After opening its doors near a decade ago, the president of Dickinson State University says the Strom Center is set to close in mid-April…
“The idea was, hopefully, that if you could help people with entrepreneurship and ideas that the prosperity in rural areas would then pick up and people would be more apt to remain within the state. That idea then went forward to actually the opening of the Strom Center, August 24th of 2007. It was mainly due to the generosity of Jerome and Rosie Strom.”
DSU President Thomas Mitzel says the Strom funding helped launch the center and was to support itself with outside dollars and grants. Mitzel says while the Strom Center was seeing on-going success in working with entrepreneurs and businesses it was the lack of grant money that caused the downfall…
“In various ways the Center has helped 200 different businesses really sort of get started. And that help could come from anything as minor as showing how to set up a web page to helping a particular business obtain a grant for start-up purposes. It has also done a fair amount of training among businesses that are already running. And it has impacted over a thousand businesses since 2007.”
Mitzel says along with the facility, the employees of the center were also grant funded. He says the shutdown will impact four full-time, and one part time employee.