Laura Butler is Pioneers 21’s Executive Director. She’s also a Texas Venture Committee Member and a host of a Texas Venture Crawl in El Paso. Texas Venture Alliance had the opportunity to ask about her greater vision for El Paso, her dedication as a board member to a number of causes of non-profits, the P21 mantra of collaboration, and more.

Your role at Pioneers 21 as a leader in the business community, especially with entrepreneurs, has served as a pillar in El Paso. What are some favorite parts of your work?

I believe that what I’m doing now is what my role with boards, education, and my corporate journey prepared me for. I love what I do because I get to create and build programs and economic development efforts for our region based on NEED. I’m all about building community, meeting entrepreneur need and although at times the need is much greater than what we can provide, my team has that greater vision that enables us to build with limited resources. Building a great team (another fave thing to do) from recruitment to training the team, communicating, and ensuring that there’s diversity so that you have great ideas and feedback is the synergy I like to create. This type of synergy is infectious and how we bring our ecosystem together and build…

You’ve spent twenty years at Wells Fargo rising in the ranks as an executive in the small business division. Could you share with us some highlights of your time there and what made you proud of your experience there?

Established the Wells Fargo Membership (@work) program for small businesses to offer as a benefit with direct deposit to employees in El Paso.

Led the efforts for retail banking in El Paso for student engagement with El Paso Community College and University of Texas at El Paso.

Founded the Hablemos de Dinero program, a financial education and in-language program in collaboration with Hispanic Chambers for small businesses that impulsed efforts across the company for in-language and diversity with small business marketing and suppliers.

SBA Access to Capital and Financial Services Champion and Minority Business Development nationally recognized award winner. TAMACC award for corporate partner of the year.

During my time as a Small Business Leader, my role was to work with branches across the country. I coached and developed small business bankers and managers through the small business lifecycle and trends, amongst many other resources. My approach was to engage managers and bankers to get involved with CDFIs, chambers. That’s how I start many conversations “Laura from the bank”.

You’ve held a number of non-profit board memberships and are committed to several important causes encouraging women, Latinas, and entrepreneurship. If you’d like to express why you’re passionate, please share that with us and what makes each cause special to you.

It’s about being first generation and creating a trend for generations after me. This is my purpose. Helping…encouraging Latinos, Latinas and people of our community to become educated, if they can’t then build something, become something because you ARE SOMEONE already, now you just have to find what it is you enjoy doing and what your purpose is. Giving back and volunteering is something that my mom instilled in us. She did it since she was a teenager, and she is 75 and is still volunteering and on a board. Life is short and if you have something to share, share it.

Pioneers 21 has a variety of types of programming– would you like to share some of your favorites and/or great outcomes of those efforts?

Oh my! As I’m typing, I’m listening to our Pioneering Perspectives Podcast that Amira Williams, P21 Program Assistant and Senior at UTEP (Engineering), co-founded with me. She created the Podcast and Michelle Tubbs, UTEP (Engineering Sophomore) both edit and come up with ideas on what to podcast. That’s one of my favorites because we get to share with everyone who our mentors are and share what we do, plus created by our talented team.

The P21 Venture Mentoring Service is licensed by MIT Venture Mentoring Service. I founded and launched it in March 2022 with 7 ventures and 10 mentors. Since then, we have served 25 ventures and now have over 40 mentors. The program is run by our Marisol Chavez, MBA (UTEP) and this year we added the Pitch Challenge where we provided 12k in startup capital. This along with our accelerator programs added over $4 million.

If an entrepreneur is looking to plug into the business community in El Paso, what resources should they check out?

They can go to our resource page pioneers21.org/resources and there’s also our ecosystem partner page elpasobusinesstrong.com powered by the Better Business Bureau and City of El Paso.

What are your favorite things to do in El Paso? When the startup and venture community from across Texas comes to visit the region, what are some activities that are a must while spending time in the region?

Everyone says the food, but I say link up with us and we can show you around. It depends on what they’re looking for but there’s always something going on. This week, I attended a one-year anniversary party for a local magazine, the Better Business Bureau Torch Awards. The Medical Center of the Americas Foundation and Pioneers 21 are planning El Paso Startup Week – we are the founding organizations and doing this for the first time. There’s also the Technology Hub in Juarez, a sister incubator that we work with across the border. As a community we would team up and ensure that the visiting startup received support and if P21 didn’t have the resources, our mantra is that we don’t say no, we find you the right organization that will help because we want you to build in our city.

What do you think are the opportunities for Texas’ future that you look forward to, and how will or how does El Paso fit into that?

Top three:

Access to capital

Access to talent

Access to mobility

And I’m just firing off the top of my head. I’ll say this, we need to keep jobs in our communities to create wealth and ensure that we tackle this brain drain. That’s why we built the El Paso Tech Hub Consortium. I believe in onshoring and attracting manufacturers that will bring jobs such as building semiconductor work to El Paso, Tx. We are the perfect border town for this.

Microchips are present in almost every electronic that we use. Texas announced that $1.4 billion will go to microchip research and manufacturing with the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund. El Paso must jump on board we wrote the Federal EDATECHHUB Grant this summer to ensure that our name is noticed. This is the future for El Paso, Tx and our entire state.