by Bill Radford, The Gazette | May 8, 2020
Leading a community relief program for small businesses devastated by a crippling pandemic was not in Natasha Main’s job description. She had plenty on her plate since becoming executive director late last year of Exponential Impact, a Colorado Springs-based, nonprofit incubator/accelerator for tech startups.
But she’s more than stepped up to the challenge, says Exponential Impact co-founder and chairman Vance Brown, who developed the Survive & Thrive relief program, which is being administered by XI. In fact, he says, “she’s crushing it.”
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Main, 26, grew up in St. Louis and earned a degree in economics and international studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., where she was a Bonner Scholar. The Bonner Program provides four-year scholarships to a group of incoming students each year with a commitment to service and social justice; Bonner Scholars dedicate a portion of each week to community service at area nonprofits.
At Rhodes, Main says, she “fell in love with this intersection of community building and economic development.” After graduating, she worked at Little Bird Innovation in Memphis, a research, strategy and design firm “focused on projects that drive economic development, social impact and civic innovation.”
It was in Memphis that Main met her husband-to-be, Anthony Siracusa. They married in November 2017 and in the same week moved to Colorado Springs for Siracusa to take a job at Colorado College.