Not long from now, 1.5 billion bees may call the roof of the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel on Penn Street in Reading home. Through a partnership between Uncle B’s Honey Company, owned by Branden Moyer, and Alvernia University’s SPARK Business Incubator, they’ll work to pollinate 1.5 billion flowers in the city. That’s a lot of buzz.
There’s also a lot of buzz around the incubator, so much so that the incubator was full at the time Moyer was introduced to the O’Pake Institute for Economic Development and Entrepreneurship, which houses the SPARK Business Incubator. But both sides saw the advantages of making a connection.
It’s true. The bees, Alvernia students, the residents of Reading and Moyer have all benefited.
The student fellows and graduate assistants who work at O’Pake with the SPARK Business Incubator are high achievers, carrying a 3.5 GPA or higher and earning a recommendation from a current Fellow, faculty member or staff member for entry into the program. Those two pairings may lead to an interview process before determining if they are a fit for the paid work-study program that sees Fellows log 10–20 hours per week for the client they are assisting. Once selected, a Fellow can choose to remain such through their graduation year.
Those clients come from an assortment of fields, including the technology, software, retail, education, healthcare, entertainment and agriculture industries, to name a few. Fellows assisting them carry a wide variety of majors, too, from accounting and finance to sports management, biology and communications.
Jennifer Weasner ’22, a digital media marketing and communication dual major, was thrilled to get hands-on for Uncle B’s, designing the logo for the business’s specially crafted O’Pake Honey, sold in the Institute’s General Store. Since then, she’s been working to enhance the O’Pake General Store’s social media presence on Facebook and Instagram. It’s the perfect partnership as Weasner looks to enter into the social media marketing field post-graduation this May.
“I enjoyed being the student lead on the marketing project for Uncle B’s, from designing the logo for O’Pake Honey to now developing the social media strategy,” said Weasner. “I look forward to the challenge of building an audience and seeing where we can take it.”
Plans are also in the works to have students expand the hive project already atop the DoubleTree and connecting it with those managed by the university’s EcoHouse. Students would then establish, manage and harvest honey from a total of 20 to 25 hives, said Conway.
Current SPARK client Hayden Craddolf, owner of Cemboo, a B2B software service company, has nothing but high praise for the program, which his business formally became a part of in May 2022.
“Working with the O’Pake Fellows gave us the ability to frame our story and to prepare for future investors,” Craddolf explained. “Long term, we hope to move into a more permanent space connected to Alvernia and the O’Pake SPARK Business Incubator program and to stay in the Reading area.”
For those entrepreneurs considering applying as a client with SPARK, Craddolf couldn’t recommend it more highly.
“You get to work with bright young students that are eager to be exposed to experiences and are assisted by a hybrid team of those students, scholars and professionals,” Craddolf said.
Seeing the Institute and the SPARK Business Incubator transform the City of Reading motivated Fellow and Reading Area Community College (RACC) transfer student Jamal Dancy to enroll at Alvernia.
Dancy, a criminal justice major and a Reading resident, works with the nonprofit section of SPARK to aid those individuals looking to start new community initiatives, tackling such projects as assisting in developing business plans, creating financial models and conducting meetings with lawyers. As a RACC student, Dancy saw the positive change the O’Pake Institute and Alvernia were having in his community and was sold on enrolling with the university and becoming an O’Pake Fellow.
“A couple of years ago, there was a shooting in front of my home. It was a wake-up call,” said Dancy. “Since O’Pake made its home here, the change has happened quickly. Five years ago, I wouldn’t necessarily have walked up and down Penn Street.”
Dancy is also working with the SPARK Business Institute as a student entrepreneur developing an app geared to universities.
The good news doesn’t end in Reading. As Alvernia and the CollegeTowne initiative branch out to more communities, so will the SPARK Business Incubator model.
“We’ll have the Incubator in Pottsville, too,” said Conway. “We’ll duplicate what we do here [in Reading] at future locations and show others how special and real this project is, and aid in enhancing economic development, of course.”
Explore how Alvernia University’s SPARK Business Incubator empowers students and entrepreneurs to revitalize Reading’s Penn Street through innovation.
