When SourceLink Founder Maria Meyers received the 2025 Ecosystem Champion Award this past June at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Indianapolis, I felt something I hadn’t expected. I paused. I thought about all the people in all the rooms who don’t even know her name but have benefited from her work.
It was a big moment. Long overdue. And if you know Maria, you already know this: she didn’t do it for the spotlight. She never has. She shows up for the work. For her team. For the community builders and the entrepreneurs trying to figure out their next step.
I’ve learned a lot from Maria during my time with SourceLink, but one thing has shaped me more than the rest. Don’t start with a blueprint. Start with the people in your network and keep business owners centered. Then dare to build the best systems they deserve.
Maria showed us what that looks like. KCSourceLink began in Kansas City, MO with nothing flashy, just purpose to answer the question: “how do we best connect business owners to the right resource at the right time?” What she built from there later became SourceLink, a national platform serving over a million pageviews every year. That’s not a brand. That’s infrastructure at scale.
But here’s the truth, and honestly, it pains me to say – you can’t fully realize the impact of this stuff in the metrics.
It starts with the conversations no one remembers but that everyone benefits from. It starts with that person in a small office with a teachers desk and phone number wondering what to do next, or whether anyone out there sees them at all. It starts with an aspiring business owner Googling “how do I start a business” and finding a link that delightfully connects them with a human who can help, or when they meet with a banker then handed a literal map of where they can go next for support. These are the many powerful marks from a transformational change agent that we could only dream to one day match.
I’ve watched her lead. I’ve seen how she asks questions no one else bothers (or is brave enough) to ask. I’ve been inspired by her trust in people around her to both hold complexity and still move forward. And I’ve watched her define the very metrics others now use to measure what entrepreneurship-led economic development looks like in their own communities.
This isn’t a tribute. It’s a reminder.
Maria didn’t get here because of one moment. She got here because she kept showing up for twenty years, doing the work, empowering her team, and challenging other communities to shift the way they think about traditional economic development to include small business and startup support alongside colleagues, peers and friends who believed in the bold vision she consistently, relentlessly, chased down to make happen (We Create Jobs – the report that finally allowed Maria to boldly share that in Kansas City young firms over five years created and retained almost as many jobs as the famed Amazon HQ2 development). Yes, you read that right! And don’t even get me started with what she has been able to do to quantify and improve capital pools, measure collective impact, and so much more.
If you care about entrepreneurs, if you care about how real change takes hold in a community, then take a closer look. Show up like Maria.
She didn’t follow a blueprint, she forged one. We call it SourceLink.
