BALTIMORE, Md. — She started building her company out of her Johns Hopkins dorm room when she was just 20 years old.
"She couldn't drink but she could start a company," joked Kevin Carter.
Carter recalls meeting Pava LaPere when he was working at the Hopkins student entrepreneurship center, and immediately being taken with how strong of a leader she was.
They would eventually become best friends, and Carter would join that company she founded. It's called EcoMap, and it's all about increasing access to resources for entrepreneurs.
"The things I could see her pull off up close and personal were just larger than life feats. There's not many female founders in their 20s who can raise millions of dollars, and grow a team of 30 people."
Not to mention, earning a spot on theForbes 30 under 30 list. Carter says Pava had big long-term goals both for herself and her company.
But those goals now fall to the colleagues she left behind. Less than a year after making the Forbes list,Pava was killed in her Mount Vernon apartment building.
"I mean, Pava's irreplaceable in every single way. We feel motivated to keep moving the company forward. It's really rough many days. There's little reminders of her everywhere in the work that we do. We just want to make her proud, do the work that we're doing, but there's a lot of slack to be picked up."
The EcoMap team wants her to be remembered for how she lived, not how she died. They're launching a fellowship program that will help support other entrepreneurs.
It was Pava's idea; now it's being carried out in her honor. It's called the P.L.A.C.E. Builder Fellowship - it stands for the Pava LaPere award for cultivating ecosystems.
"Pava would be really proud, of the way we handled ourselves in the last few months. It's been one of the roughest times you could possibly imagine but Pava would be proud that we're really picking up the pieces and we're keeping her vision alive."
Eight people will be chosen from throughout the country to participate in the program.
“It’s really meant to help serve under-resourced ecosystem builders, ones that are maybe working multiple jobs, and volunteering and doing this work that’s often thankless and underappreciated but so vital to the communities that they serve. So we’re going to cast a pretty big net to make sure that those who can really most benefit from this type of program are the ones who find out about it and the ones that get into it.”
Carter says he's honored to work on one more project with Pava, this time - in spirit.