Faith-Hope-Love. That’s the meaning of the name Imani-Tumani-Upendo, the only non-profit member of the Innovation Underground here in Bryan, Texas. This is only the second summer Imani has coordinated mission teams serving organizations working on the ground in Africa, but the company has already expanded from one team in 2011 to four teams this year. Next year, Imani expects to send nine teams to Africa.

Jenny Jenkins (r) and Rachel Driskell (l) are the founders of Imani-Tumani-Upendo

Imani founders Jenny Jenkins and Rachel Driskell are especially proud that they are able to offer internships for credit to Texas A&M University students serving on the mission teams.

Imani trains team leaders and prepares participants for the summer in training sessions in downtown Bryan before they set out to Africa. Imani’s new video produced while on the ground in Jinja, Uganda provides insight into the impact these teams are having, and just as important, the impact the mission is having on each team member.

So far, Imani supports three mission organizations, including:

Real4Christ operating in Mombasa, Kenya

Healing Faith, Jinja, Uganda

The Cries of a Child, Burundi, Africa

Jenny and Rachel hope to expand by reaching out to additional mission organizations operating in Africa and enhancing their operations to provide support to more individuals and even organization seeking mission opportunities abroad.

Rachel in the mission field.

Watch the Imani video to learn more, and visit their website to get the full story about this rapidly growing start-up.

This week, Advent GX leadership traveled to Austin to meet with government agencies and hosted distinguished guests here at the Innovation Underground, all with the aim of learning about programs available to support entrepreneurs and rural communities. We’re learning a lot. In meetings with the Economic Development Administration, Texas Department of Agriculture and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) we were met with overwhelming enthusiasm. All three agencies were eager to learn more about the Innovation Underground and the businesses our members are getting started in Bryan.

We learned about a wide variety of low interest loan programs for rural entrepreneurs through the USDA. State Director Paco Valentin toured the IU along with Daniel Torres, USDA business and cooperative programs director. The two provided insight into the wide ranging programs aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship and healthy communities.

Similarly, during meetings with Texas Department of Agriculture, we learned about a number of programs targeting communities and young farmers, all with the goal of economic development and job creation.

The insight gained will help us continue to serve our member companies and client communities as they do the hard work to grow and prosper.

Today marks the official start of a new Advent GX project with Donna, TX Economic Development Corporation (EDC). Donna (cityofdonna.org) is a community of nearly 16,000 located in Southeast Hidalgo County and home to a new international port of entry. The community is eager to increase bridge crossings and expand economic activity.

We will use our Advent GX Strategy Deployment (ASD) process to engage community stakeholders and form an economic development strategy that takes advantage of the community’s assets. Among these are a rich heritage, abundant agricultural operations and location along a primary North American trade corridor. In addition, Advent GX will begin immediately to evaluate best developmental opportunities for Donna and begin pursuing those.

The AdventGX team for the Donna project includes former Hidalgo County Judge and new Advent GX Managing Partner JD Salinas III, AdventGX President Jose Quintana and Joan Quintana, AdventGX Managing Partner. In addition, subject matter experts in the fields of development, international trade, manufacturing, nature tourism and heritage tourism will serve the project.

Today we are delighted to tell the world that JD Salinas III will join Advent GX has a managing partner effective Monday, June 25th. JD joins us after stepping down from his post as Regional Administrator for the US General Services Administration (GSA). You can expect to see JD here at the Innovation Underground in Bryan, TX in the coming months. He will also be working to expand the Innovation Underground network with new incubation locations in the Lower Rio Grande Valley region of Texas and in other areas of North America.

JD has served as Regional Administrator for the GSA’s Greater Southwest Region since November 2009. Prior to his service at GSA, Salinas served as County Judge of Hidalgo County, Texas. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Sciences in 1991, and of University of Texas – Pan American where he earned a Masters of Public Administration in 2002.

We are honored that JD has chosen to join our team. He will significantly enhance our ability to reach and serve communities and businesses throughout Texas and North America. JD brings an exceptional understanding of local, state and federal issues that impact both local governments and businesses and his servant values are a perfect fit with Advent GX.

Texas music, Texas beer and locally crafted pizza were on hand to welcome international visitors to downtown Bryan and the Innovation Underground during the 2012 International Conference on Design, Computing and Cognition. The group of international travelers gathered in the IU’s patio garden to meet colleagues from across the globe representing a variety of disciplines all with a shared interest in design aspects of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

According to Texas A&M’s website, Design Computing and Cognition is a biannual conference series that provides an international forum for the presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art and cutting-edge design research with a focus on artificial intelligence, cognitive science and computational theories in design. The conference proceedings form a continuing archive of design computing and cognition research. DCC is one of the few high-profile and highly respected international interdisciplinary conferences. Most conferences are dedicated to a topic that interests only a single discipline. DCC is different in that the audience, talks, and presenters are from a variety of disciplines, all circling around a central theme.

DDC’12 was chaired by Dr. John S. Gero, a research professor in the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, the Volgenau School of Engineering, and the Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University. Dr. Tracy Hammond was the Texas A&M local chair of the event. She is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the director of the Sketch Recognition Lab.

Previously, the conference was held at MIT, the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands (DCC’06), the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Stuttgart in Stuttgart in Germany (DCC’10).

Viza-Go-Go 19 was great! I can’t decide what I enjoyed more – watching people walk their way through an entire building while walking in place or seeing their reactions to the 3D art. I do know that we were thrilled to have Viza-Go-Go’s exhibit on the first floor of the Innovation Underground during First Friday weekend this month.

Exceptionally talented Texas A&M Architecture students shared their wares as part of a showcase that stretched along Bryan’s 26^th Street from the Palace Theater to Village Café and our own Innovation Underground at the Federal Building.

The Palace Theater was packed as First Friday crowds stretched and craned to enjoy a glimpse of the animation showcase. We got a peek into the effort that goes into making animated creatures move so realistically and were entertained by the murder mystery that was woven into the film showcase.

Up the street at the Village Café (also know as the home of Art 979), an exhibit of undergraduate work from the visualization program took over the coffee house walls. The art is for sale, so be sure to stop by the Café and check it out.

Across the alley, at the Innovation Underground the graduate exhibit drew a crowd too. We were thrilled to host so many people in what was once the local post office. The Federal Building has been home to the USPS, the IRS and other federal agencies. Today, it’s our home for the Innovation Underground. We house eight businesses in incubation offices and provide a quiet place to work for freelancers at the Creative Space.

On the first floor, we’ll offer space for meetings and events in our Parlor Gallery and Library and we even have a unique outdoor venue in the patio garden.

Viza-Go-Go got us started and future events will be hard pressed to draw such a crowd but the venue stood the test…providing a space for innovative events with easy access to all that historic downtown Bryan has to offer.

If you missed Viza-Go-Go, enjoy these photos. If you have an event or meeting coming up, we hope you’ll consider the Innovation Underground. We’d love to have you here with us.

Over the weekend, Advent GX facilitated an ASD (Advent GX Strategy Deployment) workshop with Imani-Tumani-Upendo (means Faith-Hope-Love in Swahili) founders Jenny Jenkins and Rachel Driskell. We met in our yet-to-be-renovated gallery on the first floor of the Innovation Underground. It was an inspiring way to spend a Saturday morning.

You can learn more about Imani on their website at www.Imani-Africa.com, but the short story is this. Jenny felt the call to support African missions by coordinating mission teams here in the states and doing fundraising, etc. She shared her dream with Rachel and they’ve since formed a non-profit corporation, sent teams in summer 2011 and formed teams that will serve this summer. Imani already has relationships in place with Texas A&M so that students can earn credits for internships AND Imani is working to better represent churches by providing missions coordination support.

All this and Imani is less that two-years old. Wow!

We are so proud to have Imani as a member of the Innovation Underground and most grateful to the individuals who lent their insight and expertise to the visioning process, including:

• Dr. Carson Watt, Chairman of Board, Advent GX;Professor Emeritus of Texas A&M University in the Dept. of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences
• Liz Ylitalo, Founder, Sideshow Creative
• Marty Morrison, Audit and Enterprise Risk Services, Deloitte & Touche
• Elyse Debuck, Student TAMU and Imani Missions Team Leader
• Thomas Wynn, International Agriculture Development
• Jose Quintana, President, Advent GX and financial and systems engineer

We will continue the planning process with the help of this group and others and will certainly keep our followers updated on Imani plans through this blog. In the meantime, here are a few photos from the workshop.

Enjoy!

Logan Hooks films the entire workshop. So many great ideas. We don't want to miss a thing!

Members of the workshop team pose for a photo in the Imani offices at the Innovation Underground.

Jenny encourages Liz and Marty check out the products Imani has for sell in support of mission teams.

Introducing Big Chip Designs, the newest member of the IU network!  The Innovation Underground team held a strategy deployment workshop for Big Chip this Thursday evening.  The company, started by Jenny Jenkins and Elyse DeBuck in December, re-purposes found objects into decorative items. Their tagline is “we give junk some spunk!”.

The idea for Big Chip came from a simple hobby.  Both students at Texas A&M, the friends would meet during their leisure time to cook and do crafts together. Eventually, the pair started making crayon art.  Seeing that everyone was selling this type of art on Etsy, a popular online marketplace, DeBuck and Jenkins decided they wanted to be involved with something they felt was more compelling.  It just so happens that founders were huge fans of shows like American Pickers.

The duo started looking everywhere for unique items.  They would visit estate sales, antique shops and garage sales looking for objects that they could give new life. The IU/AGX team used the strategy deployment workshop on Thursday to provide guidance by way of identifying business expectations, possible stakeholders and the developmental opportunities for Big Chip Designs.

For more information on Big Chip Designs, email Jenny Jenkins and Elyse DeBuck at bigchipdesigns@gmail.com or visit their Esty shop.  For more information on the IU consultants and their services, visit our About page.

Growth starts here.

The Imani-Tumani-Upendo boutique, which means faith-hope-love in Swahili, has made the Innovation Underground their home.  The company is headed by Jenny Jenkins, Rachael Driskill and Kaylene Ullom.  These three women came together to combine three seperate dreams into one vision, the culmination of which would defeat poverty for children and families in Africa.

Aside from throwing the annual M.O.V.E event tasked with outreach and raising awareness for their cause in the B/CS community, the group does mission trips to various locations like Uganda and Kenya to help Christian missionary groups already working in Africa.  A couple of these groups are Healing Faith and Real-4-Christ.  Imani’s ultimate goal is to empower the people of these towns by teaching them trades and giving them much needed support to acquire basic amenities like food, water, and education.

For more information on Imani, please visit imani-africa.com.