In a recent interview about the third annual My City My Health conference in Des Moines, an event dedicated to discussing local health equity needs and building community connections, co-founders Corey Dion Lewis and Larry Twitty Jr. shared about how their efforts reflect the entrepreneurial spirit.
Dion Lewis: 100%. We saw a problem and we have a solution for it. We had personal problems, things that we’ve seen and we knew we had a solution. Our first conference, you can say, was our minimum viable product, so we built upon that. Just speaking for myself, I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spirit to do something outside of the box and outside of the norm of what we see in the industry, specifically public health. This was something that I had not seen and we are the first to do it. Not only are we the first to do it, I’ve seen conversations on LinkedIn about should we be having smaller locally focused conferences? And it’s like, yeah, you should. Not to be overly dramatic, but we’re ahead of the game, and that takes an entrepreneurial spirit.
Twitty: That also includes risk. We’ve used our own money. We’ve put ourselves in rooms with people that we’ve never met before, so taking the risk that they’re not laughing us out of the room but instead they are receiving the information, and not only receiving the information but also want to partner with us and and help contribute so that we can make the conference the best that it can be.