Derek Rhodes, MBA Class of 2027, named winner of the 2026 CASE Launch Pad Award
The Launch Pad Award provides $10,000 in unrestricted funding and mentorship to one promising Duke MBA student or team working to address a social or environmental challenge. This year’s winner, Derek Rhodes, brings five years of hands-on experience as founder of Durham Success Summit, a workforce development nonprofit serving young adults ages 16-24 in Durham, NC—experience that gave him a front-row view of a gap the workforce system rarely talks about, let alone funds. His new venture, SummitWorks, is built to close it: a targeted fund that gets launch capital into the hands of new hires during the critical window between job offer and first paycheck.
CASE Assistant Director of Student Programs Kelsey Zavelo sat down with Derek to hear about the problem SummitWorks is built to solve—and what he’s learned from five years of watching it play out firsthand.
SummitWorks has a specific focus within the workforce development ecosystem. Where did the idea come from?
I founded Durham Success Summit in 2021 and have worked one-on-one with more than 500 young people in Durham making the transition from workforce programs into employment. Over and over, I watched the same thing happen: someone gets a job offer — a real one, a good one — and then loses it. Not because they weren’t ready. Because they couldn’t cover a bus pass, or buy the scrubs their employer required, or bridge the two weeks before their first paycheck arrived.
That’s the first paycheck gap. The workforce system is good at getting people to the starting line. It’s inconsistent at helping them stay. SummitWorks funds that moment.
How does the fund work?
It’s simple by design. A trusted partner — a workforce program, school, reentry organization, or community partner — refers a new hire who has a confirmed job offer and a short-term financial barrier. We review it quickly and deploy $250–$500 within 48–72 hours. That’s it.
The key word is “trusted.” Partners verify the job offer and the need. The relationship is the verification. We don’t need a lot of paperwork — we need the right partners.
We also track 30-, 60-, and 90-day employment outcomes for every participant we fund and report them. Every dollar deployed is a data point.
SummitWorks seems to be addressing a critical need for job-ready participants. Why hasn’t this been done before?
The workforce system measures completions. Placements. It’s built to get people to an offer. The 30 days after that offer — the window where most early job loss actually happens — is a gap in accountability, not just funding. Nobody’s program technically owns that moment, so it goes unfunded.
SummitWorks is built around that window. We don’t measure completions. We measure conversions — whether someone actually makes it through that first month and stays employed.
What are you hoping to learn from the pilot?
We’re starting in Durham — a strong workforce ecosystem with a persistent transition gap — and treating it as a proof of concept. Our Year 1 goal is to fund 50 participants (testing a combination of grant-based and income repayment concepts), generate a real 30/60/90-day retention dataset, and validate the unit economics and partner referral model. By the end of the year, I want to know whether the model holds — and if it does, what it takes to replicate it in any city where workforce programs exist but the first paycheck gap doesn’t get funded.
The CASE Launch Pad funding accelerates all of that. It capitalizes our first cohort and gives us the runway to do this rigorously, not just scrappily.
What does support from CASE mean for SummitWorks at this stage?
CASE’s network is exactly what we need right now. We’re trying to stress-test our model, refine how we measure impact, and build credibility with funders and partners who take rigor seriously. Having CASE’s staff and fellows engaged in that process — alongside the funding — is the right combination for where we are.
We’re also recruiting founding funders and Fall 2026 MBA interns to help us grow and study the first-paycheck gap and shape what SummitWorks builds next. That kind of intellectual engagement matters to us. This is not just a funding exercise — it’s a research question we’re trying to answer in real time.