Team Bios
The Small Business Opportunity Center is pleased to announce that its founder and executive director, Patrice Perry-Rivers, Ph.D., is now part of VCU's Division for Community Engagement in the Office of the Provost as of May 25, 2026.
Dr. Perry-Rivers is a professor, college administrator, and entrepreneurship scholar whose body of work informs the societally-relevant efforts of the SBOC.
Her research examines how institutions shape the strategies and opportunity sets available to entrepreneurial actors, and is published in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice (ET&P), the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Ethics, and the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (JIAE). She has served as a peer reviewer for ET&P, JIAE, the Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of International Business Studies, and other business journals; and as a session chair or reviewer for the Academy of Management (AOM), the United States Association of Small Business Educators (USASBE), and the annual Social Entrepreneurship conference.
She has also co-authored government studies for the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) and the Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity (SBSD) in Virginia informing the development of programming to support small businesses, and is the author of two books: Social Entrepreneurship: Creating Value and Societal Impact, and The Business Launchpad Workbook. Dr. Perry-Rivers has an article forthcoming in Springer's Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the resource position and financial performance of small and minority-owned enterprises, and her recent work in progress analyzes the institutional barriers affecting capital access for rural and under-resourced entrepreneurs in Virginia. This work was accepted for presentation at the Academy of Management Conference in July 2026.
Dr. Perry-Rivers has founded or co-founded three university entrepreneurship centers over the course of her career. Most recently, she founded the SBOC in August 2024 and secured the $1.225 million GO Virginia award that now supports entrepreneurship training and technical assistance across Virginia's GO Virginia Regions 4 through 7. She previously served as Asst. Dean and tenured Associate Professor of Management at Virginia State University, where she built graduate and undergraduate degree programs and previously founded and directed the Minority Small Business Launch Center (MSBLC). She launched the MSBLC with a $453,000 GO Virginia award in 2021, which trained more than 1,000 entrepreneurs. The impact of the Center resulted in her receipt of a Greater Richmond Community Transformers Award in 2022, and the center was selected as one of the Innovations That Inspire for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in 2023, and placed third globally in the international competition for the Triple E Award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship Higher Education under her leadership.
Dr. Perry-Rivers holds a Ph.D. in Management with a concentration in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from Rutgers University, an MBA in Media Management from Regent University, and a B.A. in Government from the University of Virginia.
The Small Business Opportunity Center is pleased to announce that Aspen Anders has joined the Center's full-time staff as Grant Reporting and Program Coordinator as of July 2026.
Aspen first came to the SBOC as a student intern in December 2024, having met Dr. Perry-Rivers, the executive director, as a student in her introduction to entrepreneurship class. She has supported the Center's work continuously since then, most recently in an interim capacity in this role. In her new position, she divides her time between grant reporting — preparing the SBOC's GO Virginia reports across Virginia Regions 4 through 7, maintaining fiscal documentation, and reconciling program expenses — and program coordination, where she provides executive support to the director of the SBOC and serves as a liaison to the Center's network of more than 35 partner organizations, entrepreneurship support organization leads, and the entrepreneurs the SBOC serves. She has helped facilitate the SBOC's participation in more than 13 entrepreneurship events, maintains the Center's event calendar and data systems, and helps produce the monthly SBOC newsletter that reaches over 600 partners and entrepreneurs. .
Aspen earned her Bachelor of Science in Business Management from the VCU School of Business in December 2025, graduating cum laude, and has been accepted into the VCU School of Business MBA program.