investing in refugee entrepreneurs · 2020. 4. 10. · really want to thank all of you for joining...

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.

investing in refugee entrepreneurs · 2020. 4. 10. · really want to thank all of you for joining...

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