GREENFIELD — It’s not that Steven Longpre built a better mousetrap.
Instead, he’s designing vaccination stations for white-footed mice. A crazy-sounding idea, maybe, but Longpre found it makes a lot more sense than his original concept for fighting Lyme disease: shooting darts out into the woods to kill ticks.
Longpre started his South Hadley-based BarnStorm Studio as a 3-D printing service that contracts with other entrepreneurs to build prototypes. His gizmo looks like one of those solar-powered lawn lanterns with a black plastic box attached for mice to enter, get counted and get a dose of inoculant. He got the idea at a free monthly Valley Venture Mentors training at The Arts Block in Greenfeld.
“All lyme disease is transmitted by mice, so we pivoted. We decided we’re going to vaccinate mice,” he told about 75 business leaders Friday at a Franklin County Chamber of Commerce event.
He was there to showcase the entrepreneur mentoring effort to bring innovative business and nonprofit organizations’ ideas together with community volunteers with any background in marketing, financing, social media or other helpful areas.
Longpre was one of three entrepreneurs who told the Chamber audience about the VVM events in Greenfield, launched a couple of years ago by the 5-year-old, Springfield-based organization and the Franklin County Community Development Corp. to match volunteer mentors with entrepreneurs in what’s been described as speed dating to launch great business ideas.
“We have often wanted to do a mentoring program, because getting entrepreneurs and mentors together is a whole other offering we wanted to have up here in Franklin County,” said John Waite of the CDC which already had been offering coaching, a loan program and training for people who want to launch their own businesses.
VVM, which has spawned many entrepreneurial ventures since 2010 and expects another 100 this year, is planning its next “first Thursday” session beginning at 5 p.m. at the Arts Block to graduate its class of 36 from its boot-camp-like “accelerator program” May 26.
VVM co-founder Rick Feldman said that with foundation funding, the program has been a bigger success than organizers originally imagined, and that its graduates last year generated $10 million in revenue and created 220 jobs in Western Massachusetts.
“We love the fact that we can partner with the CDC and be growing,” said VVM Program and Development Director Feldman, adding that the mentoring program will be starting programs in Amherst and Worcester later this year, and there are plans to collaborate with Greenfield Community College .
The program has helped one woman get up and running with a fair-trade wedding gown business, an Orange woman launch a wooden pet product business, and a group of machinists develop software to improve manufacturing efficiency.
Although he hopes for his mouse-inoculation device to be ready when the Environmental Protection Agency unveils its program to help prevent rabies in larger animals, Longpre — with help from the veterinary researchers, the Centers for Disease Control, electronics engineers and others — said his device could also be used for birds and could help with mosquito-borne Dengue fever, Zika virus, malaria, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other “pools of viruses that reside in creatures that are around when we aren’t around.”
Another speaker, Tamara Stenn of Marlboro, Vt., showed Friday’s breakfast gathering in the new Greenfield High School cafeteria the handmade alpaca “glittens” — a combination glove-mitten — that are hand-knit and hand-sewn for her company, Kusikuy Clothing, by Bolivian women for a luxury market.
Stenn, who met the crafts workers while working for the Peace Corps in Bolivia, said she’s employed as many as 500 workers there producing the alpaca products for Whole Foods, Timberland and other retailers, but after learning that some of her social entrepreneurism students at the Five Colleges had taken advantage of VMM, she decided to re-launch her business.
“I didn’t know about the luxury market when I started this company,” said the Marlboro, Vt., resident, who realized at a Greenfield VVM event that the $400 billion-a-year sector, with a 14 percent growth rate last year, was the way to go. She’s now “re-launching as a sustainable luxury company,” with plans for new design, branding and website campaigns, a Kickstarter campaign to get finer-grade alpaca glittens, sweaters and other high-end, handmade Bolivian products into Lord & Taylor, Barney’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.
There are even plans for a Ghanaean Summer line of handcrafted organic cotton products from Africa.
A third speaker, Nancy Rothenberg, is the fourth-degree black belt founder and director of Spirit of the Heart Martial Arts in Northampton for 23 years, but through the mentor program discovered how to grow the business, which specializes in teaching martial arts to kids 4 to 12 years old.
By focusing her business on combining the building of “martial arts, mindfulness, and communication skills” as the building blocks of self-esteem, Rothenberg has doubled the number of students she has at a time from 40 to 85 and has been working especially with a special-needs clientele as a place of “empowerment and positive needs for children.”
Part of her expansion has been in Greenfield, working with Federal Street School and the development of an after-school program at the YMCA.
“This is the magic that can happen when you put good-hearted mentors and mentees together with positive intentions,” she said.
On the Web: www.valleyventurementors.org