Intersect Fund grows strong with new classes

Aiding New Brunswick entrepreneurs for its second year, non-profit organization The Intersect Fund is making new advances and adding new classes to help their clients go further with their businesses.
The Fund offers a host of services to low-income entrepreneurs in a slumping economy by offering an eight-week-long business class that teaches entrepreneurs how to take critical assessment of their business to keep it alive.
“This past summer, we’ve been able to take a good look at the Intersect Fund and find new ways to serve entrepreneurs,” said Intersect Fund Co-Founder Joe Shure. “We have begun work on our first entrepreneur directory, held training courses in new locations and opened a computer lab in our New Brunswick office for clients and student staff.”
Shure, a University alumnus, said entrepreneurship is becoming a social movement, and the fund’s student staff is on the cutting edge.
“The Intersect Fund’s power comes from our student staff,” Shure said. “They work with real businesses, real money and real people, furthering a mission of financial well-being in New Brunswick. Every day, they fight poverty by helping local entrepreneurs grow their businesses.”
Shure and co–founder Rohan Mathew, who graduated in the spring, also named Ragavan Sree as regional director of the fund.
Sree said he is adjusting to his new role quite well. 
“Over the summer … they started a new class at Magyar Bank,” Sree said. “We just started a new class … which I am co–teaching at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple.”
The fund recently extended their business courses from a six-week program to an eight-week program, in order to provide students more personal attention, Sree said.
“We’ve had great success with the extended course,” Sree said.
Client Zakiya Forbes said signing up for the Intersect Fund’s class was one of the best decisions she ever made because the course helped her manage her small cultural shop better.
“The Intersect Fund forces you, in a good way, to take a critical assessment of your business,” Forbes said. “Step by step, inch by inch, they help you hammer out a business plan.”
Forbes said she recommends entrepreneurs to sign up for the Intersect Fund right away. “Without hesitation, just jump right in and do it,” Forbes said.  “I think so highly of them — Rohan and Joe and all of their wonderful volunteers. If anyone’s thinking about taking the course, they definitely should, and they will be kicking themselves for not doing it sooner.”
In addition to expanding their classes, the Intersect Fund gave out three business loans in the past year, and they plan to give more in the near future, Sree said.
Client Pearl Thompson plans to apply for one of those loans after she completes her business plan.
The Intersect Fund has helped her business, which provides personal chef services, in more ways than she can describe, Thompson said.
“This has been kind of a ragtag adventure, but they gave it structure, they gave it dimension, they gave it focus and they just really professionalized it,” she said.  “Their focus has been to make this an absolute business.”
The business loans provided by the fund are given to entrepreneurial students who have completed the course and developed a solid business plan, with the ultimate goal of aiding them in their entrepreneurial goals in order to stimulate the local economy.
Mathew said he and Shure are working hard to expand the fund, and they are in the office every day.
“Joe and Rohan, since after they graduated, have been trying to take the model and expand it to other universities, and trying to also expand it more within New Brunswick itself,” Sree said.
The fund continues to grow, Sree said. By December, they will begin offering courses in Spanish to make the fund’s resources available to an even wider audience of New Brunswick residents.

— Joe Shure and Rohan Mathew are also Daily
Targum alumni

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