Apr. 1—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — The potential of a crop of new businesses in the Johnstown region is taking shape.

The Johnstown Region Startup Meetup has fully returned from a pandemic hiatus — and at a new location, the City of Johnstown Entrepreneurial Center, 150 Gazebo Park, downtown Johnstown.

The group meets the first Monday of each month.

Budding entrepreneurs network with peers and business consultants and coaches who are funded by state and federal agencies that can also connect entrepreneurs to startup grants.

Kareen Krise, of Loretto, an interest savings specialist and business owner of Shop Financial, was among the attendees for the March meeting. The April meetup is scheduled for Monday.

"There's not much around here as far as networking in person, so this is great to feel the energy and enthusiasm from the people who are entrepreneurs or who want to be," she said.

The meetup originated in 2013 and was then funded by a state Department of Community and Economic Development grant. It's been continuously co-led by Donald Bonk, a Johnstown native and Carnegie Mellon University economic development consultant, and Mike Hruska, founder of Problem Solutions, a company involved in government and commercial technology.

The meetup started in the basement of Venue of Merging Arts in Johnstown's Cambria City neighborhood, then moved to the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown campus in Richland Township before the COVID-19 pandemic drove the group to a virtual format, Hruska said.

In February, the meetup resumed in person and has more than 20 regular attendees.

"We want to see more people creating businesses and following their dreams," Hruska said. "We try to find out what's blocking people, what resources or funding they need."

The meetup includes representatives and entrepreneurial resources from Johnstown Area Regional Industries, Southern Alleghenies Planning and Development Commission and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

"We just want to rally around people who are starting businesses," Hruska said. "We just want to help people break the handcuffs and start their own thing."

Bonk, a Johnstown native whose family was in the local grocery business for 41 years, is currently an economic development consultant for the Office of Government Relations and the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship of Carnegie Mellon University.

He said that as a leader of the Johnstown Region Startup Meetup, his role is to magnify relationships and connections to help promote business growth development and innovation.

"Every business has to stay on the cutting edge," Bonk said. "The entrepreneurial meetup is just one more way in which the community is trying to promote entrepreneurship. There are resources in our community that help with entrepreneurship including the meetup, JARI, Southern Alleghenies Planning and Development Commission. I think of it as an ecosystem."

The newest addition to that ecosystem is the location of the meetup — the City of Johnstown Entrepreneurial Center, or COJEC. The center is a collaborative effort with the City of Johnstown and Intrignia Corp., which opened last summer.

It provides co-working spaces and small business training. The center's administrator, Amy Henson, works with small businesses, providing them resources that they need to start, grow and run their business.

Mike Artim, former president and CEO of the then-Greater Johnstown/Cambria County Chamber of Commerce, had been involved with spurring entrepreneurship alongside the meetup for years. Since then, he's become president of Intrignia Corp., opening restaurants downtown and COJEC, which he said is an excellent fit for the meetup.

"All the pieces are coming together for the city right now," he said. "There are so many people that we are working with (at the entrepreneurial center) who have ideas and want to start businesses in the city — I've never seen such interest in starting businesses in the city. We are working with people every day on different businesses or different ideas or expanding existing businesses. The meetup is a great way to give people a support system."

The competitive environment for business is always transforming, Bonk said.

"Any community that wants to survive long-term needs to have thriving entrepreneurial business-minded people," he said.

Bonk was previously a subcontractor of Southern Alleghenies Planning and Development Commission, a regional coordinator in Pennsylvania's International Trade Program from 1998 to 2006. In that role, he helped more than 60 companies to export products and services around the world. Nine of his client companies won the Pennsylvania Governor's Export Excellence Award, another won the Pennsylvania Governor's Foreign Direct Investment Award and three client companies won the U.S. Department of Commerce's Export Excellence Award.

"We all know Johnstown was a steel town, and we all know under (late U.S. Rep. John) Murtha it was a defense- oriented community," he said.

"But there's been a series of small- and medium-sized businesses, particularly part of supply chain as well as businesses including service and professional businesses serving the community that have a long history of success. We are interested in helping — in every way — not only those businesses that have been around forever, but a new generation of businesses that are growing in the Johnstown area."