investing in refugee entrepreneurs · 2020. 4. 10. · really want to thank all of you for joining...
TRANSCRIPT
Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs May 17, 2017
Hannah
Carswell:
Hi, everyone. I'm Hannah Carswell with Welcoming America. We
really want to thank all of you for joining us today and also to thank
the Office of Refugee Resettlement, whose support of the
Welcoming Refugees Project has made today's webinar possible. I'd
also like to thank Higher for partnering with us to put together this
webinar on Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs. I know that most of
us in this field have seen incredible refugee entrepreneurship success
stories over the years, and we know just how important it is to
support refugee entrepreneurship and the difference it can make in
the lives of refugees and also in our community.
Today we'd like to give you a few more tools for thinking about how to
support refugee entrepreneurs in your community through the work
that you're already doing. By the end of the webinar we hope that
you'll be able to communicate three ways that refugee entrepreneurs
economically contribute to their communities, identify two ways that
employment programs can support refugee entrepreneurs as part of
their work, and articulate two concrete suggestions for ways that
your organization can increase community awareness and support for
refugee entrepreneurs.
Let's take a quick look at our agenda. I'll open with an overview and
some basic messaging that you can use to promote refugee
entrepreneurship to the wider community. Then Nicole Redford,
who is the program manager at Higher, will talk about how refugee
entrepreneurship intersects with employment programs. Then we'll
have Diego Abente, who is the vice president of economic
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development at the International Institute of St. Louis, join us to talk
about all of the ways that his organization supports refugee
entrepreneurs and promotes their businesses to the wider
community. He has some really great examples that I think you're all
going to enjoy hearing. Then we'll have time for your questions. If you
have questions that pop up as we go over the material, just type them
in our chat box, so that we can answer them at the end of the
webinar. We'll also be sending out the recording, slides, and resources
once we finish.
Although specific data on refugee entrepreneurs is difficult to find,
we know that newcomers are more likely than US born residents to
start businesses. We can take a look at the statistics we have around
immigrant entrepreneurs and know that it includes the contributions
of refugee entrepreneurs. Immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs
make up 20% of the Main Street business owners. When we say
Main Street businesses we're defining that as retail, food service, and
accommodation, and neighborhood services, like nail salons, beauty
shops, and gas stations. Immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs also
employ 1 out of every 10 private sector employees, and they
accounted for 48% of overall growth and business ownership and
almost all growth in Main Street businesses in the 50 largest metro
areas. This really adds up to a large impact on our economy, as well as
a big impact on the way our communities look and the businesses and
services that we all use.
All of these statistics come from Welcoming America's Seeds of
Growth Toolkit, which you can find on our website at
welcomingrefugees.org. It has some more sources where you can
find statistics like that to support your work. How can we support
local refugee entrepreneurs? One of the first things we can do is
start by being champions. This can be exposing existing
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entrepreneurship, lending, and small business programs can
untapped potential working with refugee entrepreneurs, so there
may already be programs for entrepreneurs in your community, but
they aren't serving refugees, because they don't know that there's a
need or they don't know how to best serve refugees. By partnering
with organizations that are already serving receiving community
members or people who have been in the community for a longer
time you're expanding services to a wider portion of the community
and also avoiding resentment from senior community members,
because services are available to everyone and people are getting to
know each other through receiving these services.
We know from the statistics we saw earlier that everyone, including
receiving community members, are benefiting from the work of
immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs. However, if community
members feel like refugees are getting special, it may not feel that
way to them, so that's one of the reasons it's really important to
emphasize when we're championing refugee entrepreneurs, that
when organizations and municipalities take steps to make it easier for
refugees and immigrant entrepreneurs to get started on their
businesses they're opening pathways for everyone. For instance,
Chicago approached this issue and ended up lowering the number of
permits required to open a business, which made it easier for
everyone to open businesses. Being a champion for refugee
entrepreneurs means having those kinds of conversation and making
those connections with the people we're talking to.
The next thing you can do is be a connector, which means we're
developing a referrals system in which you're working with refugee
entrepreneurs to connect them to the existing local resources. Filling
program gaps is another thing that we can do, so when we see an
unmet need or a challenge face our refugee entrepreneurs we can
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recruit new service providers to cover that need, if we're not able to
do it ourselves. Finally, it's just really important to make the work
your own, so your approach to supporting refugee entrepreneurs has
to be reflective of your community, its economy, the existing
resources, and your capacity to either introduce new programming
or improve what already exists. What works and really what's different
from organization to organization and communities to community.
Knowing the local context is vital. You can start by sharpening your
grasp of the local economic priorities and refugee assets, so
understanding both the mainstream economic priorities and the
distinctive assets that your local refugee and immigrant community
has can help you uncover business development priorities and the
growth opportunities that can be integrated into your plan to support
refugee entrepreneurs. You can also look for data that tells a story
about refugees in your area. I know this can be difficult. It can be
really hard to find data that's refugee specific. There are some
suggestions in the Seeds of Growth Toolkit for [inaudible 00:06:46]
data sources, and some communities have even been able to find
funding to do economic studies that include information on
entrepreneurship as well as other refugee economic impacts. In
particular Cleveland in Central Ohio has done studies over the past
few years, but you can also use data that talks about the wider
immigrant community and know that refugee contributions are being
counted in there.
Also inventory and engage existing programs and potential
partnerships. Limited resources for refugee entrepreneurship
programs can be greatly leveraged by developing partnerships with
local entrepreneur training programs, micro-lenders, incubators,
mentors, and more to help promote a strong referral system that's
connecting refugees to resources that already exist. Then it's just
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really important to remember to talk with refugee entrepreneurs and
make sure that we're actually helping the people that we want to be
helping. We need to be directly engaging with them to understand
their needs and what opportunities would be most helpful for them.
This could be as simple as visiting them at their place of business or
using a trusted community partner to convene refugee
entrepreneurs and the people who serve them. It's also important to
make sure that there are opportunities for refugee entrepreneurs to
be involved in this work and be leaders in promoting their businesses.
Communications is also a really important part of your strategy. It's
important to communicate proactively and frequently about refugee
entrepreneurs to get the word out to the wider community about
their businesses and success stories. Another important thing is to be
familiar with positive messaging themes around refugee
entrepreneurs, and I'll go over a few of those in the next minute or so.
Then finally you should be adapting the messaging themes to fit your
community context. Like I said before, what works for one
community may not work for another.
I'll give you two messaging themes to think about when you're doing
this work. The first is innovation. Refugees are innovators,
entrepreneurs, and small business owners, whose contributions are
helping us grow our local economy. Refugees bring new ideas and a
willingness to work hard to see them succeed. They start businesses
that bring jobs to our community, and that's good for all of us. We
need to welcome everyone with ingenuity and innovative ideas to
help us create a thriving economy. Here we're emphasizing the
innovation of refugees and how that relates to our shared values and
success as a community.
Another theme that we can use is the twenty-first century economy.
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Competing in a twenty-first century economy will require taking full
advantage of our most important resource, our people. That means
welcoming the new Americans who are starting businesses,
committing to our community, and helping us build a stronger local
economy. Working together to build a twenty-first century economy
means making sure everyone who lives here feels welcome and
included. In this one we're appealing, again, to the idea of shared
success and how being welcoming is getting us there. These are
themes that you can use in any of your communications around
refugee entrepreneurs. The wording has been tested, and it works
well in sharing how important the contributions of refugee
entrepreneurs are to our communities, and you can always feel free
to borrow the wording and shift it to fit your needs, whatever your
needs may be, as you're communicating.
This wraps up my overview of refugee entrepreneurship and
messaging suggestions. I'm now going to hand it over to Nicole
Redford, who is a program manager at Higher. We're thrilled to have
her here and to have been able to partner with Higher.
Nicole
Redford:
Thank you, Hannah. I'm really excited to be here today to talk about
entrepreneurship and how it's a possible option for refugees within
employment programs. Because I love working with refugees so
much, I always like to start with an inspiring story. I have a story from
the Innovation Campaign. Days after he and tens of thousands of
other civilians fled the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this
month, Adam set up shop under a tree just inside of Uganda
repairing cell phones and radios that his fellow refugees brought with
them. He said, "I realized I was just sitting there doing nothing, and I
realized I cannot live like this." Five years before, at the age of 30, he
had broadened his skills by persuading a friend to teach him the art
and science of electronic repairs. Today you can still find Adam
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sitting beneath the tree working on his entrepreneurial activities,
using his soldering iron, which heats on a bed of coal, and working his
magic on the decrepit cell phones and radios that are a vital lifeline
for the nearly 17,000 refugees just inside of Uganda.
I like to listen to stories like this to learn more about all refugees who
had experiences within their own country. Refugees often have had
their own business, but face some serious barriers when they try to
start one when arriving in the United States. Some potential
entrepreneurs held professional positions in their home country and
perhaps owned their own businesses. It may be difficult for them to
join established business associations in the United States because of
language and cultural barriers. Additional barriers to using credit in
the US might prevent them from being able to access traditional
means in order to get loans in order to start businesses in the US.
Some of the common barriers that have been identified for refugees
that are typical in the US are lack of capital, lack of credit history,
lack of acceptable credit score, lack of American business experience
and how the US markets work, and cultural and language barriers.
Today I want to talk a little bit about why entrepreneurship is
important and how it's really important to access a client's
information about their background and their experiences from their
own country and use that when trying to enroll them into
employment programs. Especially these days when there are less
new arrivals, it's really great to sit down and do a longer intake and to
really find out what kind of path those refugees would like to pursue,
so that they're doing more of a job upgrade experience in this
country.
First I want to talk about why entrepreneurship? Despite the
difficulties that some refugees might have and the barriers that they
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might bring into this country, a lot of them have a real passion for the
work that they did. That might have been starting a business, and it
might have just been in learning things, like Adam did, in order to
help different populations. The pros that any entrepreneur can bring
to this country is that it's a viable strategy towards self-sufficiency
for refugees, so it's beyond those starter job. It's something much
more, leading them to a much more fulfilling lifestyle. Refugee
entrepreneurs who have been in the country for some time and have
businesses often rise up and make great community leaders, inspiring
others to take journeys like they did. Refugee entrepreneurs have led
to the creation of more than 10,000 jobs, according to the Office of
Refugee Resettlement. It offers refugees a greater sense of purpose
and potentially higher salaries. Entrepreneurship also offers a more
flexible work schedule, especially for those that are caregivers or
those that might want to pursue some sort of part time education.
One great resource to anyone who's thinking of starting this type of
program for their clients is the Office of Refugee Resettlement's
Micro-Enterprise Development Program. The main objective of this
program is to assist refugees to become economical self-sufficient
by starting a new business or expanding or sustaining a small business.
The Micro-Enterprise Development Program is intended for
recently arrived refugees, refugees who possess few personal assets,
or those who lack credit history. All of these features are important
towards getting access to traditional commercial lending dollars
through banks or credit unions. It's intended for refugees who have
been in the US for a number of years and wish to supplement their
income from wages and salaries. Sorry.
ORR started the Micro-Enterprise Development Program in 1991 to
assist refugees to start their own businesses and to provide them with
loans or funds in order to provide capital to start those business, as
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well as technical assistance for the process. Currently this program
has 22 grantees operating in 15 different states, and collectively
they're funded around $4.5 million each year. The businesses that
are created under this program amount to as many as 1,200 job
opportunities each year, including those for business owners and
families or other low income people, who might be able to access
these jobs through these entrepreneurial businesses.
A couple of facts from this program. During the last 19 years
refugees have developed and expanded or maintained around
10,800 micro-businesses with a business survival rate of 88%. The
loan repayment rate is nearly 98%, which is far higher than the
average repayment rate in the industry, proving that refugees make
great clients. Additionally, over the last 19 years ORR has seen over
24,000 refugees gain new entrepreneurial skills and knowledge. It's
also led towards better jobs, helping refugee families achieve a better
sense of economic self-sufficiency. In talking with those in lending I
know these repayment rates are exemplary, so refugees are proven
good customers in this type of program.
The program is great for any organization that wants to start the
process of beginning an entrepreneurship program, but ORR does
offer two other programs that might help refugees who are wanting
to start similar type businesses. The first is the Refugee Individual
Development Account Program under ORR, which started in 2011.
It's intended to fund projects to establish and manage IDAs for low
income refugee participants. IDAs are leveraged or matched savings.
Refugee eligible populations who enroll in this program can open
their own savings account and have their assets matched through this
program, $2,000 for an individual and $4,000 for a family. One of
the things that a refugee can save towards under this program is
money to set aside for their own personal business. Under the IDA
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Program there are currently 20 grantees in 17 states funded at just
over $5 million. This is a great way for refugees to accumulate assets
that can eventually be leveraged money for their businesses.
A third option is the ORR Refugee Family Childcare Micro-
Enterprise Program. The refugees program here provides business
opportunities to women in the market where there is a shortage of
childcare providers. Through the grant mentors help refugee women
establish agreements or contracts with state or county childcare
officials, so they may qualify for state or county childcare
reimbursements, and serve as childcare providers, and become
successful, independent entrepreneurs. During the first year of the
program the original 13 grantees collectively achieved the following
results. They enrolled 879 refugee women in the program. They
helped 172 refugees obtain business licenses. They assisted 160
refugees to start home daycare programs and created 1,061
childcare slots for children. This means that they helped 2,007
refugees find and secure their own jobs and took 79 refugee women
off public assistance.
Programs beyond ORR. The first program that I wanted to check out
for everyone today was the Small Business Administration. It's their
mission to aid, counsel, assist, and protect the interests of small
business concerns to maintain and strengthen the overall economy
of our nation. The SBA was created in 1953 as an independent
agency of the federal government to help Americans start to build
and grow businesses. Through an extensive network of field offices
and partnerships with public and private organizations the SBA
delivers its services to people throughout the US.
As any of you might already know, starting a business involves a lot of
planning, a lot of financial decision making, and completing a long
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series of legal activities. Just to give you an idea of how hard it is to
open a business, when I met with someone at the SBA they said
across the United States there's over 652,000 different permits
alone just to start a food truck business in the United States. That
can be very difficult, and you can understand those barriers that
refugees have might prevent them from being able to go through this
process easily.
The SBA has developed a 10 step list that's helpful for you and to
help your clients plan and prepare if they are ready to open their own
business. Here are the 10 steps. Step 1 is for them to write a business
plan. Step 2 is to get business assistance and training. Take advantage
of any free training or counseling services that might be available in
your local community. Step 3, choose a business location. Get advice
from your community members on where a customer friendly
location is and where it would comply with zoning laws in the city.
Step 4 is to finance your business. Find government backed loans,
venture capital, or research grants on your own. Step 5, determine
the legal structure of your business.
Step 6, register your business name. To register your name with your
state government you'll be able to get your state tax identification
number as well as your federal tax identification number to operate
as a business in this country. Step 7, register for state and local taxes.
Step 8, obtain business licenses and permits. Step 9, sorry,
understand employer responsibilities. What are those kinds of steps
that you might need to know in order to take and hire employees?
Step 10 is to find local assistance. Contact your local SBA Office to
learn more about this process. They put this as step 10, but I would
definitely flip that and put it as number 1. That's really important. This
process is extremely difficult, and even native English speakers have a
hard time going through this entire process.
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The SBA has money that's dispersed through various entities, but it's
more important that you and your clients know that there are many
tools and resources that can be used throughout this process. I spoke
to the local Baltimore office of the SBA. You guys can do the same
in your community. They're very welcoming, and they have tons of
resources. To access them just reach out via online, or they all have
websites and phone numbers that you can call as well.
Beyond the SBA, I continued to do some research in the Mid-
Atlantic region of the United States to discover what other resources
exist for clients. There are plenty of programs in operation, and in all
of them you will ... Not all of them are geared toward refugees, but
they are funded to help any adult, and many of them are funded to
help adults who do not speak English as their first language. I really
suggest that you might want to do research as to what's going on in
your local community already. What I found is there are a number of
partners involved in this process that you would need to pursue in
order to support your clients throughout this process.
One of the programs that I met with was the ECDC Program called
Enterprise Development. In 1992 they began a program under a
grant from the Office or Refugee Resettlement, where they
established micro-enterprise development programs to promote
economic self-sufficiency by providing loans, technical assistance,
and business counseling to refugees interested in and starting small
businesses in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Since then
they've grown their program to be able to disperse loans up to
$35,000, and they now have over 4 different lending partners that
provide those loans. The average size loans they say they provide to
refugees are $11,000, and the repayment for these loans, refugees
take on average one to three years to repay the loans, and the loans
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are given at an 8.9% interest rate. The loan payment default rate is
less then 10%.
That was a really wonderful program that was really taking on the
business of administering loans to clients. Since the inception they've
been able to give out a ton of loans to refugees, but also other low
income people in the metropolitan DC area. This was something that
they really stressed that their expertise was really after the business
loan had been built up, and they were going to help clients to find
ways to get their businesses financed through the first three to five
years.
A second program that I explored was called The Welcoming Center
for New Pennsylvanians, and it's funded by public and private funds.
The Welcoming Center exists to help immigrants and US born
businesses overcome barriers that they might face in this country.
They said that Philadelphia was already home to 16,000 businesses
and had a remarkable number of partners that were involved in the
process. The Welcoming Center, since they started, was able to do
research to say that of those 16,000 businesses, 50 to 70% were
those that were immigrant owned and that immigrants are usually
more likely to start businesses. This program began nine years ago in
partnership with the Philadelphia Commerce Department, who
funds all entrepreneurial activity across the city. Partners throughout
this program meet throughout the year to discuss different parts of
the entrepreneurial process.
The Welcoming Center saw though that there was a gap in services
to provide technical assistance to those seeking to open their own
business. What this program does is they have a ESL For
Entrepreneurs Course. It's a 6 week long course that refugees would
have to take and pass in order to move to the next step, which is a 12
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week long Developing Your Business Plan. They also have a great
part of their program where they match any of their refugee program
participants with mentors in the field of the business that they're
hoping to start. This program is able to serve 400 to 500 people
each year. All they do is the technical assistance portion. They would
refer clients out to receive loans from different programs. When I'm
speaking to the head of the program there they said that the process
for refugees can take anywhere from 9 months to 5 years, depending
on the type of businesses that they want to open.
Here's some typical requirements that programs have for refugees in
order to become part of their entrepreneurial process. Just a good
understanding of English, good credit or cosigner, some sort of
savings, a steady employment, a business plan, and the knowledge of
how to implement that plan step by step, know how much money
that they're requiring in order to start their business, copies of their
tax returns, good standing in community, clean background, and
possibly an application fee in order to cover the cost of a credit
check. If you're sitting with your clients and you're enrolling them
into these programs, I definitely suggest doing a personal budgeting
plan with them each month to make sure that they're able to cover
the expenses of going into this type of process, which can take a
good amount of time.
When I was speaking to the different programs the favorite thing that
I liked to ask were, "What were the top five businesses that refugees
liked to open?" This is Roman at the top of this picture here, and
these are the top five businesses that clients are opening at ECDC.
Uber and Lyft, he said those are the easiest ones in this type of
economy these days. Trucking, like the CDL licenses. Convenience
stores, restaurants, and spa services, and spa services like massages,
hair braiding. At other programs they had refugees that were doing
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nails for spa services. They also had commercial cleaning businesses
being opened. Then a lot of them mentioned that they were opening
home childcare businesses for up to six kids, which I thought was a
great part of the program and very empowering to the women
participants in the program.
I also wanted to get the advice from the experts in these programs
that are already in operation, and so here's some of the advice that
they wanted to pass on to you, if you're working with refugee clients,
to give them this information, but also a little bit of information about
those of you who might want to start opening a program. What they
said is that the most successful refugee clients that were entering
these programs had been in the United States already for two to
three years. It takes on average three to five years after starting a
business for their business to become successful, where they're able
to turn profit. They wanted to suggest to refugees who want to open
a business that they might want to work in that industry before they
work on a business plan. They said refugees who wanted to explore
the field of a business they're opening definitely had more experience
of knowing what kind of permits were needed or what kind of steps
were needed after they had worked in that particular industry.
That last advice is from the experts just saying for those of you who
want to possibly open this type of program, you want to strike a
balance between your mission and the sustainability of this type of
program. Neither one of you, you or the client, will be able to take
shortcuts. It's a long process, and it involves a lot of partnerships.
You'll need a lot of strength and stamina for the process. It'll take a
long time and require hard work. What I've learned through this
whole process is that doing research there's a lot of things that are
already available in communities to entrepreneurs, so please first
check with your local Small Business Administration, your Business
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Association, or your Chamber of Commerce. Also, I would say
maybe try working with a few refugee entrepreneurs and see how
difficult the process is. Now I'm going to turn it over to one of those
experts. Diego?
Diego Abente: Hey. Can you guys hear me?
Hannah
Carswell:
Yes. We can hear you loud and clear.
Diego Abente: Hello? Okay. Good. I guess it's good afternoon in St. Louis to
everybody. Got a great group here. I was excited to hear everything
you guys presented. It's no more than what we know to be true in the
space that we work in. Before I get to the slides, I really just wanted
to kind of summarize everything that you guys had talked about by
sharing the following. We are a grantee of the Office of Refugee
Resettlement's Micro-Enterprise Development Grant. We have
been since 1999, so we're a part of that group of 20 odd grantees. I
would be happy to speak with you guys offline and individually about
what that program is like. We have received off and on every year
sort of the IDA Grant, so I have some fairly good expertise on that
and also we'd love to share what we learned around that.
We were, at the very beginning of the childcare program, a grantee
of that as well, so I've got some experience that I can pass along to
folks who might be interested in doing that in their particular locals. I
will say that the RSC, the childcare program, is probably the most
particular and the on you really want to think about the most before
you apply, because there are, depending on your locality, very, very
different barriers to entry to those businesses. I will say the following.
Folks who are in Philly were just visiting here in St. Louis yesterday
related to the organization that you guys mentioned before, just kind
of sharing what they were doing and learning about what we were
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doing, and it was incredible. These organizations that have known
about each other for several years now, and we still every time we
meet have the occasion to really learn from each other and kind of
pass on, back and forth, best practices.
All of this just to say to you guys that the community around
immigrant and refugee lending is pretty tight knit, and that's a great
thing, because it provides a lot of free expertise, experts experience,
best practices to help you understand how to make it work in your
community, and this is something that we believe is completely
additive. There is definitely more than enough room for all of us to be
doing this great work, and obviously our end users, our clients,
deserve every opportunity to succeed. We would love for
organizations to be helping them across the United States. Feel free
to reach out. I'm sure Hannah will let folks know what my contact
details are, so you can, if you've got any particular questions on those
programs that were mentioned.
But onto the slides. The International Institute has been doing
refugee resettlement for over 100 years and has been involved in
economic development space, under which we do our refugee and
immigrant work, entrepreneurship work, for about probably 20 years
now, 10 really in earnest. In a way we're a little bit new to the market,
but we've been doing this for enough years where we feel like we've
hit our heads against the wall several times and have some great
lessons that we can pass on. I think the first thing in terms of
communicating the message about what you're doing is really asking
yourself about where the starting point is in terms of the folks that
you're serving, and that might sound a little bit obvious, but I think a
lot of times, especially in nonprofits, we're so busy with our day to
day that we don't have the time and sort of the head space to step
back and ask ourselves these sort of bigger questions that will provide
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direction and alignment of what we're doing.
What we've done in the institute or at the institute over the past
several years is really started to fine tune our mission alignment
between the resettlement portion of what our organization does and
the economic development and really trying to craft a mission that
speaks to both of those pieces at the same time. The example
concretely is that the institute works to make the refugees that we
resettle here in the St. Louis area positive members of our
community. Through that work we want to elevate, communicate,
celebrate the importance of their cultural and financial contributions.
We include the financial contribution there as a sort of lead in to the
economic development work. On my side when I speak about more
particularly the economic development activity that we do I will
continue and add on that what we're trying to do within economic
development is foster a community with very involved immigrant and
refugee businesses.
Why do we want to do that? That's the question that people are
asking themselves in the back of their minds as you're speaking to
them. Well, we want to do that for two very simple reasons. The first
is we want to increase the number of immigrant owned businesses in
our region. Why? That steps back into the sort of larger mission,
which is to recognize the cultural and the financial value of a diverse
population, both in its citizenry, but also in terms of the businesses
that are present in the community. The second is to help make every
single one of the folks that we work with [inaudible 00:37:56]. That
really is our hook to folks in the private sector. Right? Because that's
really what they want to kind of understand. What is your place in this
larger puzzle, and how does the work that you guys do tie into the
things that I do, and why should I care? Why is this important to me?
You automatically hook them.
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You say, "Look. What we're doing here is we're accelerating this walk
that refugees and immigrants have to do to get into mainstream
banking, to become users of the products or the services that you're
providing or the widgets that you want to sell depending on who your
audience is." I think it's really important, again, to align the mission,
make sure that you're communicating something that's simple, but
powerful, and that includes some language that will open windows or
doors to the partners and the community that you want to reach out
to. That kind of steps back to one of the former slides on knowing the
context of your local community, and understanding who the players
on that landscape that you want to influence are, and making sure
that, again, as you craft this message you're making sure to use some
words in there that will sort of heighten their senses and help them
pay a little bit more attention to what you're trying to communicate.
That's starting at the beginning. When we interact with folks we're
starting to talk to them from the very beginning, our clients, these
refugees and immigrants. We're trying to tell them that, "Look. What
you have done with your life is by definition entrepreneurial. You
have left everything behind. You have overcome insurmountable
challenges, and you're here kind of rebuilding your life. That in a way
is the most powerful entrepreneurial story that can be told. Now, it's
your choice to decide how you want to continue with that, if you
want to express that through, you know, obtaining a great job and
providing for your family or yourself, of if you've got some ideas, or
some experience, or now want to take advantage of the opportunity
that you have here in the United States to start your own business.
Part of this is at the very beginning we sit them down, pen to paper,
with what we call our pathways and our roadmaps, so that they can
see, even though they're not going to access those services from day
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one, they can kind of see visually in front of them what's in store,
what's available, what they can aspire to. I think that's really
important, because they've come from a place of a lot of uncertainty,
of a lot of changing I guess changing [inaudible 00:40:28] them that
there's a process, and there are some milestones that they can look
forward to, but also we want to inspire them to start thinking about
where they want to be, you know, 12, 24, 36 months down the line.
I think, to Nicole's point, we also have seen in our practice that folks
that have been here for two to three years are those that are in the
best place to start a business. Of course we don't want to wait for
those two to three years to kind of go by before engaging them
around entrepreneurship. We want to make sure that from day one
they know that that's an opportunity and that they know when
they're ready they can come see us about that, and we can help them
realize their dreams, if you will. That's sort of the first bullet point
around starting at the beginning.
I think the second thing is really thinking about how you deliver the
services and products that you think are going to, if you will,
accelerate these folks into mainstream services, whether that be
financial or other. We have tried to, along with our resettlement
agency, sort of our parents agency's mission and sort of delivery
package, we've tried to really make everything [inaudible 00:41:38]
quite nicely and be very cohesive. Our mission aligns to the
International Institute's mission, which is our parent, but then our
service delivery model also ties in very nicely with the service delivery
model of the parent, again. This simplifies the message for all of our
partners. It also simplifies the message for our clients. Right?
We have a very simple model of the 3 D approach. Right? We
provide the dollars, the development services, and the ID. The dollars
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is pretty simple. This is the capital that these folks need to start or
strengthen their business. It's something that they can't access
through banks, for the reasons that Nicole mentioned, but I think
another thing that you could say here as you're reaching out to
financial partners is also they don't have the networks that other folks
have in the United States because they've grown up here, and
they've got family and friends that can help them as they start their
businesses. It's important for them to know that organizations like
ours or possibly yours are their only alternative, and it's important for
them to be there and provide that for them.
The development services, and Nicole touched on it a little bit, it's
just helping them understand how to succeed as entrepreneurs in the
United States, which is sometimes very different from what success
looks like in countries that they came from, and so in a way they've
got to take their experiences and understand how to transform them,
and transition them, or to use the trendy word, pivot them into what
will be success in the United States. Finally, and here again, here
comes our hook. When we reach out to partners and we try to
elevate our awareness and our message about why this is important
to folks who aren't as naturally passionate about it as everybody here
on the phone today. The ID. We are helping them develop a portfolio
or an identity that will allow them to walk into a financial institution or
a more large scale business development organization and present
themselves on an equal playing field.
I think when you start to communicate those messages, again, people
who are working in different spaces kind of find a bridge between
what we're doing and what they're doing, and that helps them hear
the message, digest the message, and understand how to meet us in
the middle, not only in terms of understanding and being aware of
what we're doing, and being able to communicate that through their
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networks, but also figuring out how they can help. They might
surprise us and be able to help in ways that we didn't think that would
be possible. I want to just kind of tie this back to the institute's
massage of service delivery model. We have the 3 Ds, the dollars, the
development, the ID. The institute has the three pillars, immersion,
investment, and inclusion.
Every time I present this, and I'm trying to get the rest of the staff to
do this as well, I like to also mention the community. These three
pillars, these three Ds cannot exist in a vacuum. What we do is
additive. It's added value to a community, and the community has to
understand and has to appreciate that, but we also have to give
thanks. None of the work that we do is sustainable in a vacuum. It
really is necessary to have ... I try not to use the word buy in, because
it sounds sort of one and done, but engagement, a continuous
partnership and collaboration among the community.
I think communicating in this way is a very powerful way to kind of
elevate the message that we want to make sure that people are
getting. It helps us stay front of mind for folks. In our experience
that's been sometimes very difficult. You know, you'll hold an event.
It'll be large scale. It'll be a massive success. Folks will be really happy
with it. Two months down the road they've forgotten about it,
because something else has come up, or another event has been
held. For us it's really important to maintain that engagement and
stay front of their minds. That's what we try to do as we craft our
message and think of words and ways to elevate that and to make
sure that they're thinking about us more than on ... Sorry, guys. My
computer just ... There we go. It almost crashed. They think about us
more continuously.
I'm going to try to ... There we go. ... move forward one and show you
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some of the examples of how we do this. We talk a little bit about
using sort of building blocks or thinking about the honeycombs and
connecting pieces that together kind of build out to something
stronger and bigger than they would be able to be on their own. For
example, the institute has held for many years now a Festival of
Nations we call it. It's an outdoor festival. It's grown, and it's become
extremely popular. 150,000 folks over a weekend will attend the
festival. We try very hard to communicate our message throughout
the festival and everything we do. We've got 40 different food
booths, ethnic food booths, and every one of them has a message
there about the importance of what they provide to the community
and how the institute fits into that value chain. We have craft booths,
about 40 to 50 of those as well. Again, there are messages there to
reinforce to everybody who is enjoying the festival that this ties into
the bigger picture and this has value in your every day life, not just on
the particular weekend that we're holding the festival.
That became so popular in fact that we had trouble fitting in all of the
immigrant entrepreneurs that wanted to provide food, or crafts, or
participate in the festival in one way, shape, or form, so we leveraged
that, and we created what we now call the Holiday Bazaar, which is in
the winter, and it's indoor, and it's a little bit more small scale, but it
allows folks that couldn't get into the Festival of Nations an
opportunity to test out what it feels like to present at a festival like
this, to understand what supports they can get from us, and to be
exposed to the community, to see if what their presenting or what
they're selling is something that resonates with the community.
Again, there we're reinforcing the message about the value that
these refugee and immigrant businesses bring to our community,
how it makes in our case, St. Louis, a Mid-West city, really feel quite
international, something that a lot of folks who come visit here are
surprised to feel.
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We also have spaces up at the top left here for more formal sort of
academic conversations that share ... I love these widgets, so I'm
going to highlight that. ... to share some more timely research
information. This is an opportunity to talk about the numbers a little
bit more than the stories. I like that both Hannah and Nicole talked
about both stories and numbers. I think one of the things that we
have to really, really be careful about is not going overboard on the
numbers, and I'm a numbers guy, so that happens to be my particular
weak spot, if you will. We have to really balance out that part of our
conversations and our message, along with the stories, because to
Nicole's point, it's really powerful when you tell a story, and folks
remember that.
Bagels and coffee is an opportunity to focus on the numbers. It's
early in the morning, so folks don't have to miss work or plan to be
home late, but it also allows them to prepare to receive some deeper
insights into affecting refugee and immigrant resettlement, what's
affecting refugee and immigrant businesses, and where we want to
go in terms of that activity here in St. Louis. That was such a success
that we had volunteers come up and ask, "Well, how can we replicate
what you're doing and tell the story of what the institute and the
Economic Development Department are doing for St. Louis?"
We thought about it a lot, and we figured, okay, we would really,
really as a nonprofit love to have this additional resource, which is
relatively low cost, but we want to make sure that the product that
we're delivering is one that we can put our brand to, one that really
communicates the message, because we've spent so much time
developing our message, so we developed this Speakers Bureau,
which is nothing more than a sort of train the trainer workshop,
where volunteers from the community can come in. They spend a
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day with us. We share our mission, our vision. We talk to them about
a lot of the stuff that I'm talking to you about today, and we empower
them to go out in their communities, however big or small, however
close or far, to retell the story. Every time they tell it they're going to
share some numbers, and they will tell a success story, and they will
talk about refugee resettlement in general, but they will also talk
about their value to the financial and cultural wellbeing of our
community. We're replicating this message, again, at a relatively low
cost.
I'm being told to hurry up, so I will. I'm just going to ... One other
thing that we've done that's really I the think interesting that you guys
might think about, if you've been working with refugee communities
for a long time, what we did, we celebrated our 97th birthday as an
organization not too long ago. We decided we wanted to do
something different. I'll finish with this last one, because this is
something exciting that I think hasn't been done too often before, in
as much as I've heard. 97th birthday, we're celebrating it. We want to
do something different, not just the sort of [inaudible 00:50:49]
and read off some of our latest numbers and all of our
accomplishments.
We did an immersion activity or an experiential activity, where we
asked folks to sort of walk the refugee walk. This was extremely
elaborate. We put up refugee camps. We had projectors showing
some of the camps across the world. You know, we made them take
that long walk, which represented their travels from wherever they
might be to the United States. We sat them down for instead of
English classes, it happened to be Arabic classes, because not a lot of
folks who showed up knew Arabic. We kind of made them feel like a
refugee might feel first arriving here, being talked to in a language
that they're not familiar with. It was just a resounding success. Folks
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that had been advocates of our work for decades, they still just
enjoyed it too.
What we're trying to do with that now is really leverage that success
and take this experiential model or this immersion model into
schools, so that we can reach out to the young folks in our
communities, out to corporations, and maybe we'll condense it when
we do that, so that folks who have to work in a multicultural setting or
who want to understand better how to participate in our society and
just be more involved with the immigrant communicate can get a feel
for what it's like, for where these people come from, because not
every refugee, not every immigrant is comfortable sharing their story
and sort of reliving those difficult times in their lives.
Through this experience we really hope to leave them with a feeling,
not just a message, but a feeling. You know, I'm hopeful that that's
going to have a transformative effect on our community and really
bringing in a whole new pool of advocates, volunteers, and folks who
are actively engaging with our organization and elevating our
message. I think I'll end it there, Hannah, because I'm probably five or
so minutes over time, but happy to take questions if you guys see
anything on here that you might want to ask about.
Hannah
Carswell:
Okay. Thank you both, Nicole and Diego. That was really great. I
already got a few questions from people, so if you have questions,
just chat them in the chat box, and we'll try to get to them. The first
question I got is, "Do you have any tips on finding refugee
entrepreneurs to chat with and learn from in our respective
communities?" Maybe I'll start with Diego.
Diego Abente: I would ask the question what community are you in? What we have
done in St. Louis, with the communities that we're not naturally
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connecting to, is we've gone out to look for ... Okay. I see Long
Beach, California. Check and see if you've got some Ethnic
Chambers of Commerce. That's probably a pretty low hanging fruit
in terms of finding them. They'll have a web presence. You know,
they'll be easy to contact, and they might be able to connect you to
their membership or at least direct you to sort of the commercial
corridor where a lot of their members are. Then you would just get
out there and, for example, go for Mexican dinner, and talk to the
folks there, and try to do some investigative work.
Hannah
Carswell:
Okay. Another question that we have is, "For people who already
have businesses, like hair salons or nail salons, how would they use
their story to promote themselves?" Whoever feels like they have
something to share.
Diego Abente: I can start and Nicole, you can jump in if you'd like. It kind of depends
on where they want to go with their story. I think, going back to my
first point about starting at the beginning, what do you want to
communicate with your message about what you do, or where you
come from, or what you've accomplished? I'll give you a really cool
example from St. Louis. We had a lady get a loan from us to start a
hair braiding service. She's from the African Community. I think she's
Congolese. Of course she was servicing a lot of folks from that
community, and she found that there was a great need for additional
supports within that community. They weren't making it to our
organization, the International Institute, to get these service, and so
she leveraged her business success to create sort of a peer group of
women, a learning group, if you will, a support group.
We helped her kind of craft the message and set up her social media
profile, if you will, and connect with these ladies. We provided her
some curriculums as well, so that she could ... In a way we trained the
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trainer in that sense and helped her, again, leverage that business
success to start to give back to her community and provide additional
supports for other women in particular was really her focus, who were
trying to accelerate their adjustment here in the US.
Hannah
Carswell:
Okay. I think we will maybe take two more questions. One of them is,
"In one of the earlier examples I think that Nicole talked about you
said that knowledge of English was a requirement of participating.
Have you seen any programs that assist English language learners in
creating businesses?"
Nicole
Redford:
Yeah. That's a great question. In my research I found there were tons
of different ESL programs in communities already that were more
the general type ESLs. The one program that I talked about in
Philadelphia was just one that because English is such a requirement
for each part of these processes, that they require participants to go
through this six week class, which is like ESL for entrepreneurs, so
specifically that kind of language that you would need in order to
write a business plan, in order to apply for permits [inaudible
00:56:45], but I thought it was a great understanding of them to see
where the real gap was in the service of Philadelphia. I don't know
about specifically like entrepreneurial type ESL classes, but I would,
again, definitely encourage you to check out your local Chamber of
Commerce or with the SBA, because there were a lot of programs
that were aimed towards immigrants in general and that being one of
the more important steps that they all realized. They should be able
to hook you up with the classes or community colleges that they
access it most often.
Hannah
Carswell:
All right.
Diego Abente: Let me just add real quick to that. There is a curriculum. It's probably
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fairly old, but some of the basics are in there. I think it's called ... I'll
send you the details, Hannah, so you can send it out, but it was
developed by a consultant that was working with the Office of
Refugee Resettlement probably four or five years ago now. I can't
remember what it's called, One, Two, Three, or Picture This I think it
was called. It's a very graphical representation of a literacy financial
fitness I guess curriculum, going from the very basics all the way up
to kind of how to manage a small business and how to put your
inflows and outflows on paper.
Hannah
Carswell:
Okay. Just one more question before we wrap up. so, "Any tips for
getting organizational buy ins for this kind of work if you're having
trouble getting your organization interested?"
Nicole
Redford:
Like getting the organization interested in starting this kind of
program?
Hannah
Carswell:
Yeah. And communicating about Work This Way or in supporting
refugee entrepreneurs.
Nicole
Redford:
That's a great question. I mean, I'm not sure how far along this
particular program is in the process, but when you are trying to start
any sort of upwardly mobile or job upgrade program it's really great to
talk to the clients that you have and see what kind of background that
they have brought to your particular neck of the woods, so that you
can see what types of jobs they're wanting to move up in towards.
Then I always like to have people test a couple cases with refugees
and see how difficult that process is, see how many partners would
need to be involve in your particular community to get that program
going, and then of course any of those clients that you can help along
the way, to see how difficult that process is, and see how much
potential income they've increased by starting their business, and any
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data that you can leverage from those particular test cases I think is
always great to show the funders. That collaboration in your
community using what's going on already and then also the data that
you're getting from refugees that are successful in these types of
businesses.
Hannah
Carswell:
All right. Good. Thank you, Nicole.
Diego Abente: Another great thing ...
Hannah
Carswell:
Oh. Go ahead.
Diego Abente: Sorry. I'll be quick. I forgot to tell you when you signed me up for this
that I talk a lot. Another great thing that you can do, and this is the
example of the folks from Philly that were just visiting. If you've got
communities nearby that you can sort of benchmark to what you
want to do and have maybe some of them vouch for the work that
they've done, I think that's a powerful message too, because it speaks
to the implementation, not just sort of the theory, the idea, or the
ideal behind it, but the fact that this is happening, and that the results
are tangible, and that communities all across the United States are
getting behind this, and all of them are in unison singing the praises
of the added value of these types of initiatives.
Hannah
Carswell:
All right. Thank you both, Nicole and Diego, for being here today. I
wanted to quickly go through a few things before we close. This is the
Seeds of Growth Toolkit that I mentioned earlier that has a lot of the
statistics that I pulled in the earlier part of the presentation, and it
can guide you to other places where you can get more numbers to
support the work you're doing. Then this is the Welcoming Refugees
website. It's welcomingrefugees.org. You'll find lots of resources on
all kinds of things, but particularly on ways to support refugee
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entrepreneurs you can find there.
Then also we'd love to hear from you. This is our contact information.
We'd love to answer your questions. I also chatted our Diego's email,
and if you didn't catch it, feel free to email me, and I will connect you
with him. That's it. Thank you so much for joining us today. We were
glad to have you, and thanks again, Nicole and Diego, for sharing
your expertise with us. Thank you, everyone. Have a great rest of
your day.