Last week, a LinkedIn post stopped my scroll.

The author, Heath Naquin, was breaking down what had just happened to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, a major federal funding pipeline for early-stage startups. He painted a picture: “On October 1st, the programs went dark. ~4,000 companies a year that depend on SBIR/STTR funding were frozen out. No new solicitations. No new awards. Five months of dead air while Congress played chicken over reform vs. extension.”

Now, I’m no expert (yet) in federal policy, which is why I appreciate when people like Heath break down what happens at the federal level. But here’s what I do know from reading this post: When federal funding guidelines change, someone needs to translate these changes for the entrepreneurs on the ground and help them adjust to the new, more complicated requirements: The new version of the program pushes for more commercialization readiness, capital matching, and security compliance, and I can’t help but wonder how startup founders are supposed to adjust without losing sight of what they’re here to do: build thriving companies around innovative technology.

The obvious answer to me is: ecosystem builders.

As conveners and translators who work in our communities to create more onramps and equitable access to entrepreneurship, and opportunities like SBIR, ecosystem builders are well positioned to help translate this new regulation and help startups get up to speed.

Unfortunately, however, ecosystem builders themselves have been hit just as hard by changes, disruption and reallocation of federal funding. Over the last fifteen months, I have witnessed my peers get laid off because critical funding was frozen, delayed or completely eliminated. The impact? Critical infrastructure within our entrepreneurial communities has lost what little funding it had to begin with.

Too often, when entrepreneurial support or economic development organizations lose funding, the role of the ecosystem builders is the first to go.

To me, this is a question of legitimacy. And the federal funding cuts and freezes highlight what’s happening within the field:

What actually happens when funding freezes

When programs like SBIR pause, the official story focuses on startups and investors: which founders can’t access capital, which agencies have stopped releasing solicitations, which policy provisions are changing. The story that rarely makes headlines is about the people holding the ecosystem together while all of that unfolds.

Ecosystem builders are the ones fielding calls from founders who don’t know what the freeze means for their grant timeline. They’re updating curriculum, reframing capital pathways, and translating federal policy signals into plain language for entrepreneurs trying to make payroll. They do this quickly, without additional resources, and often without anyone noticing.

That adaptive capacity is one of the field’s greatest strengths, and also one of the reasons we remain invisible. If you’re absorbing the shock smoothly enough that no one panics, no one sees the labor that went into the absorption.

Ecosystems don’t hold themselves together. People do. But those people rarely appear in the policy conversation about why ecosystems work.

The legitimacy gap is structural, not perceptual

Ecosystem builders don’t struggle for legitimacy because we haven’t made a strong enough case for our value. We struggle because the institutions that evaluate and fund our work were not designed to recognize what we actually do. The misalignment shows up in at least five ways, and I see them play out constantly across the ecosystems I work with.

The work is relational, but institutions measure outputs.

Rick Turoczy has been championing Portland’s startup community for three decades. For jsut as long, he has documented local founders, shared news, and celebrated entrepreneurs, most of it outside any formal job description. That work helped shape how Portland’s ecosystem sees itself and built the connective tissue that made later programs possible. It does not appear in any grant report.

Larkin Garbee created Startup Journeys in Richmond as a space for founders to share their stories. The trust built in those rooms rippled through the ecosystem for years. It didn’t show up in an annual report either.

Institutions tend to recognize visible outputs: startups launched, events hosted, grants distributed, jobs created. What they struggle to capture is the relational infrastructure that makes those outputs possible. Because that work is hard to measure, it becomes easy to overlook, and because it’s easy to overlook, the people doing it become easy to defund.

Ecosystems develop slowly, but funding moves fast.

Healthy ecosystems compound over years, as trust deepens through repeated collaboration, entrepreneurs learn from one another, and institutions gradually discover ways to work together rather than compete. These processes cannot be rushed, and yet most grant cycles last one to two years. When they end, the people who maintained coordination across the ecosystem often lose their roles, even though the relationships they built remain essential. I have watched this happen to colleagues across the country over the past two years. It happened to me when I worked s Director of Ecosystem Building in the Shenandoah Valley. As soon as the grant ended, my entire team was eliminated. The ecosystem continues to function locally, but the infrastructure underneath it begins to fray and dissolve. While the work succeeded, the ecosystem rarely recognized it as success.

Policy frameworks weren’t built for informal coordination.

Ecosystem builders work across organizational boundaries, without formal authority, through relationships that often take years to cultivate. They convene stakeholders who report to different institutions and coordinate efforts that no single organization can own. This approach works precisely because it is not bureaucratic, and it’s also why ecosystem builders can feel invisible inside bureaucratic systems. When a field operates through informal coordination, it doesn’t fit neatly into funding categories designed for programs, institutions, and formal deliverables. The result is that ecosystem building often gets treated as context rather than as the infrastructure it actually is. It falls into the “nice-to-have” category rather than being understood as the actual secret sauce that makes everything else – coordination, collaboration and conflict management – possible and seamless in the first place.

Practitioners work without stable institutional footing.

In many regions, ecosystem builders don’t hold clearly defined positions within institutions. They lead programs within nonprofits, coordinate networks through grants, and facilitate collaboration among partners who report to different organizations. Their authority comes from relationships, not mandates. This flexibility is a feature, not a bug: it allows practitioners to stay close to community needs rather than institutional requirements. But it’s also what makes the work so precarious: When funding cycles end or priorities shift, the individuals holding the ecosystem together can disappear from the system almost overnight.

I recently spoke to an ecosystem builder in Minnesota who lost his role the day a grant ended. Partnerships he had spent three years cultivating weakened within months. Entrepreneurs who had finally found their footing had to figure out how to navigate a fragmented landscape on their own again. He said, “People still care about the ecosystem. Other organizations are picking up some of the work we used to do. But without central convening, we go back to wasting a lot of time and resources by duplicating efforts. Besides, when no one organization or ecosystem builder is dedicated to stewarding the narrative, resources and information for all to see and engage with, then who will do it at all?”

Decision-makers often encounter ecosystems from a distance.

Policymakers and funders frequently understand the importance of entrepreneurship in principle. What they encounter less often is the day-to-day reality of what sustains it: the slow work of coordinating stakeholders who don’t yet trust each other, the patience to wait for relationships to mature, the improvisation required to maintain momentum through leadership turnover and funding gaps. That’s not to mention the direct work with entrepreneurs to help them take advantage of the very opportunities policymakers present to them. That gap between principle and practice shapes what gets funded, what gets measured, and whose work gets recognized.

What the SBIR moment is actually telling us

The SBIR reauthorization is welcome news. Five years of stability beats three-year cliffhangers, and some of the changes, including tighter vetting of foreign ownership and limits on proposal mills that have treated the program as a revenue stream rather than a startup development tool, make sense.

But if you read between the lines, the policy shift also reinforces a familiar pattern. The new requirements, including commercialization readiness, private capital matching, and national security compliance, are designed for startups that already have investor relationships, customer commitments, and sophisticated operational infrastructure. For ecosystem builders in underserved communities, in rural regions, in cities that don’t yet have deep investor networks, this raises some tough questions: What happens to the founders we serve when the bar moves in a direction that assumes a level of ecosystem support that doesn’t yet exist in their region?

Ecosystem builders will absorb that question, too. They will update their programming, reframe their guidance, and gather all available information to help founders navigate a new landscape. And once again, they will do it without being named in the policy that created the need.

Here’s my hot take:

Innovation policy depends on strong ecosystems. But the field that builds and sustains those ecosystems is still treated as supporting context rather than essential infrastructure.

What would actually close the gap

The legitimacy challenge facing ecosystem building is not primarily about better advocacy or stronger communication, even though both remain crucial for our field. To me, it’s just as much about alignment between how ecosystems actually develop and how institutions define and fund impact. That alignment requires movement on both sides:

For funders and policymakers:

• Spend time closer to the ecosystems your decisions affect, not in convenings where practitioners present polished reports, but in the day-to-day work where the real coordination happens.
• Fund coordination alongside programs. The connective labor that makes programs possible deserves its own line item.
• Design evaluation frameworks that can recognize relational progress, not only transactional outputs.
• Support long-term stewardship. Consider what it would mean to fund an ecosystem builder’s role across multiple grant cycles rather than requiring their work to restart from scratch every two years.

Don’t know where these ecosystem builders are or how to connect with them? The ESHIP Alliance is a US-wide network of entrentrepreneurialeprneneurial ecosystem builders. Reach out when we’ll get you connected to someone in your state/community.

For ecosystem builders:

• Document the outcomes that relationships make possible, not just the events hosted or the introductions made, but the funding raised, the partnerships formed, and the founders who stayed in the ecosystem because someone was paying attention.
• Invite funders and public leaders into the work before the polished presentations. Let them witness the improvisation and care that sustain communities.
• Name our contributions clearly and connect them to results that decision-makers care about.
• Build solidarity across the field. Our legitimacy grows when we tell the story collectively, not only through individual organizations competing for the same pool of resources.

Not sure where to start with documenting relational outcomes? You’re not alone. This is arguably one of the toughest nuts to crack in this line of work. Dr. Amy Beaird, co-founder of the Ecosystem Edge, helps ecosystem builders translate intangible efforts into tangible outcomes and language that funders and policymakers can understand. Check out this webinar we hosted with our friends at EcoMap Technologies and read Amy’s newsletter, “Your glue work isn’t overhead. It’s infrastructure,” discussing this very topic (a great one to subscribe to if you’re an ecosystem builder!).

Ecosystem builders are not a footnote. The people who help founders navigate SBIR are the same people who, when SBIR freezes, help those founders recalibrate their strategy and stay in the game long enough for the program to come back online. That work deserves more than a passing mention in a bullet point.

A field hiding in plain sight

I don’t think ecosystem building struggles for legitimacy because the field lacks value or maturity. I believe it struggles because the systems evaluating it were not designed to recognize the kind of work it requires. The result is a field that serves as essential civic infrastructure in many communities, yet remains difficult for institutions to fully see.

I have spent years documenting the people who do this work, the coordinators, conveners, connectors, and champions who show up before the cameras arrive and stay long after everyone else has moved on. Their stories are not peripheral to the innovation economy. To me, they are the story.

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