggling financially and kind of turn them around.
And this is the third time that I’ve kind of had the opportunity to do this, but I got to take Beyond Blindness. their nonprofit accelerator. And so they give us this pitch deck and they basically say, okay, in a week you need to come back with this. And it’s like 14 pages and it’s like a full on masterclass and looking for VC funding like a, you know, a private company would do.
But this is really to pitch to funders on innovative ideas that we have at our nonprofit. So I basically cleared my calendar for a week, and sat in a room one of my extra bedrooms in my house. ’cause my kids are grown and. My husband kept coming and checking me on me. Are you okay? Just like diving into the process and really coming up with that deck.
And then we present it to the people at Octane and they tear it apart. And we go back to the drawing board again. And we continue through that iterative process over a couple months while they bring in subject matter experts. And then at the end we actually present to a, a panel of people that judge us and rank us across all disciplines.
Performance sectors. How we do on strategic planning. How was our pitch? What did our market analysis look like? Is it something that, was it compelling enough to receive funding? All those things. And you get this big detailed statistical analysis of how you performed and they benchmark you against all the other non profits that have participated in the program.
And then they present it to you. And then they present it to your board. And so it’s a really cool experience. And I think for us, what was so amazing and what I’m so appreciative of is the nuts and bolts of the pitch, even though I did it in 2021, really, like, Honing the message and then coming up with the compelling ask no matter what program within the organization that I apply it to, I’m able to take that, the bones and the skeleton and what I learned and craft my pitches according to whatever funder that I’m speaking to, because a lot of times in the nonprofit space, we have to do a lot of work when we prospect on aligning funders their interests and what they like to fund with the work that we’re doing.
And not every funder is going to be interested in Beyond Blindness because they might be interested in other, you know, Initiatives like which is totally fine But when you do find those funders that have that alignment with either blindness visual impairments kids with special needs Children that are at risk Populations families that need support that are with kids You know with disabilities when you find those niche kind of funders and you have five minutes to talk to them.
You better get it and get it fast and get it out quickly. And I think a lot of times in the nonprofit space, we do a disservice in that we, we, you know, and so really that program was so helpful for myself and a couple of staff members that I took through it with me to like, get to your point, get it there fast, make it compelling and use lots of pictures instead of words, you know, on the slides, you know, a lot of those little things that you don’t think about.
So it’s kind of, it’s just, it’s a great experience and they’ve been very supportive since. So I’ve been involved in a lot of their programs now. They’re, they have a women, women’s leadership group. I’m participating in their board readiness program to hopefully get, you know, some, at some point get placed on a board when that I can serve on, you know, in the for profit sector.
So it’s just a, it was a really cool opportunity to expose me to things that a lot of times nonprofits aren’t exposed to. Amazing. Angie, final question here. If somebody’s wants to learn more about beyond blindness, maybe a little bit, tell a little bit more about the organization and how people can follow up and how they can learn more, follow social media or anywhere else you’d like.
Yeah, we are. Our website is www. beyondblindness. org. We’re a non profit that serves children who are blind and visually impaired. We hope To let them reach their full potential. , we have a comprehensive journey of care, we call it. We believe in supporting the whole child, so we’re kind of a one shop shop, which is really unique.
We provide educational services. We have classrooms on site from zero to five, and then we stay with that child through their. elementary high school and keep working with them in their public schools. But we also have a full clinic because most Children have need one to one services for physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy.
We have a free vision clinic, so everything outside of their medical doctor work. appointments, they can do all on site at Beyond Blindness. And that’s really a unique thing for a family to be able to come to a one stop shop and also have a counseling department and a social worker. And we work with siblings and we include siblings in all the programming and have the.
Support for the whole family. Wow. So we’re located in Santa Ana. . . And we’ve been around for over 60 years providing these services and we serve about 500 kids and about a thousand of their family members a year. And just really proud of the work we do here in Greater Orange County. But we are on social media at On, we are beyond blindness.
OC on Facebook. . . We are at Beyond Blindness on Instagram. . . And we are also beyond blindness on LinkedIn. Amazing. And for everybody watching at home, just so you know, we’ll put the links to the website and all that good stuff on the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new entrepreneurs. New executives, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help carry you along in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Angie, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been so much fun. Thanks. Thanks for having me.