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Read the full article from Sustainable Business Oregon.

Portland State University's two-year-old Social Innovation Incubator announced Friday its new class of incoming startups, adding six members.

The incubator, which specializes in working with socially responsible and sustainable companies, has run 10 companies through its training and consulting programs. Six of those have garnered investment or other outside funding, including:

• Sustainable Harvest, which in 2010 received an investment from the Lemelson Foundation to expand its work with coffee farmers.
• Fork in the Road, a mobile farmers market business that aims to serve so-called food desserts. Fork in the Road this week closed its Kickstarter fundraising campaign, raising $12,815.
• Preciva, a cervical cancer screening technology company, which won $3,000 in a business plan competition last year.
• Other organizations that have garnered funding include Central City Concern, Tipping Bucket and Mama's Fire Gourmet Sauces

Of the incoming class of new companies, five will participate in the incubator's six-month circuit program, which involves group sessions for the entrepreneurs.

Those businesses are:

• Bright Neighbor, an online platform for peer-to-peer borrowing and renting.
• Cascadia Experience, which provides leadership, sustainability and conservation training for professionals through hands-on outdoor projects.
• Elkarti, which markets leather accessories to create employment in Morocco.
• Junk to Funk, an art-as-social-change organization that creates fashionable clothing out of trash.
• Meditation Momma, an effort to demystify and encourage the use of meditation.

In addition, EcoZoom, a certified B Corporation that makes high-efficiency cook stoves to promote safer cooking in third-world countries, will join the incubator's more intensive Vector program.

The incubator benefited greatly from a $50,000 investment last year by the Lemelson Foundation, said Cindy Cooper, Social Innovation Incubator founder and director.

"Our capacity has grown," Cooper said. "It's made a huge difference in our ability to move the program forward and be effective."

Cooper said the program has received support from Ater Wynne and will co-host a briefing with them on impact investing in April.

Last year, the incubator landed a spot in Fast Company's "United States of Innovation" feature.

Cooper said that incubator program's goal to product "active agents for a healthy, just and sustainable world" has found a receptive audience in Portland.

"We're seeing there's tremendous untapped energy and really amazing entrepreneurs coming out of the woodwork," Cooper said.