Cortaiga Collins, Founder of Good Shepherd Preschool

Cortaiga Collins never intended to open her own business, let alone her own early childhood education center. Instead, Cortaiga received her bachelor’s degree and was on track to become a CPA. However, when she had her second child in 2000, everything changed. After having her first child as a senior in high school, Cortaiga felt like she got a second chance at parenting. The St. Louis, Missouri-native wanted to do everything perfectly, but when her three months of maternity leave finished and it was time to find a daycare center for her son, Cortaiga discovered that it was difficult to find a place that she trusted with her baby. After a series of bad experiences at both commercial daycare centers and home-based operations, Cortaiga decided to quit her job at a city government agency to create a childcare solution that offered quality services to families.

Before Cortaiga could open her own center, she had to immerse herself in early childhood care. She enrolled in classes at community college and took an administrative job at her church’s elementary school. Soon after, she became the director of the school, where she gained valuable experience. Finally, in 2009, the then-single mother of two found herself on the brink of being licensed and opening her own center, Good Shepherd Preschool and Infant/Toddler Center, with the social mission to raise the standard of childcare and to create a quality early childhood program that equips children for school and the world. “Getting open was the most cumbersome part of it all,” Cortaiga said, “I had no experience with permits and licenses and inspectors and building requirements. I didn’t have thousands of dollars saved or a mentor. I got a $35,000 grant, but that wasn’t enough.”

Fortunately, Cortaiga was able to get the rest of the capital that she needed to open her business from Justine PETERSEN, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that connects institutional resources with the needs of low-to-moderate-income individuals and families in Missouri, helping them to build assets and create enduring community change. CNote partners with CDFIs like Justine PETERSEN in communities across the country, funding loans and empowering local entrepreneurs like Cortaiga. With capital from Justine PETERSEN, Cortaiga was able to finish renovations to her space and open the doors to Good Shepherd. The CDFI also connected her with an accountant that she continues to work with today.

Since it got up and running, Cortaiga’s business has been full steam ahead. Good Shepherd opened in March 2009, and by Halloween, it’d already outgrown its space. Cortaiga decided to open a second location, and again, Justine PETERSEN provided funding to help Cortaiga with her expansion. Then, in 2018, Cortaiga bought land in the same low-income community to build a $2.5 million state-of-the-art childcare center that would bring both of her centers together under one roof. The new development is set to open in October 2021, and with the larger space, Cortaiga will be able to grow her team from 14 employees to over 20. Better yet, the larger facility has the capacity to serve over 100 children at a time. “I never knew that this journey would take me to where I am and where I’m going,” Cortaiga said. “I’m just a former single mom who wanted a safe place to take her kid. Now, I’m in uncharted waters with this space. It’s scary and exciting, but you know what they say: ‘if you build it, they’ll come.’ I’m counting on them coming.”

Investing in the Future

While it’s incredible how far Cortaiga — and her business — have come since she quit her job 21 years ago, all of that success was nearly erased by the COVID-19 pandemic. The perfect storm of shutdowns, remote work, fear, and uncertainty almost shuttered Good Shepherd, and according to Cortaiga, despite the fact that she was able to begin to bring a limited number of infants and toddlers back into her centers last November, she’s still working her way toward full capacity. “At one point,” she said, “I began to prepare my staff and my parents that we were going to have to lay off everybody if we didn’t fill our available slots. For months and months, we were dangerously close to having to shut our doors.”

Thankfully, Cortaiga didn’t have to close her business. Instead, she and her team are preparing to move into their new expanded center. To help get the word out, Cortaiga has been getting digital marketing assistance from a marketing and social impact consultant introduced to her through Pacific Community Ventures (PCV), another local CDFI referred by Justine PETERSEN. After tackling her business’s website and social media presence, Cortaiga said that she plans to work with a PCV-provided business mentor to help her with more Human Resources-related elements of her small business. According to her, recruiting and retaining qualified employees are her biggest challenges. Despite those headaches, Cortaiga says it’s the children that keep her motivated to run her business. “No matter what’s going on, kids just love so freely,” she said. “They’re so forgiving and resilient, and seeing their emotional and academic development and progress makes it all worth it.”

From Kids to Community Development

When asked about the future of Good Shepherd Preschool and Infant/Toddler Center, Cortaiga doesn’t just share her dreams for her small business, she shares her dreams for her community. Through her more than two decades of working with children in her community, Cortaiga has learned that it’s not just children who need care — it’s entire families. That led her to launch a nonprofit called Foundation for Strengthening Families with the goal to help families rise above poverty through education. Not only does the organization offer early childhood education programs, but it also has adult education classes on topics such as health and wellness and financial literacy. “They say if your dreams don’t scare you, then they’re not big enough,” Cortaiga said. “I see me in a lot of people in this community — especially the single moms. I grew up in poverty, and I know how my life has changed as a result of not living in poverty anymore.”

Cortaiga’s vision for her slice of St. Louis — and her desire to help families break out of generational cycles of poverty and to purchase local homes  — is inspired by the work being done by the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York and the East Durham Childhood Initiative in North Carolina. As much as she’s looking at communities across the country to see where she can borrow from already established community development playbooks, Cortaiga is hoping to forge local partnerships to bring her vision to fruition, including with Mayor Tishaura Jones, the city’s first Black woman mayor. “No one organization can get all this done,” she said. “Collaboration is such an integral part of being able to create lasting change in a community. We want to rebuild and restructure this community by rebuilding the residents so that this can be a thriving place to live.”

Learn More

• Good Shepherd Preschool and Infant/Toddler Center
• Pacific Community Ventures is an Oakland-based CDFI that empowers small business owners and helps impact investors make investments that create shared prosperity and sustainable communities through a “Good Jobs, Good Business” model.” 
• Justine PETERSEN is a CDFI that connects institutional resources with the needs of low-to-moderate-income individuals and families in Missouri, helping them to build assets and create enduring community change.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like this? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like Pacific Community Ventures, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Ethel Brooks

For many people, a cancer diagnosis can derail them. For Ethel Brooks, it ignited her. It was January 2017 when Ethel learned that she had breast cancer. Her mind instantly concocted the worst-case scenario, and her first thought was about what she was going to leave behind for her three daughters and seven grandchildren if something happened to her. However, the moment she found out that her chances of surviving were high, she chose to fight like never before. “When I saw that I was going to live,” she said, “I took off like lightning. They say cancer breaks people, but cancer gave me strength and made me look toward the future. I wasn’t gonna let it take me down because I have too much to live for.”

Ethel went through 21 weeks of chemotherapy; yet, she didn’t let that keep her from her day job at Franklin Primary Health Center in Mobile, Alabama, where she was hired in 1986 as a 20-year-old Medical Receptionist. Over the years, Ethel has skyrocketed up the ranks, with stints as an intake clerk, accounts receivable, office manager, operation manager, and most recently, billing supervisor.  Amazingly, Ethel would do her chemotherapy on Mondays, and she’d be back in the office on Tuesday to finish out the rest of the workweek. Eventually, after the hair loss, a double mastectomy, and seven surgeries, Ethel triumphed over cancer with the support of her mother, eight siblings, and daughter Darralyn, who surrounded her with love and support throughout her treatment. Additionally, the fight helped her to realize that she needed to start thinking about how she could create a financial legacy to pass down to her family when the time came.

That’s when Ethel partnered with Mr. William McGlasker, a local contractor and concrete specialist, to start her own business. She’d met Mr. McGlasker at Franklin Primary Health Center, after which he’d built a driveway for her. The two became good friends and he told her that he had his own construction company, but was limited on how much money he could make since he did not have his subcontractor license.  He suggested that Ethel get her license and create a company that would, in essence, absorb his business. In 2017, Mr. McGlasker dissolved his business and Ethel started Bennett Construction. All of Mr. McGlasker’s employees joined the new company, and Mr. McGlasker stayed on as superintendent. “To be honest,” Ethel said, “he was really the person who pushed me to take this leap of faith. He’s been doing this for 50-some years, and once people learned that he was with Bennett Construction, everything fell into place.”

Ethel went back to college to work toward receiving a bachelor’s degree in business management so that she’d be better equipped to manage her company. Meanwhile, in August 2019, Bennett Construction was awarded a $600,000 contract from Mobile Asphalt Company. That paved the way for Ethel to begin renting a building for her business and to land additional smaller contracts from the City of Mobile. Ethel’s next goal is to be certified as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE), which will allow her to bid on bigger Department of Transportation contracts that will give her more income. Her primary goal is to become a General Contractor so that she can have other subcontractors working under her. Once she achieves that, Bennett Construction will be able to bid for contracts worth millions of dollars.

One Step at a Time

In the short term, however, Ethel wanted to purchase a dump truck, which could help her make an additional $10,000 a week for her business, given that 100 million tons of dirt need to be removed from a construction site in Leroy, Alabama. That’s what brought Ethel to TruFund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that invests in small businesses in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and New York. CNote partners with CDFIs like TruFund in communities across the country, providing business coaching, funding loans, and empowering local entrepreneurs like Ethel.

Ethel was already familiar with TruFund. Last year, during the pandemic, she attended a virtual presentation hosted by the City of Mobile to learn more about the PPP process. She connected with TruFund, who was able to help her secure PPP funding for Bennett Construction’s payroll.

Through a TruFund small business loan, Ethel was able to purchase the dump truck she so desperately wanted. “Ms. [Tamika] McNeal has been very helpful,” she said. “There were several times I would get discouraged but she reminded me to take it one step at a time. When I thought about it like that, then it wasn’t so bad.”

Incredibly, as Bennett Construction continues to grow and to land more and more work across both Mobile and Alabama, Ethel has continued to work her 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. job at Franklin Primary Health Center. She’s thankful that her supervisors have been so flexible and understanding with the arrangement, as sometimes Ethel has to go to a job site for Bennett Construction during working hours; however, once she gets her DBE and primary contractor licenses, Ethel doesn’t think she’s going to be able to balance both jobs with her side hustle. Instead, she’s readying herself to make Bennett Construction her main focus. Mr. McGlasker, who is 77, similarly has no plans of slowing down anytime soon. “He told me he’s going to work until God tells him he can’t work anymore,” Ethel said. “That’s what keeps him going, so I don’t argue with him.”

When asked whether or not she’d believe it if someone told her 20 years ago that she’d own and operate a construction company in 2021, Ethel laughed. Despite the fact that Bennett Construction wasn’t in the cards for her until relatively recently, Ethel loves her company and the work that it produces. Unsurprisingly, it’s getting the chance to see and hear about Bennett Construction’s good work in and around Mobile that brings her the most joy, and she continues to be motivated by the knowledge that she’s building a financial legacy for her family that will outlive her. “As a Black woman running a business,” Ethel said, “there are a lot of opportunities for me. All I need to do is to get to those opportunities, and that’s what my focus is on now. Getting those certifications, and getting those opportunities.”

Learn More

• TruFund – is a 501 (c) 3 certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) headquartered in New York City with field offices in Alabama and Louisiana. TruFund tailors its financial and technical assistance to the unique needs of each site—from contractor mobilization lending in New York and Louisiana to rural Black Belt initiatives in Alabama.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like Ethel’s? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like TruFund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

For over 30 years, McAuley Residence has been a safe place for women in need in Portland, Maine. When the opioid crisis hit 13 years ago, however, the residence — a longstanding project of The Sisters of Mercy — needed to rethink its services. “We were seeing a significant need for women with children who had a diagnosis of substance use disorder,” said Melissa Skahan, Vice President of Mission Integration at Northern Light Mercy Hospital. “Women throughout the U.S. were experiencing more overdoses and more admissions, and we were also seeing an incredible number of children being removed from their homes by child protective services from families affected by substance use disorders to ensure their safety. It was clear that we really needed a more comprehensive approach.”

All photos were taken in McAuley Houses’ Bangor location.

That’s when the McAuley Residence partnered with Community Housing of Maine to solely focus on families affected by substance use disorders. The residence adopted a two-generational approach, with robust services and interventions targeted at both mothers and their children. Notably, McAuley Residence doesn’t provide treatment on-site. This was intentional. Most recovery centers offer treatment in-house; however, when someone leaves the facility, that means she leaves her treatment team behind. That’s very disruptive — and, when considering the cyclical nature of substance use disorders, it’s also dangerous.

“What we designed after examining patient outcomes from reoccurring residential stays was a model that builds the best treatment team for our clients external to McAuley with seamless integration into onsite services,” Melissa said. “This way we could ensure that the outpatient space was transformative and sustained, while really focusing on capacity building regardless of where mom and child laid their heads at night. None of the progress would be disrupted when they left us.”

Instead, what McAuley does offer in-house is a family-centered, evidence-based suite of supportive and clinically oriented- services that help families break the generational cycles of addiction and poverty. These services range from preparing women to re-enter higher education to providing cooking classes and workshops on healthy eating; however, before any of that can happen, McAuley staff work with women to help them stabilize physically, mentally, and emotionally so that they can reunify with their children if they’ve been separated. That includes one-on-one coaching as well as group sessions on parenting education. According to Melissa, she and her team are most often able to reunify women with their children within the first three to five months of their stay at McAuley.

While McAuley helps to develop healthy routines for both mom and child(ren), it also offers mothers financial coaching and career planning. In total, the women put in 35 hours a week to McAuley Residence’s programming, which further establishes the discipline and stabilization needed to successfully transition out of the program. When the time comes, McAuley also helps McAuley residents leave the residence and land on their feet. For most women, their total length of stay at McAuley Residence is 24 months. “It’s pretty rewarding work to watch these women truly have the opportunity to flourish and to reunify with their families and then re-enter higher education and the workplace and become highly productive mothers, citizens, and people,” Melissa said.

An Approach Worth Replicating

Based solely on the numbers, McAuley Residence’s innovative approach is a resounding success. Well over 200 women have completed the program, and the facility reunifies 95% of the families that come to it. More so, 80% of the women who commit to the program remain abstinent from illicit substances. “It is remarkable what we are able to see families that have experienced homelessness, incarceration, and trauma accomplish when they are provided safe housing, comprehensive services, and access to the very best treatment,” Melissa said.

Unsurprisingly, demand to get into McAuley Residence is high. Therefore, McAuley Residence wanted to open a second location. Fortunately, in 2019, Maine’s legislature passed a law called An Act To Stabilize Vulnerable Families, which provided funding to replicate McAuley Residence’s model across the state. Through a partnership with Community Housing of Maine and The Genesis Fund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), McAuley Residence was able to open a second location in Bangor. Since 1992, The Genesis Fund has been working to develop and support affordable housing and community facilities across Maine, mainly by providing both financing and technical assistance to increase the supply of affordable housing. CNote partners with CDFIs like The Genesis Fund in communities across the country, channeling capital to fund social missions like affordable housing, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurial funding, and more.

Not only did The Genesis Fund provide financing for the Bangor project, it also provided the necessary capital for McAuley Residence to renovate the location, including the kitchen, each bedroom and bathroom, and the big dining room. “It’s a beautiful older building,” Melissa said, “and the funding from Genesis really helped us to bring it back to life.”

Melissa and her team at McAuley often get asked the same question: “why don’t you expand more.” With ongoing support from The Genesis Fund, that’s exactly their plan, and with fatal overdoses up 27% in Maine and a pandemic that’s compounded the opioid crisis, the need has never been greater. Although Melissa is worried about the increase, she feels privileged that McAuley has been able to continue to screen and accept families in these difficult times. “The ability to really serve families in a comprehensive way is lacking across the United States,” Melissa said, “so we’re thrilled to be able to partner with Genesis to create an approach for both mother and child in a way that delivers remarkable outcomes. It’s really the right resource to fund because we’re truly seeing a direct benefit to families in our community.”

Learn More

• Northern Light Mercy Hospital
• The Genesis Fund provides innovative financing by soliciting investment loans from individuals, churches, corporations, and foundations, and then re-lending the money at favorable terms to nonprofit organizations developing affordable housing and community facilities for underserved people and communities throughout Maine and beyond.
• CNote is a women-led investment platform that empowers individuals and institutions to invest locally to further economic equality, racial justice, gender equity, and address climate change.

From the time that Dr. Alexia McClerkin broke her ankle in high school, she knew she wanted to become a doctor. Although Alexia didn’t end up pursuing a career as an orthopedic surgeon as she’d originally intended when she matriculated at Michigan State, she instead chose to study kinesiology so that she could work with athletes, allowing them to get better and to return to their sports. That passion led Alexia into chiropractic medicine and Houston, where she started her own private practice in June of 2016: just a couple of months before returning to school to become a registered nurse (RN). According to Alexia, she estimates that less than 1% of chiropractors are also RNs.

Dr. Alexia McClerkin

Alexia’s decision to study nursing was rooted in how she wanted to be able to work with her patients as a chiropractor. In chiropractic medicine, providers can’t do anything that penetrates the skin, such as administer Botox, while RNs can. Although Alexia was less than enthused at the thought of more schooling, she knew it was the right thing to do to expand the scope of her practice and be able to help the masses. “It was always on the back burner,” she said, “and I knew that I wanted to be able to provide these services. I just told myself to stop wasting my time and to just take the plunge and do it.”

As soon as Alexia graduated as an RN, she rebranded and expanded her private practice. That’s when she expanded her brand to include The Beauty and Wellness Doc, and in July 2020, she moved the wellness clinic from a 1,048 square foot space to a space with over 2,600 square feet, more than doubling the size of the operation. On the medical spa side of The Sports and Wellness Doc, Alexia and her team of two full-time employees (and one intern) offer Botox, dermal fillers, body contouring, medically assisted weight loss, laser hair removal, IV hydration, and vaginal and anal rejuvenation. On the chiropractic side of the business, Alexia offers a variety of traditional services, including adjustments, deep tissue massage, stretching, dry needling, athlete recovery, therapeutic laser, and cupping.

A community event for Alexia’s nonprofit 9 Months to 5K

When Alexia initially looked to furnish her new space with equipment and furniture, she met with a lender who told her that they would give her a loan that wouldn’t affect her credit. After reading the fine print, however, Alexia discovered that the interest rate was 65% and that she would have to pay an exorbitant loan origination fee. She dodged one predatory lender only to find herself facing another nefarious actor when the first PPP loans became available. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was particularly rough for business, as Alexia wasn’t getting patients but she was still paying her staff. She was contacted by a business that said that its staff attorney could help her navigate the PPP application’s legalese and help her get her paperwork in order — for $1,000. “It was so shady,” Alexia said. “I just told them that I’m going to try to figure it out on my own, but I feel like they were preying on the weak because some people are new to business and just don’t know.”

One True-To-Their-Word Lender, and One Motivated Mom

Fortunately, Alexia already had a long-standing relationship with TruFund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that invests in small businesses in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, and New York. CNote partners with CDFIs like TruFund in communities across the country, providing business coaching, funding loans, and empowering local entrepreneurs like Alexia. Since launching her own business, Alexia has attended eight different courses offered through TruFund, including classes on how to build your business, obtain funding, network, and grow your business as a woman entrepreneur. Not surprisingly, TruFund called Alexia to ask her if she was planning to apply for a PPP loan and if she needed help with the application. “I had absolutely no idea how to go at it,” she said. “But Jessica [Whittington] from TruFund walked me through the process. We went through my finances and made sure everything was in place so that I could get it. She was true to her word. It was so easy and seamless and within a few days, I looked in my bank account and the money was there.”

TruFund was also able to help Alexia to navigate the second round of PPP funding, and today, business at The Sports and Wellness Doc is booming. According to Alexia, the pandemic, in a way, has turned out to be good for her business, as the pivot to remote working has left a lot of people with low back, shoulder, and neck pain caused by poor ergonomics and bad workspaces at home. Amazingly, Alexia, who is also a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program, is seeing her best numbers yet, and her revenue has almost doubled, exceeding her goals. While she still feels like she wants to master the ins and outs of her current wellness clinic, its positive trajectory has her dreaming about one-day franchising and scaling her business concept across Texas.

When asked about her most challenging day as a business owner, Alexia notes that every day is a balancing act. In addition to running a business and being a full-time employer, Alexia is a full-time mom (she has a six-year-old and a two-year-old), a graduate student at the University of Texas at Arlington (studying to become a nurse practitioner), a certified prenatal yoga instructor, and the founder of a local nonprofit: 9 Months to 5K. Alexia started the nonprofit in 2018 while she was pregnant with her second son, and the organization educates low-income pregnant women on the importance of health, nutrition, and fitness with the goal of decreasing maternal mortality as well as the rates of preventable diseases and conditions, such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. Alexia’s nonprofit hosts annual 5K runs and walks (the 2020 iteration was held virtually) and quarterly workshops with topics ranging from financial literacy to dental health. This past Mother’s Day, 9 Months to 5K held a community baby shower for members of the public in the parking lot of The Sports and Wellness Doc.

Despite everything that Alexia manages to juggle, she continues to be motivated by those around her, and she’s driven by the opportunity to help patients — including not just customers and community members, but also professional and Olympic athletes — to lead healthy pain-free lives. “It’s great when you love what you do,” Alexia said. “That’s what motivates me.”

Learn More

• The Beauty and Wellness Doc
• TruFund – is a 501 (c) 3 certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) headquartered in New York City with field offices in Alabama and Louisiana. TruFund tailors its financial and technical assistance to the unique needs of each site—from contractor mobilization lending in New York and Louisiana to rural Black Belt initiatives in Alabama.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like Michea’s? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like TruFund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Tanesha Sims-Summers has been an entrepreneur since she was a little girl when she would weave her way through the gridlocked traffic waiting to get into Birmingham’s Legion Field for the Alabama-Auburn football games, selling homemade popsicles for 50 cents as she went from car to car. Tanesha went on to graduate high school, and she matriculated at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she studied marketing and Spanish. She recalls that when she graduated college, she didn’t feel the same pull to get a “real job” as her friends. “I remember that I didn’t want to work for anybody,” Tanesha said. “I just wanted to start a business then, but I never knew what that business was going to be.”

Tanesha Sims-Summers

Without a business plan in mind, Tanesha took a job in investment banking to provide stability for her first child. After seven years in that space, she felt burned out and decided to pivot to digital marketing, where she spent the next six years of her career helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. In 2014, however, Tanesha was ready to start something for herself. That’s when her aunt, who lived in Virginia and helped to raise Tanesha alongside Tanesha’s grandparents, mentioned that people were going crazy over kettle corn. At the time, even though Tanesha was on maternity leave, she felt drawn to the idea. She did some research, looked at the numbers, and decided that this could be the business opportunity for which she’d been waiting.

Soon after, she founded Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co., a gourmet, hand-popped kettle corn company. Tanesha’s first event was the Annual Whistle Stop Festival in Irondale, Alabama, and she didn’t let a newborn baby hold her back from booking as many events as she could that first summer. Instead, her husband (and co-founder) stepped in to take care of the four kids while Tanesha got her feet underneath her as a business owner, racking up successful event after successful event. “We’ve invested time, sweat equity, education, and money in this company,” Tanesha said. “It’s paid for itself from the start, and we’ve seen a 20% or more increase in revenue year over year since we first launched.”

Learning Is Growing

While Tanesha credits Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co.’s success with having a quality (and addictive) product, she notes that utilizing community resources and seizing every opportunity to educate herself as an entrepreneur have equally fueled her company’s growth. That thirst for education is what led her to connect with TruFund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that invests in small businesses in Alabama, Louisiana, New York, and Texas. CNote partners with CDFIs like TruFund in communities across the country, providing business coaching, funding loans, and empowering local entrepreneurs like Tanesha.

In 2019, TruFund provided Tanesha with a $50,000 loan to complete the build-out of Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co.’s food truck — Miss Poppy — and to provide some extra cushion for miscellaneous expenses. “We would not have been able to be up and running and popping around the city without that investment from TruFund,” Tanesha said. “But they didn’t just offer us lending, they offered us education. As entrepreneurs, sometimes we do need capital, but sometimes we need to learn how to be more efficient, how to streamline our processes, and how to allocate money effectively so that we can continue to grow.”

To date, Tanesha has taken advantage of a number of TruFund’s programmatic offerings, and through the CDFI, she’s connected with and learned from fellow entrepreneurs near and far from Birmingham. “It’s been invaluable being able to see other women in business who’re able to really share their skillset and to learn from one another,” Tanesha said. “As entrepreneurs, we have to be intentional about utilizing services and asking for help, and TruFund is here to help us make changes to our businesses that impact our bottom lines and that align with our community investment goals.”

Poppin’ Into The Future

Today, Tanesha has evolved her customer base to include corporations, hotels, universities, and wedding and event planners; however, it’s arguably Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co.’s commitment to its community that makes it one of Birmingham’s standout small businesses. Through its Poppin with a Purpose campaign, Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co. supports local organizations, nonprofits, and small businesses, whether through “PoPraising” (fundraising and donations), sponsorships, or volunteerism. Tanesha’s company also has an initiative called Make Your Local Pop, where Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co. partners with local businesses like Eugene’s Hot Chicken. “I really believe in the power of collaboration,” Tanesha said, “so we partnered with Eugene’s Hot Chicken and used his spice on our product to really show the versatility of kettle corn. We want to make the world a sweeter place to live, one kernel at a time, and we will continue to do that through these community campaigns.”

When Tanesha isn’t thinking about how to best serve her loyal following of “PoP heads,” she’s likely thinking about her goals and vision for the future. She’d love for Naughty But Nice to be a household name; however, she doesn’t want that recognition to come by way of big box stores and national grocery chains. Instead, Tanesha wants to do everything she can to preserve the experience surrounding getting her kettle corn into customers’ hands, perhaps by expanding her fleet of Miss Poppy trucks and meeting new customers where they are: at local breweries, farmers’ markets, and community celebrations.

On a personal note, Tanesha says that in the coming years, she’d also like to strike a better balance between work and home. That includes one day getting to a point where she doesn’t have to continually stay up until 3 a.m., which she currently does to both maximize time with her children and run her business. “I just always say, if you’re going to doubt anything, doubt your limits,” Tanesha said. “Do it scared, do it tired, and do it with purpose. And educate yourself. As an entrepreneur, that’s where you can stay sharp and make sure you’re making the right decisions for your business. That’s my mantra.”

Learn More

• Naughty But Nice Kettle Corn Co is a gourmet, hand-popped kettle corn company based out of Birmingham, Alabama
• TruFund – is a 501 (c) 3 certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) headquartered in New York City with field offices in Alabama and Louisiana. TruFund tailors its financial and technical assistance to the unique needs of each site—from contractor mobilization lending in New York and Louisiana to rural Black Belt initiatives in Alabama.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like Tanesha’s? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like TruFund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

When Aimee and Preston Osborne met and married in Fort Hood, Texas in 2001, their dream was to one day own a lake-side resort, an RV park, or something that would take them back to their rural roots. Aimee grew up in the Northwoods of Minnesota, Preston was born and raised in Ashe County, North Carolina, and both knew what it was like to live in a place where the natural beauty and remoteness drove the local tourism industry. For Preston, that was the Appalachian Trail, and for Aimee, that was Lakewood Lodge.

Aimee and Preston Osborne

The storied history of the 240-acre Lakewood Lodge goes back to 1906; however, Aimee’s grandparents didn’t come to own the “rundown old fishing camp,” as she called it, until the 1980s. According to Aimee, she lived with her parents and siblings in a double-wide tucked on the back 40 acres of the property, and everyone helped out with the resort. The lodge was 30 miles from the nearest town, which had a population of 900 people.

“When you grow up in a place like this, the idea that you can ever really come home and be super successful is slightly limited,” Aimee said. “It’s not to say you can’t do other things and be successful, but there’s no industry here beyond the resort industry, and the economy isn’t conducive to young people coming back here and working their way up the ranks.”

That mindset is partly what drove Aimee to enlist in the Army, where she met Preston. In a time before cell phones and the internet, the two would spend time in their one-bedroom apartment in Killeen, Texas flipping through copies of Log Home Living, dog-earing pages, and cutting out pictures that they both liked. “We always had that dream of where we wanted to end up,” Preston said.

Being in the military, however, meant that the Osbornes had a few more moves — and for Preston, five deployments — before they could bring their retirement dreams to fruition. The family was sent to bases in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Alaska before ending up in Colorado Springs. Over the next five years, Aimee left the military to become a massage therapist, and she took a job selling residential solar. She loved her job, but when the world lurched to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and her responsibilities transformed into telemarketing, she realized that if she had to be stuck at home on lockdown and working remotely, then she didn’t want to be in Colorado.

She did a Google search for Lakewood Lodge. Sure enough, it was for sale.

Making a Dream a Reality

Aimee called the listing agent, who in turn referred her to the bank that already financed the lodge. The bank said it was willing to loan Aimee money, but only for half of the amount she’d need to buy Lakewood. The Osbornes adjusted their dream and instead set their sights on smaller resorts in the area, which still cater to the region’s fishing, hiking, and weekend-getaway enthusiasts. Because Preston, a Sergeant First Class, couldn’t leave the military base because of COVID-19 restrictions, Aimee piled their children into the car and drove 16 hours from Colorado to Minnesota to begin looking at properties, none of which Aimee felt excited about.

Aimee’s return to the Northwoods, however, didn’t go unnoticed. The owners at Lakewood Lodge heard she was in the area and wanted to meet with her to see if there was anything they could do to help. Aimee felt hesitant. “I didn’t want to waste their time, and I didn’t want to waste our time on something that might not be possible,” she said. “But those other resorts were not going to work. That’s not where my heart was. My heart was here, at Lakewood.”

Aimee and Preston decided to do everything they could to raise the capital they needed to buy the resort. That’s how they got connected with Entrepreneur Fund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that works with entrepreneurs across northeast Minnesota, central Minnesota, and northwest Wisconsin to provide flexible business loans, skills development, and networking opportunities. CNote partners with CDFIs like Entrepreneur Fund in communities across America, funding loans to small businesses and empowering local entrepreneurs like the Osbornes.

In total, Aimee and Preston took out seven loans to purchase Lakewood Lodge; however, according to Aimee, the ongoing education and support they received from Entrepreneur Fund were arguably more important to them than the capital. “We had the passion,” she said, “but not the full knowledge of how to approach a bank and how to really put the funding together in a way that made sense. That’s what we needed the most.” Entrepreneur Fund was also able to “widen the conversation” and introduce the Osbornes to important contacts who they “had no idea existed,” but who nonetheless proved to be worthwhile and helpful resources.

From start to finish, the purchase took roughly six months to go through: six months that Aimee describes as an emotional rollercoaster. However, given both the global pandemic and the nuances of lining up seven funding streams, the two feel blessed that they were able to make it to their closing on November 3, 2020, which was attended by Lakewood Lodge’s previous owners, the Osbornes, and Entrepreneur Fund staff members. According to the couple, there were a lot of tears, but they didn’t feel nervous about what was next: owning and operating a 14-cabin resort.

“We were just wanting to get started,” Preston said. Aimee added that the two felt confident because of all the support they received. “It didn’t feel risky because seven other people believed in our ability to do this, and they told us they wanted to invest in us because they believed that we could do this. For us, that took all the fear away.”

Welcome to Your Dream

Not surprisingly, the Osbornes have settled into life as Lakewood Lodge’s owners, and the couple — and business — are thriving. Although they didn’t have time to take a victory lap after completing the purchase, they’ve been plenty busy maintaining the property and welcoming guests. Because the Canadian border remains closed due to COVID-19 restrictions and because of people’s stay-at-home-induced stir-craziness, Lakewood Lodge has continued to see high numbers of guests. Some are even early-booking for this coming fall because of the ongoing uncertainty.

“COVID has definitely increased outdoor sports and lifestyle,” Aimee said, “and the closed border has been a boon for business. It’s been good to revive the resort industry up here a little bit, and it’s also renewed the resort spirit, which is good for us.”

The Osbornes are hard-pressed to name their favorite thing about owning Lakewood Lodge. Aimee loves to attend craft shows and to support local artists, and after more than 20 years of adhering to a strict military schedule, Preston enjoys setting his own schedule and being his own boss. The two, however, agree that the thing that brings them the most joy is showing guests to their cabins and witnessing their excitement firsthand. After all, they share in that excitement, because it’s their Log Home Living dream that came true.

“The spirit of Lakewood Lodge isn’t about the buildings,” Aimee said, of returning to where she grew up. “It’s really about this land and this area and the people that come up here and enjoy it. There’s more than fishing. There’s the northern lights and sitting by the bonfire and enjoying friends and family and the lake. It’s about the simpler things in life that we don’t take the time to stop and do often enough. It’s just what we wanted.”

Learn More

• Lakewood Lodge specializes in providing year-round fun-filled vacations and awesome fishing on a quiet bay of Sand Lake, part of the Bowstring Chain of Lakes.
• The Entrepreneur Fund – a CNote partner and certified CDFI, actively partners with small business owners in northeast Minnesota, central Minnesota, and northwest Wisconsin to support small business growth and local economic development. The Entrepreneur Fund provides flexible financing, along with small business coaching and strategic support to promote a culture of entrepreneurship throughout the region.
• CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like The Entrepreneur Fund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Stefka Czarnecki Fanchi has always been a big believer in homeownership. Both of her parents were teachers; however, her dad “built” every house Stefka’s family ever lived in, whether that meant physically building the structure or making improvements to what was already built. According to Stefka, she has lots of childhood memories as a kid on construction sites, and she was aware, from an early age, how special it was — emotionally and financially — for a family to have a house to call home.

Stefka Fanchi, President and CEO of Elevation Community Land Trust

Given that passion, it’s not surprising that Stefka has only ever worked for nonprofits, including jobs in high school and college, as well as five years working in local government. However, in 2004, Stefka was able to weave her deep-seated passion for affordable housing into her career when she took a position at Habitat for Humanity of Colorado’s state support organization. For the next 14 years, Stefka helped to support the 30-some Habitat for Humanity affiliates across the state by fostering and developing partnerships and raising funds. Although Stefka loved her job, she couldn’t ignore the buzz that was being created at the end of 2017 about the creation of a new community land trust in the Metro Denver Area. Recognizing that there wasn’t a robust funding mechanism for affordable homeownership in the region, a group of funders created Elevation Community Land Trust to help shrink the gap and create permanently affordable homes.

The community land trust model blossomed out of the civil rights movement, and the first community land trust was formed in the late 1960s in rural Georgia by a group of Black farmers who wanted to own their own land. What they helped to create was a model in which they could communally own the land while at the same time creating opportunities for individual families to participate in the wealth that came from homeownership. Therefore, homes are less expensive because buyers aren’t buying the land, which is what escalates in cost over time, and in exchange for that discounted price, buyers agree to pass that opportunity onto the next buyer. In this way, by splitting the land from the houses and having a strict resale formula that limits the appreciation of homes, community land trusts are able to keep affordable housing affordable. Today, there are more than 230 community land trusts throughout the United States, with many more scattered across the globe.

Generally, these trusts are owned and operated by nonprofits, and unsurprisingly, Stefka wanted to get involved in Elevation Community Land Trust. She was particularly drawn in by the community land trust model itself. According to her, the typical way of investing in affordable homeownership has been via down-payment assistance, which is focused on the buyer, not the real estate. The community land trust model, she says, flips the script on the traditional approach to affordable housing by putting capital and resources into real estate, much like public infrastructure. “The community land trust model is a much more responsible use of public funds,” she said, “because it is able to be recycled time and time again so that we don’t have a big windfall or a big subsidy coming into one family. Instead, we’re able to make this so that generations of families can benefit from the same home.”

A Creative, Strategic Lender

Elevation Community Land Trust launched at the end of 2018, and Stefka took over as president and CEO in November of that year. Since then, the nonprofit has hired nearly a dozen staff members. More impressively, the trust has more than 200 homes in its portfolio and 75 homeowners have closed on their homes. Another 330-plus housing units are in the nonprofit’s immediate pipeline, meaning that they’ll be completed over the next two years.

The Elevation Community Land Trust Team

Stefka is the first to admit that the public-private partnership’s early success metrics are a result of a robust coalition of actors, including local municipalities, state agencies, housing authorities, foundations, individual donors, and Impact Development Fund (IDF), a Colorado-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that creates economic opportunity by delivering flexible capital to develop and preserve affordable housing and nonprofit facilities in under-served communities across the state. CNote partners with CDFIs like IDF in communities across the country, channeling capital to fund social missions like women’s empowerment, entrepreneurial funding, and affordable housing.

Stefka had become a cheerleader for CDFIs when she was working at Habitat for Humanity, where local affiliates needed local financing to build homes, and she welcomed the opportunity to work with IDF when she joined Elevation Community Land Trust. That was especially true when the nonprofit began work on one of its first projects: a 92-unit condominium development called La Tela, located in Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe. Even with public and private funds, Elevation Community Land Trust had to put $3 million into the project, which would take two years to complete. “It’s expensive to use conventional financing over that long of a hold,” Stefka said. “We started talking with IDF about our cashflow pinch points. The great thing about IDF is that they are strategic thinkers, and we started talking about what we wanted to accomplish, not what we needed, and how we can work together to get that done.”

According to Stefka, unlike other lenders, Elevation Community Land Trust was able to access Capital Magnet Fund (CMF) dollars through IDF, which came with a 1% interest rate. More so, IDF was able to work with Elevation Community Land Trust to save the nonprofit financing charges over time, which in turn reduces the total development cost of each unit of housing built. In addition to that low-cost capital, IDF also offered Stefka and her team industry know-how that they wouldn’t have received elsewhere. “Affordable housing projects are super complex,” she said. “One of the things that is often a challenge for a bank is the idea of doing something that is not the ‘normal way.’ The creativity, expertise, and willingness to think outside the box on things that might be traditionally unbankable really is where the value of IDF and other CDFIs lie.”

Building into the Future

These photos were taken in Westwood, Denver, the location of Elevation Community Land Trust’s Stay in Place Program.

Stefka and her team at Elevation Community Land Trust have lofty goals: together, they want to add 1,000 affordable home-ownership opportunities to the Colorado housing market by 2027. They don’t plan on stopping there; however, that’s the critical stabilization point where, organizationally, the trust will be able to bring in enough revenue to cover its operating costs, which means the nonprofit won’t have to rely on philanthropy to stay above water.

The need has never been greater. According to Stefka, over the past year, Elevation Community Land Trust has seen a 10-fold increase in its application rates. It’s too early to know if the inundation of people wanting to buy affordable homes is a result of COVID or something else, but the present reality has added a sense of urgency — and purpose — to the land trust’s day-to-day operations. That’s led to deepening conversations around how Elevation Community Land Trust can help to proactively create racial equity through its work. In its first impact evaluation, the nonprofit learned that the percentage of its homeowners who identify as Black, Asian, Latinx, and female-heads of household are as much as three times higher than the general market.   

“We’re looking at what tools are at our disposal so that we can make real impact generationally,” Stefka said. “Homeownership and building something for yourself and your family is something that’s a real cornerstone to American life, and when people are shut out from that opportunity, they are shut out from the American dream, so we want to do everything we can so that everybody can share in the prosperity that is part of this crazy real estate market that we’re experiencing in Colorado.”

Learn More

• Elevation Community Land Trust makes homeownership more accessible for Colorado families through the community land trust model, a proven tool for creating and preserving accessible, inclusive communities for generations.
• Impact Development Fund (IDF) is a Colorado-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that creates economic opportunity by delivering flexible capital to develop and preserve affordable housing and nonprofit facilities in under-served communities across the state.
• CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like Impact Development Fund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

If you ask Tawnya Dee Sanford what her secret is to running a successful business, she’ll tell you that she’s willing to give people a chance. After all, she wouldn’t be where she is today — as a person and as an entrepreneur — if it weren’t for the chances that people gave to her.

Tawnya was raised by her grandmother in a low-income household in a little town in Oklahoma. When she moved to San Antonio in the early 1990s to take an assistant manager job with a national restaurant chain, she thought she was moving up in the world. Instead, seven months later, she ended up homeless. A friend stepped in to help get a roof over her head, but then she was evicted. During her second tussle with homelessness, Tawnya lost her car, and her credit score nosedived. Still, she found a way to persevere.

“It was very humbling,” she said. “I started over twice. And the thing is, you can start over, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of dedication. You gotta have the want, and you have to put your hands to the plow and you have to work to make it happen and to change. It’s hard.”

Considering what she’d been through, starting an in-home daycare didn’t seem daunting to Tawnya, who, at 30, became a mother and wanted to work from home while she raised her daughter. With support from her husband and sister-in-law, she opened up the family home for business. Eleven years later, she wanted something bigger.

In 2011, Tawnya began to look for properties around town where she could open a larger daycare center. She felt like she struck gold when a friend put her in touch with the owners of a childcare facility who were looking to sell their building — and their business, The Little Engine Learning Center.

The owners liked Tawnya, however, they got cold feet and decided they weren’t ready to sell just yet. They asked Tawnya to instead come work for them for a summer. She ended up working there for four years. Then, when the time finally came to purchase the business, Tawnya ran into a different challenge: finding a bank that would give her a loan.

“Every time I’d call a bank about a loan, they’d tell me ‘no,’” Tawnya said. “They told me I needed to have between $80,000 and $100,000 before they’d even talk to me. It was very depressing.”

Fortunately, Tawnya went to Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union (RBFCU), who referred her to LiftFund, a San Antonio-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). CNote partners with CDFIs like LiftFund in communities across America, funding loans to small businesses and empowering local entrepreneurs like Tawnya.

In 2015, Tawnya was able to get a 401(k)-backed loan that allowed her to purchase the business portion of The Little Engine Learning Center, and in 2019, LiftFund helped her to secure a loan so that she could purchase the building, which she’d been leasing from the previous owners.

“LiftFund seemed really interested in my story,” Tawnya said, “and they wanted to help. I felt like I gave them my life’s history, from financial to personal, but they really wanted to get to know who I was. They wanted to know who they’d be investing in, and working with them has been great.”

Tawnya with one of her employees at The Little Engine Learning Center.

It’s no surprise that Tawnya’s most exciting day as a business owner was the day she signed all of her loan paperwork with LiftFund. For her, it was a tangible reminder of how far she’d come.

“Nothing has ever come easy, and I’ve struggled for most of my life,” she said. “I’ve always had to fight for everything I’ve wanted, so to have my dream come to fruition was amazing. I don’t know if you can put into words how exciting that day was for me. I got in the car, and I just cried while my husband held me. Who would’ve thought? It took me 20 years. That’s why you don’t give up on your dreams.”

Today, Tawnya gets to focus on helping others to dream big, and that means building up the children who come to The Little Engine Learning Center so that they can “be great in their futures,” as she puts it. Tawnya and her team of 13 full-time staff strive to teach morals and values at the daycare, and she loves every child that walks through her doors. The center accepts children regardless of their background, meaning that Tawnya doesn’t turn away kids who have been kicked out of other daycares because of behavioral issues.

“In spite of their behavior, you have to love these kids beyond where they are,” she said. “We don’t really know what goes on at home, so I just love them and we make things work.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tawnya was looking for another property to expand her business; however, she paused that search. She says the crisis will push back her plans to grow The Little Engine Learning Center into a second location, which she wants to be located in a low-income area. Until then, she’ll continue to support her children, her staff, and her community as best as she can.

Given her own personal journey, Tawnya has a particularly soft spot for homeless individuals, and she helps with providing food and medical supplies however she can. She also buys groceries for families in need, and she’s helping to organize a diaper, baby wipe, and food distribution in her community.

“My heart is so squishy,” she laughed. “I think when you lose everything, you realize what’s really important in life.”

Learn More

• The Little Engine Learning Center
• LiftFund is a community small business lender that transforms lives by opening doors and providing capital, financial coaching, tools, and resources to entrepreneurs who do not have access to loans from commercial sources. Since 1994 LiftFund has provided over $360 million in capital, propelling the dreams of over 20,000 diverse small businesses throughout its 13 state footprint.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like this? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like LiftFund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

When Steph Primm left the for-profit world and moved to Maine, she wanted to do something more meaningful than help other people make money. Although she’d grown up in the New York metro area going to summer camp in Maine, it wasn’t until she moved to “The Pine Tree State” after a successful career in marketing that her eyes were opened to one of the state’s biggest struggles: poverty. In her new community, Primm met people her age who hadn’t made it through sixth grade. “It was evident we desperately needed a more equitable landscape,” she said, “so that every hard-working family has a chance at meeting basic human needs and education so that they have a chance for a hopeful future.”

Primm had found something more meaningful than helping companies turn a profit.

Stephanie Primm, Executive Director of Knox County Homeless Coalition

Coming up on eight years ago, Primm was asked to help re-open the Knox County Homeless Coalition ( KCHC)  Family Shelter, Hospitality House. Today, KCHC is a homeless services organization that includes a family shelter, comprehensive case management, and a youth program offering a drop-in center, outreach, case management, and shelter solutions for youth. As executive director, she’s grown her team from two and a half employees to a caring, courageous, and professional team of over 50, and the coalition currently provides case management for over 500 individuals. Additionally, Knox County Homeless Coalition offers educational services, and transportation services, as well as operating a food and emergency supply pantry and depot. “Sadly,” Primm said, “we’ve ramped up significantly over the past eight years to meet the increasing need.”

That “increasing need” has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Primm, who also serves as the chair of Maine’s Statewide Homeless Council, says that pre-pandemic, homeless shelters were crowded, and most often overcrowded, and always under-funded–especially during the winter months. However, because of the virus, those configurations no longer work, meaning that shelters like the ones operated by the Knox County Homeless Coalition have had to “decompress” their capacities in order to maximize safety concerns surrounding COVID-19.

(From Left to Right) Rich Norman (Board Member), Stephanie “Steph” Primm (Executive Director), Laurie Mills (Housing Manager), and Jesse Shimer (Assistant Shelter Manager).

“There’s a lot of strain on the system,” Primm said, “and the demand is spiking. We have to reduce capacity for health and safety, yet there are no other resources in place. People are losing jobs, hours are being cut, and people cannot pay rent. And on top of that emotional stress is at an all-time high—anxiety, depression, substance use disorder are at exponentially increasing and complex levels making our jobs extremely challenging. ” According to Primm, these realities, coupled with the exponential increase in home prices and sales to out-of-staters, have helped to create a perfect storm for homelessness and a crisis of lack of affordable housing in Maine, especially along the Mid-coast.

Building Affordable Housing for the Future

Therefore, one of the Knox County Homeless Coalition’s major tenets is to identify and secure permanent affordable housing in the communities where it works. Unsurprisingly, to be successful, Primm and her team rely on a network of community partners, including Midcoast Habitat for Humanity, Maine State Housing Authority, and The Genesis Fund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Since 1992, The Genesis Fund has been working to develop and support affordable housing and community facilities across Maine, mainly by providing both financing and technical assistance to increase the supply of affordable housing. CNote partners with CDFIs like The Genesis Fund in communities across the country, channeling capital to fund social missions like affordable housing, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurial funding, and more.

Primm has been working with The Genesis Fund since Knox County Homeless Coalition’s early days when the CDFI helped the nonprofit acquire its first shelter and plot of land. A couple of years later, The Genesis Fund financed Primm and her team so that they could purchase the adjacent property, which now houses the coalition’s offices, food pantry, and supply depot. The collective land, which Knox County Homeless Coalition owns, is big enough for the nonprofit to one day build tiny houses, which will expand its shelter capacity. Additionally, early in their partnership, Knox County Homeless Coalition had a line of credit with The Genesis Fund, which has since been paid off. “Genesis really invested in getting to know our mission, our aspirations, and us early on,” Primm said. “They’re always so generous with their time, wisdom, and advice.”

Today, Knox County Homeless Coalition and The Genesis Fund are working together on two affordable housing projects. The first project is to purchase a newly renovated duplex in Rockland and to make it a “forever affordable property.” A Genesis team member assisted Primm with the intense process of applying for a housing trust fund grant that, if received, will allow Knox County Homeless Coalition to not only purchase the property but to own it as an affordable housing project, in perpetuity, with zero debt.

“These grant application processes are very complicated,” Primm said, “and most of us who run homeless organizations are running around like one-armed paper hangers doing our best to stretch resources and save lives in the face of increasing need—especially during a pandemic. We have very little administrative bandwidth, so Genesis is really helping us.”

The second project is a bigger affordable housing project in Rockland that will include roughly 20 units of affordable housing, including four to six Habitat for Humanity home-ownership homes. The development will be situated on a single piece of land, within walking distance to town, that was purchased with $500,000 from the Maine State Housing Authority. According to Primm, the housing will be a mix of duplexes for families and small-footprint cottages for individuals or couples. Once the project is completed, Knox County Homeless Coalition will own the affordable housing units, and the nonprofit will incorporate them into its program offerings, where renters will benefit from not just a roof over their heads, but professional support on their path to stable sustainable independence, and the opportunity to build equity over time.

Once again, The Genesis Fund is helping Primm and her team navigate the complexities of the endeavor, including grant applications and overcoming zoning, planning, and development hurdles. She’s hoping that when it’s all said and done, the project will be 100 percent debt-free. “They’re providing the technical assistance,” Primm said, “but it may be that we tap into some of their financing to bridge any timing gaps between the grants so that the project can stay on track with construction. That’s a wonderful option to have on the table.”

Because of their ongoing partnership with The Genesis Fund, rather than get bogged down by the tedious technicalities of applications, Primm and her team can focus on a different set of complexities: helping unhoused individuals and families get back on their feet.

“It’s complicated to put a life back together without help,” Primm said. “Navigating the homeless sector feels like this unmanageable bowl of linguine for people who are already traumatized and struggling, so that’s what we and others in the state like us do: we are caring professional partners who help put those pieces together for people. We find strengths and build upon them, building confidence, possibilities, and hope for a better future.”

Primm hopes that COVID-19 illuminates the state’s lack of an organized emergency response system that addresses homelessness as part of protecting public health. “The silver lining is that COVID has shed light on this for the first time,” she said. “People are more aware of it and more aware of what we are working on, and affordable housing needs are definitely on the radar—where they should be.  I hope that’ll help in the years to come.”

Learn More

• The Genesis Fund provides innovative financing by soliciting investment loans from individuals, churches, corporations, and foundations, and then re-lending the money at favorable terms to nonprofit organizations developing affordable housing and community facilities for underserved people and communities throughout Maine and beyond.
• Knox County Homeless Coalition is a homeless services organization that includes a family shelter, comprehensive case management, and a youth program offering a drop-in center, outreach, case management, and shelter solutions for youth.
• CNote is a women-led investment platform that empowers individuals and institutions to invest locally to further economic equality, racial justice, gender equity, and address climate change.

For as long as Cheri Witt-Brown can remember, she’s known her way around a residential construction site. Her father owned a home-building and real estate company, and Cheri landed her first construction job — albeit picking up nails — when she was just three years old. She was paid a penny per nail for her efforts. Cheri has come a long way since those early days helping out with her family’s business, but the love that she developed for building homes is as strong today as it was when she was a child.

It might even be stronger.

Cheri Witt-Brown, Executive Director of the Greeley Weld Habitat for Humanity

Cheri is the executive director of Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity, an affiliate of the international home-building nonprofit in Weld County, Colorado, a roughly Connecticut-sized county located on the state’s Front Range. Whereas the mission and organization are a natural fit for Cheri, she didn’t join the nonprofit until just over five years ago. Prior to that, she’d spent 25 years growing her family’s home-building business. Cheri spent the first 10 years working alongside her father; however, in the late 1990s, she bought the company from him and continued to run it until her retirement 15 years later. During that time, she simultaneously owned and operated a couple of design businesses and retail stores, and she dedicated a lot of time to doing volunteer work in her community.

A self-identifying “accidental entrepreneur,” Cheri didn’t consider a career in the nonprofit world until after she retired from her various for-profit business ventures and returned to Greeley, the town where she was born. Cheri’s first nonprofit job was with the local food bank, where she spent “three amazing years;” however, once the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate heard about Cheri’s construction background, they made a point to offer her a job every few months. Finally, the nonprofit’s persistence paid off. In October of 2015, Cheri left the food bank and took over the reins of Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity. According to her, it’s been one of the best decisions that she’s ever made. “When you’re kind of wired to build things,” she said, “that never leaves you, and you always just want to be building something.”

That doesn’t mean that the transition was easy for Cheri. Instead, Cheri soon learned that there was a stark distinction between the food bank and Habitat for Humanity in terms of being able to meet the needs of the community. Whereas the food bank had a steady supply of food coming in and the nonprofit could meet the needs of almost every family that walked through its doors, Habitat for Humanity was the opposite. Cheri says that for every 100 families that approached her and her team, they could maybe help one of them — in two or three years. “That wasn’t good enough,” she said. “And that became my personal motivation.”

Fortunately, unlike a lot of other areas in Colorado (and across the country), Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity still had affordable land around it. Cheri leaned into her background in building communities and real estate development, and she and her team set out to build affordable housing for as many community members as they could: an expensive deliverable, but an essential one considering that currently, one in five Americans pays more than 50% of their pre-tax income on housing.

An Eye-Catching Partnership

Luckily, before Cheri even joined the organization, Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity already had a long-standing partnership with Impact Development Fund (IDF), a Colorado-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that creates economic opportunity by delivering flexible capital to develop and preserve affordable housing and nonprofit facilities in under-served communities across the state. CNote partners with CDFIs like IDF in communities across the country, channeling capital to fund social missions like affordable housing, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurial funding, and more.

Cheri Witt-Brown with Megan Ferguson, Director of Operations for Impact Development Fund

According to Cheri, IDF was instrumental in her onboarding at Habitat, and they helped her to navigate and understand some of the complexities of her new job as executive director. More than that, however, the CDFI has been an essential and ongoing source of capital and technical assistance for the nonprofit. For example, IDF extended a $500,000, 1% interest loan to Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity so that Cheri and her team could meet the match requirement to receive a $1 million federal grant to fund an innovative development project in Evans, which was devastated by floods in 2013. Whereas Habitat now owns those single-family homes and their co-developers Commonwealth Companies own high-quality apartment rentals, Cheri credits IDF with making it happen. “We would not have been able to meet those federal requirements and do that without that half-a-million-dollar loan,” she said.

A ground blessing ceremony for a future zero net energy home in Evans, Colorado

Since then, Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity and IDF have embarked on several projects together, and IDF has assisted Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity with strategic planning, messaging, and applying for grants. The CDFI has been particularly helpful in developing long-term financial modeling for Cheri’s team so that the nonprofit doesn’t over-leverage itself. That includes helping Habitat with technical matters ranging from legal requirements to underwriting to getting families into their homes. “They’ve been phenomenal at looking at the projects we have underway,” Cheri said, “and understanding what kind of financing and mechanisms we will need to bring those projects live.”

According to Cheri, IDF’s ability to make sure that Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity doesn’t just look good on paper but actually is good on paper has allowed it to attract larger projects, investors, and donors. For example, recently, a reputable, multi-density development and building company approached Cheri and told her that it wanted to donate 30 acres of land — a $16 million value — to Habitat so it could build 184 lots of affordable housing in Greeley. The mix of single-family homes and affordable rental units will be similar to what the nonprofit is currently completing in Evans. “Had we not been able to cast the vision for what a quality project like this could look like with Impact Development Fund,” Cheri said, “we wouldn’t be attracting these kinds of investors into our work at Habitat.”

Building Affordable Housing for Everyone

In its 30-plus years of existence, Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity has built more than 160 homes; however, according to Cheri, prior to her arrival, the affiliate averaged building between three and five homes in a single year. Not surprisingly, that average has increased dramatically during her tenure as executive director. Incredibly, not only have Cheri and her team built more homes and housed more families during the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before in the nonprofit’s 34-year history, but they’ve done it without their usual army of volunteers. As is expected, slowing down isn’t in the blueprints. “My hope,” Cheri said, “is that we can eventually take this model of building a continuum of affordable housing and duplicate it all across Weld County and across the nation.”

Since returning to Greeley, Cheri has grown deep roots in the community, and it’s not uncommon for her to walk down the street on any given day and run into a donor, an investor, a volunteer, or a family that she’s worked with at Habitat. Despite the joy that those encounters bring her, Cheri says that the most magical moments continue to be when she gets to introduce a family to their new home. “There’s just a look in their eyes,” Cheri said. “It’s relief, and it’s gratitude, and you can just see the sense that they can breathe knowing for certain that this is their home and that things are going to be okay for their future. It’s just such an honor and privilege to be a part of that.”

Learn More

• Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity is part of a global, nonprofit housing organization whose vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live.
• Impact Development Fund (IDF) is a Colorado-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that creates economic opportunity by delivering flexible capital to develop and preserve affordable housing and nonprofit facilities in under-served communities across the state.
• CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like Impact Development Fund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Since Michea Rahman was a child, she always knew that she wanted to one day work with children. She idolized teachers, adored Sesame Street, and, unsurprisingly, grew up to become a middle school arts educator in her hometown of Houston, Texas. One day, a fellow teacher asked Michea if she’d be willing to work with her autistic students on a theatrical performance. It was a life-changing experience. Michea got to know the students’ speech therapist, and, long story short, she fell in love with it.

The experience filled Michea with excitement and led her to alter her career trajectory. The Howard University alumna enrolled in a graduate program at Texas Woman’s University (TWU) and set out to research what would be the most effective way to blend language and services with children with autism and language delay. It was through her clinical placements at TWU that Michea discovered that she had an innate talent for working with young children as a speech-language pathologist.

While she continued to gain skills and learn techniques in early intervention clinics for medically fragile children, Michea realized that there was a tremendous need in her community: kids from underserved and underrepresented neighborhoods didn’t have access to quality services where they lived. Instead, they had to leave their neighborhoods and travel to more affluent parts of Houston to see a speech pathologist, which placed pressure on parents who were already strapped for time and resources. “There was this need,” Michea said, “and I thought there has to be a way to bring convenient, quality services to children where their families don’t have to leave their neighborhood and sit in traffic and get stressed out to be there on time.”

In late 2018, with the support of her husband and 13-year-old daughter, Michea opened the Children’s Language Center, where she could offer sensory-based play to children with language delay and autism at price-per-sessions much lower than elsewhere in the city. For Michea, she wanted to prove that she could blend quality care and affordability in a clinic located in the same underserved community where she was born and raised. “Personally, if I want other people to make investments in my community and to respect my community and to make these kinds of services more accessible,” she said, “I felt like then I needed to do it too. You need to practice what you preach.”

We’re In This Together

Whereas Michea admits that it took some time for her clinic to get up and running, February 2020 was easily her best month. Within a month’s time, however, her business ground to a halt. As the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, Michea was faced with cancellation after cancellation until the lockdown effectively shuttered her business. According to her, she was woefully unprepared.

That’s when Michea saw an advertisement for TruFund about a business resiliency course. TruFund is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that invests in small businesses in New York, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. CNote partners with CDFIs like TruFund in communities across the country, funding loans to small businesses, and empowering local entrepreneurs like Michea.

Although Michea thought that it would be ironic to take a class on business resiliency while at the same time thinking about closing her clinic, she signed up. During the first session, Michea was so stressed and nervous, that she put on her headphones and began to clean her house while listening to the call. By the end of it, however, she was sitting on the chair in her bedroom crying. “They weren’t sad tears,” she said. “That call gave me so much hope. Until then, I felt like the only one going through the pandemic and that I was losing everything. But TruFund was saying I wasn’t alone, and that was beautiful.”

That night, Michea sent TruFund an email. Like other entrepreneurs enrolled in the CDFI’s resiliency class, she was able to receive real-time information about PPP loans, and she was able to get everything that she needed in order so that when the time came to apply for assistance, she was ready to go. In the end, Michea received her PPP loan from TruFund, and although the amount wasn’t much, it was enough to give her business the momentum it needed to survive.

Another source of motivation, however, was her teenage daughter, who dealt Michea the tough words that she needed to hear in those trying times. “I told her that I thought I’d need to close the clinic, and she said ‘if you’re going to give up and it’s that easy for you to give up, then call all of your playmates and tell them you just gave up and they have nowhere to go after this,’” Michea said. “It was hard to hear from a child because of course, I don’t have the courage to make that phone call, but I raised her like that, and I was proud of her for giving me that swift kick in my emotions and reminding me that failure was not an option.”

With the financial support and resiliency plan from TruFund, along with the tough love from her daughter, Michea pushed forward into 2020 with a renewed sense of purpose. Because she couldn’t provide her services online, she secured the personal protective equipment (PPE) and cleaning supplies she needed to safely reopen her clinic. After the resiliency class ended, Michea took a marketing class through TruFund, which helped her to begin to grow her business. Additionally, because so many people lost their jobs in the early months of the pandemic, families who didn’t live around the Children’s Language Center came to Michea’s clinic, because hers was the only one in Houston that they could afford on a single income.

The clear mask that Michea is wearing allows children to visually observe her as she produces sounds and words. These clear masks have enabled the continuation of quality in-person services during the pandemic.

Today, Michea’s clinic is not only thriving, it’s doing better than ever before the pandemic started. She is both hiring her first full-time staff member and looking for a larger space so that she can expand and serve even more families in her community. “I’m just so fortunate,” she said, “and I feel proud and excited. I really have TruFund to thank, because I was drowning in the ocean, and they saved me.”

Going forward, Michea wants to continue to grow the Children’s Language Center and expand into other underserved areas in Houston — and beyond. She’s driven, in part, by the same sense of togetherness and camaraderie that she received from TruFund.

“If we can’t give parents hope, then what are we here for?” Michea said. “I tell parents that we’re in this together and that I’m invested in their child’s growth, because their growth is my growth and Houston’s growth, and our city gets better when our children get better.”

Learn More

• Children’s Language Center has a mission to provide quality pediatric speech therapy services to children while bringing hope to families and strengthening our collective communities.
• TruFund – is a 501 (c) 3 certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) headquartered in New York City with field offices in Alabama and Louisiana. TruFund tailors its financial and technical assistance to the unique needs of each site—from contractor mobilization lending in New York and Louisiana to rural Black Belt initiatives in Alabama.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like Michea’s? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like TruFund, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

When Julia Sleeper-Whiting moved to Lewiston, Maine to attend Bates College, she never could have imagined that she’d be a small business owner in the community more than 15 years later — and not as a veterinarian, which she originally planned to become as a first-year undergraduate student. Julia intended to specialize in animal care, but after struggling in her introductory chemistry class she realized that she needed to try something different, and her community is certainly thankful she did.

Julia Sleeper-Whiting

That something different turned out to be gender issues and an education course with a service-learning commitment of 30 hours. According to Julia, her placement in an English Language Learning (ELL) class was her first exposure to Lewiston, the state’s second-largest city. It was an eye-opening experience for the Bangor native. “I didn’t even know what ELL was,” Julia said. “I had grown up in Maine and had access to a high-quality education, yet, there were so many things I did not know about. Being two generations in from my own family’s immigration story from Lebanon, it was crazy to me that I knew nothing about refugees’ or these kids’ lives.”

Julia became intrigued with education, and her experience working with ELL students dramatically changed her career trajectory. She pivoted away from veterinary sciences and majored in psychology and education. Her initial service-learning placement in Lewiston, however, didn’t end after those first 30 hours in 2005. Instead, that was only the beginning of Julia’s work in the community. In fact, because she and her classmate, Kim Sullivan, spent so much time in the community as undergraduates supporting kids and providing homework help, the two joked that Bates was their extracurricular activity and Lewiston was their educational focus. “The experience was a privilege,” Julia said, “and I began to feel connected to a community in a way like I had never experienced in my whole life.”

Not surprisingly, when Julia graduated from Bates, she didn’t end the work she was doing in Lewiston. Instead, she continued to offer homework help and tutoring in the community while she completed her master’s studies in leadership and organization studies from the University of Southern Maine. In the summer of 2011, she co-founded Tree Street Youth with Kim Sullivan, her Bates alumna, to be a summer youth camp for the same students they worked with throughout the school year.

Whereas Julia and Kim didn’t have a business model, they both had plenty of passion, not to mention a strong commitment to the Tree Street neighborhood in downtown Lewiston. They were fortunate to find a vacant property (a former daycare facility) to host their camp, and even luckier that the landlord was willing to give them a two-month-for-one special on rent. Although the old commercial building needed some work, the community came out to support Julia and Kim, and with a fresh coat of paint, Tree Street Youth was up and running.

A Google Search, and a Lucky Encounter

Two years after opening Tree Street Youth, Julia received word that the building they’d been renting was being put on the market. She worried that if the property changed hands, a new landlord wouldn’t want to keep Tree Street Youth in the building; but, she also knew that her organization didn’t have the capital to purchase the building.

Not knowing where to turn, Julia Googled “how a nonprofit purchases a building.” The Genesis Fund, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), popped up. Julia, however, was unfamiliar with CDFIs. Instead, she chose to reach out to traditional banks to explore different lending options. Each told her that it wasn’t going to happen. Yet, as chance would have it, Julia ran into Bill Floyd, then executive director of The Genesis Fund, a few weeks later at a workshop in Augusta.

“Bill said ‘why don’t I come see what you’re doing,’” Julia said. “I’ll never forget the day. Our old building had very little airflow, and it was 90 degrees in there. We met in what we treated as an office, which wasn’t really an office, overlooking the play yard. We were both dripping sweat, surrounded by screaming kids and basketballs thudding against the wall, and he goes “you’re going to own this in a year.’”

Bill was true to his word. Within 12 months, Tree Street Youth owned the building. Since 1992, The Genesis Fund has been working to develop and support affordable housing and community facilities across Maine, mainly by providing both financing and technical assistance to community organizations and nonprofits like Tree Street Youth. CNote partners with CDFIs like The Genesis Fund in communities across the country, channeling capital to fund social missions like affordable housing, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurial funding, and more.

After purchasing the building in 2014, Julia and her team set out to fundraise the necessary capital to renovate the entire facility. Through both a public campaign, which received contributions from nearly 400 community members and a major gifts campaign, Tree Street Youth was able to raise the money it needed for construction. By November 2019, after three years and two phases of construction, Tree Street Youth unveiled its renovated building to the community. The nonprofit is currently in the process of raising funds so that it can burn its mortgage by the end of 2021.

In addition to providing the loan itself, The Genesis Fund provided Tree Street Youth with bridge lending so that the nonprofit didn’t have to stop construction while it continued to fundraise. More so, Bill and his team worked alongside Julia throughout the construction and renovation experience, lending their industry know-how and expertise. “Providing those loans was critical,” Julia said, “but having Bill and Liza [Fleming-Ives] as my point people was invaluable because it gave me more confidence. We would not be where we are, or potentially even exist if they had not essentially taken a risk to want to support us.”

Rooted in the Community, Ever-Growing

With the stress, uncertainty, and distraction of not having a guaranteed long-term space in their community behind them, today, Julia and her growing team at Tree Street Youth are able to focus on developing programming, forging new partnerships, and better serving their students. From the very beginning, all of Tree Street Youth’s programming has emerged out of needs voiced by the community. For example, according to Julia, Tree Street started its college prep program because kids wanted support to go to college, and the nonprofit started its leadership program because students wanted jobs helping other kids.

“Our vision is to cultivate leaders who fear less, love more and dream big, and build communities united across lines of difference,” Julia said. “The idea is that by supporting youth to recognize their passions and reach for their fullest potential, what that essentially does is cultivate them into leaders who then will go out and solve the issues around them.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tree Street Youth served between 600 and 700 children (pre-kindergarten to 12 grade) annually. Today, however, the organization is only able to serve roughly 100 students in person, and given the realities of the pandemic, much of the current work being done by the nonprofit is related to supporting students struggling with remote learning. Still, Julia is thankful that she and her team have a building where kids can come, spread out, and be safe, and despite the pandemic, Tree Street Youth is committed to offering year-round programming grounded in academic support, leadership development, and social-emotional enrichment, the latter of which was created and designed in partnership with Maine’s Department of Corrections to be both preventative and responsive to youth who come into contact with the juvenile justice system.

As much as Tree Street Youth has evolved over the years, one of Julia’s favorite things is when youth come back to work for the nonprofit as staff members. According to her, a number of Tree Stree alumni have worked for the organization (including two current staffers), and it’s always special for her when she can entrust a kid who’s “grown up with Tree Street” with a key to the building.

“Tree Street literally grew out of the community, no pun intended,” Julia said. “There’s been so much influence from so many people over the years. It’s an example of what can truly happen when every member of a community comes together to support their kids, and how empowered kids can truly change a whole community.”

Learn More

• The Genesis Fund provides innovative financing by soliciting investment loans from individuals, churches, corporations, and foundations, and then re-lending the money at favorable terms to nonprofit organizations developing affordable housing and community facilities for underserved people and communities throughout Maine and beyond.
• Tree Street Youth supports the youth of Lewiston-Auburn, Maine through academics, the arts, and athletics.
• CNote is a women-led investment platform that empowers individuals and institutions to invest locally to further economic equality, racial justice, gender equity, and address climate change.

Felicia Parks was always interested in business; however, it wasn’t until her two sons were grown adults before she decided to try her hand at it. In fact, her sons were the inspiration that propelled her to open her own franchise.

After her youngest son graduated high school, he launched his own janitorial service. Unfortunately, the business never took off. “It was so disappointing to see him come home every day getting rejected,” Felicia said. “People already had an idea of who they thought he was just based on who he was as a young Black man. So, I wanted to start something where I could make a difference in my community and do something to bring in kids like my son who just needed somebody to give them a bit of a chance.”

That’s when Felicia and her sons, Christopher and Camren, decided to open a Jimmy John’s store in the same Atlanta neighborhood where she was born and raised. Christopher and Camren ran the store while Felicia managed the business operations and continued to work her full-time job with the federal government. “It was scary because it’s something no one in my family had ever done,” Felicia, a veteran, said. “I really didn’t know anyone who had taken this kind of step before, and it’s a lot of money going into a franchise, and it takes a lot of commitment.”

Neither the commitment nor the finances, however, phased Felicia, who credits her time in the military as preparing her to have the mental fortitude, the resilience, and the self-belief required to be a successful entrepreneur. Additionally, during her time in the service, Felicia learned when it was time to ask for help. That’s ultimately what led her to the Small Business Development Center in her community, who in turn connected her with Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs (ACE), an Atlanta-based Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI). CNote partners with CDFIs like ACE in communities across America, funding loans to small businesses, providing technical assistance, and empowering local entrepreneurs like Felicia.

Initially, ACE was able to assist Felicia with her business operations via a business coach; however, when COVID-19 hit, Felicia needed more than coaching: she needed capital. She went from a staff of roughly 25 to a team of her, her general manager, and, on a good day, one other employee. Sales were down 64% and she found herself behind on all of her payments. Whereas the winter months are usually (and expectedly) slow for Felicia’s business, the pandemic erased any hope for a spring upswing, and at one point, she thought she might have to give up on the business and file for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, while Felicia was keeping her Jimmy John’s outpost open so that she could provide delivery and drive-through meal service to her community, she was doing her best to secure PPP funding. “We were struggling,” she said, “but we were doing everything we could so that the elderly and our regular customers who didn’t want to come out because of safety could still have Jimmy John’s.”

After being rejected from all of the traditional financial institutions and banks that had helped her in the past, Felicia finally received a bridge loan from ACE to cover some of her operating costs and, as she put it, “keep [her] head above water” until she could get a PPP loan through a different lender. Incredibly, unlike many of the business owners around her, Felicia never had to shutter her restaurant. Instead, she was able to keep the doors open and slowly bring back more and more of her employees, particularly the single parents whose kids were doing remote learning from home.

Now, as she’s preparing for life after the pandemic, not to mention having to pay back her loans, Felicia is similarly relying on ACE to provide her with advice and guidance on how to navigate the next 12 months. Additionally, she’s been able to take advantage of ACE’s online resources on marketing, management, and finance, all geared toward getting her business back up and running after COVID. Not surprisingly, however, Felicia likes the personal counseling she gets best. “I’m always able to call up Ms. Bonita [Doster],” she said. “Just being able to talk to her and have her understand and follow me through this journey has really helped me a lot.”

Whereas ACE has been right there next to Felicia throughout the pandemic, notably absent were her sons, who left the family business nearly two years ago to begin their own entrepreneurial ventures. Today, they both have their own successful businesses, one in Atlanta, and the other in Vietnam. For someone like Felicia, who opened a franchise to show her kids how to run a business, their success is what drives her to create those same opportunities for her employees.

“I have kids who come in and work here, and they learn about starting their own businesses,” she said. “And several of them leave to go do that. One of my managers has a catering business. A former general manager left to open his own photography business. Another is now a rapper. This is why I wanted to start my own business.”

Felicia’s lead-by-example mentality, along with the mentorship she provides her employees, takes many forms, including facilitating staff training sessions on financial literacy topics like filing taxes, budgeting, balancing checkbooks, and opening (and managing) a bank account. In Felicia’s mind, by investing in her employees’ futures, she’s taking the good fortune that she’s been dealt in life and paying it forward.

“I didn’t grow up wealthy,” she said. “I grew up in one of those situations where a lot of kids don’t make it through; but, I was blessed enough to make it. So, I just always want kids to know, no matter where you are, you can bring yourself out of that with hard work and dedication and commitment and focus, and you can get anywhere you want to be.”

Learn More

• Jimmy John’s
• Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs (ACE) – ACE is an SBA Microloan Intermediary, a USDA Intermediary Relender and a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI).
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like Felicia’s? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like ACE, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Gloria Dickerson wants to change the way people think. It’s no easy task, particularly when it comes to encouraging low-income communities to dream bigger than the world they know. However, Gloria Dickerson is no stranger to adversity.

Gloria was born into an impoverished family of sharecroppers in Drew, Mississippi. She was one of 13 children, and although her family was poor, Gloria says her most valuable assets as a child were her parents. Her mother, Mae Bertha Carter, was active in the Civil Rights Movement and The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mae Bertha Carter made clear in action that she wanted better for her children.

Gloria Dickerson standing next to a photo of her mother, Mae Bertha Carter.

“She didn’t like being a sharecropper, being hungry at night,” Gloria said. “And she didn’t like it when the plantation owner came by and told her that her children couldn’t go to school because they got to get the cotton out of the field. She knew that wasn’t right, and she made it up in her mind that her children were not going to have to live in poverty for the rest of their lives the way she had come up. She didn’t know how, but she was determined.”

In 1964, it became clear what it would take to break Mae Bertha Carter’s family’s cycle of poverty: sending her kids to integrate the Drew School District.

Although Brown v. Board of Education had found segregation of children in public schools unconstitutional in 1954, the Supreme Court decision had largely left it up to states to decide when to integrate their schools. Come 1964, however, states like Mississippi still hadn’t taken any action, prompting the Federal government to threaten to pull federal funding. That’s when the Drew School District adopted what was called Freedom of Choice, which meant that families in the district got to choose where to send their children to school.

In 1965, Mae Bertha Carter chose to send her seven school-aged children to the all-white school, where she knew they’d get a better education. The FBI followed the children to school for the first week, after which they decided the family was safe. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

Gloria and her siblings, spread between first grade and eleventh grade, were the only Black students in the school. Their peers threw chalk at them and showered them with spitballs. White students terrorized them in the hallways and called them terrible names, at home things were even worse. People fired guns into the house so that the family had to resort to sleeping on the floor, and people plowed their gardens and released their pigs. The family was even evicted from the plantation where they lived and worked.

“My momma used to get on the bed every day,” Gloria said, “and she’d pray when we got on that school bus, and say ‘please Lord, please send my kids home safely.’ Then, at the end of the day when we’d get off the school bus, she’d be there, counting us one by one because she didn’t know if all of us would be coming home or not.”

Gloria says that people did everything they could to try to stop her and her siblings from going to school and to change their minds. In the end, it didn’t work. Instead, the family not only kept sending its kids to the formerly all-white school, but in 1967, it sued the school district on the grounds that it was an intolerable burden on children to have to go through what Gloria and her siblings had to go through to get an education. Gloria’s family won the lawsuit, and the Drew School District threw out Freedom of Choice and school-based segregation in 1969.

When asked, Gloria refers to her time in the all-white high school as both the best and the worst of times. Amidst the external struggles and the social upheaval taking place around her, she learned how to be in solitude and in silence, and she picked up important study skills. She got her education, and one by one, Gloria and her siblings received NAACP scholarships to attend the University of Mississippi, better known as Ole Miss. Each of them later walked across the graduation stage, diploma in hand.

Gloria passed the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam and later returned to school to get her M.B.A. On paper, she’d done it — she’d succeeded in accomplishing something and pulling herself up to the middle class. In 1999, she got a job as a corporate controller with Kellogg Foundation. Five years, later, however, she was ready to get out of the back office and back into the community. The foundation sent her to Jackson, Mississippi to be a program officer, where she coordinated capacity-building efforts with community-based organizations across the Mississippi Delta.

That all came to an abrupt end, however, when the Mid-South Delta division of the foundation she worked under was dissolved in 2009. Gloria was forced into an early retirement, which raised some big questions for her. She knew she wanted to be in the field, working with people and giving back to her community. She also knew that every time she visited her mother in Drew, most of the people she saw continued to live in the same poverty that she’d escaped.

“I’d go visit my hometown and say ‘they shouldn’t have to live like this,’” Gloria said, referring to the dilapidated houses, the lack of grocery stores and fresh produce, and the dismal state of the public schools. “We fought so hard in that classroom, but I looked back and said ‘what good did that do?’ It did me some good and it did my family some good, but the job is not over.”

Gloria started a nonprofit called We2Gether Creating Change and decided to return to her community in Drew so that she could show people how to escape poverty and teach them how to thrive.

Leading By Example

Gloria had her work cut out for her.

Given her professional background, she knew that foundations were somewhat disillusioned with the Mississippi Delta, because no matter how much money they poured into the region, nothing seemed to change.

“When I’d ask them why do you think things aren’t changing, they’d say ‘those people down there need to start thinking differently about their life situation,’” Gloria said. “So, when I started my organization, I wanted to address what those foundations said was the issue: the way people think, and their mindsets, value systems, hopes, dreams, and imaginations.”

Upon returning to Drew, the first thing Gloria wanted to do was to teach school children about their local history. Gloria wanted to teach the kids about the community they’d been born into, and she wanted to share with them how her family was able to use education to lift itself out of poverty. Those history lessons quickly morphed into conversations about self-worth, self-esteem, leadership, life skills, career tracks, etiquette, relationships, and abuse.

It didn’t take Gloria long to learn that most of her students had never been outside of Drew. That proved problematic, because when she asked them to dream, they had no idea what she was talking about. Therefore, once a year, she started taking groups to Orlando, Florida: to show the kids what middle-class life looked like. They’d go to Universal Studios and to Disney World so that the students could start to imagine a different future for themselves. For eight consecutive years, until the COVID-19 pandemic, Gloria and her team took 100 kids per year to Florida.

“A lot of those kids have gone to college, and some of them have gone back to Disney World with their own kids and families on their own,” Gloria said. “Some are nurses and biologists, and a lot of them tell me ‘if you hadn’t shown me what we could do, I never would have been where  I am.’”

Over the years, Gloria’s work with middle and high school students in her community expanded across her community. She began to work with elementary-aged students to help improve their reading levels and she started to work directly with her students’ parents and other adults in Drew, so that they too could begin to change their mindsets. The classes she coordinates range from financial literacy to mindfulness and meditation. However, Gloria knew that if she was truly going to help her community move from poverty to prosperity and from hopelessness to hope, then she was going to also have to find ways to make tangible, physical improvements to Drew to show people that change is possible.

You Have to Give Them Hope

That’s when Gloria called HOPE, a credit union that has generated more than $2.5 billion in financing to benefit more than 1.5 million people across Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. CNote partners with credit unions like HOPE across the country, working together to mitigate the extent to which factors like race, gender, and birthplace limit one’s ability to accumulate wealth. Together, HOPE was able to help Gloria and other concerned citizens in Drew make improvements to their community.

“We didn’t have any playgrounds,” Gloria said, “and the grocery store had closed, so we had no way to get a banana. We didn’t have any affordable houses, and the neighborhood and streets looked like a mess with these dilapidated houses. All of this stuff affects the way people think: it’s their environment. But just because they’re poor doesn’t mean they don’t want to have a place to play or sidewalks.”

The first thing HOPE did was help Gloria and her new group, the Drew Collaborative, to finalize a strategic plan that they could then use to present and send to funders. More so, HOPE funneled grant dollars into Drew, which went toward tearing down decrepit houses and building affordable homes in their place.

HOPE also brought in KABOOM! to build a playground, and the collaborative is currently working to open both a grocery delivery distribution center and a telemedicine center in Drew.

In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, HOPE also provided Gloria with a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to keep her two staff members at We2Gether Creating Change employed. The nonprofit has shifted away from in-person classes and gatherings, and because most people in her community don’t have computers or the internet, going online isn’t possible. Still, Gloria and her team have been distributing disinfectant, masks, gloves, and soap around the community, and because of the PPP loan, they’ve been able to keep their food pantry open.

“If it wasn’t for HOPE, I would have had to lay off my employees,” Gloria said. “I’m glad I was able to keep them, and I’m grateful that we were able to get that funding, because we wouldn’t have been able to continue with things unless I was able to keep those two on.”

Dreaming Beyond The Pandemic

Whereas the coronavirus pandemic has turned much of her world on its head, if there’s one thing that Gloria is grateful for over these past few months, it’s the time she’s been given to step back and to think about the future of We2Gether Creating Change and of Drew, Mississippi. According to her, she wants her nonprofit to get more into racial equity work. That includes acquiring the barn where Emmett Till was killed and turning it into a museum or a retreat center — a place in the community that pays tribute to him. She’d also like to restore a small jail in Drew that was used to imprison some of the Freedom Riders back in the 1960s. It all ties back to the initial work that Gloria started in the community when she moved home in 2009: teaching people about their local history so that they can use education as a vehicle to escape poverty.

As for Drew, Gloria wants to leverage her position as a Sunflower County district supervisor to improve the town’s infrastructure and aesthetics. It’s a difficult task, but still, it’s something that Gloria is committed to.

“I need to do this,” she said. “I need to work in this community and try to help people and serve people. I’m passionate about it because I know what it was like for me trying to grow up in poverty and how hard and painful it was. Even if I can help anybody else to not have to go through that, then that’s what I want to do. That’s what drives me.”

Gloria and the We2Gether Creating Change Team

It’s that same drive that led Gloria to spend her first eight years with We2Gether Creating Change without paying herself a salary. In fact, she’s poured in well over $500,000 of her own money to fund trips to Disney World, distribute scholarships, provide student stipends, pay course instructors, cover overhead expenses, and much, much more. She’s received some financial support from Kellogg Foundation, her previous employer, and other donors, but given Gloria’s aspirations for her community-based work in Drew, she’s going to need more help from foundations that aren’t afraid to invest in her philosophy.

After all, she doesn’t have to look far to see that her approach works. It’s evident when Gloria returns to Ole Miss for graduation ceremonies to watch her students walk across the stage and receive their degrees, just like it’s visible during her trips to Disney World, when she sees kids laughing and playing and having a good time in a place far, far away from the poverty of Drew.

“To see them there with that smile on their face,” she said, “that is what being out of poverty means. That’s really joyful for me, when I see people benefiting from things we’ve done and accomplishing things on their own. I’m so proud when I see people progress, and when I see that they’re gonna make it on their own.”

Learn More

• We2Gether Creating Change
• HOPE Credit Union provides financial services; aggregates resources; and engages in advocacy to mitigate the extent to which factors such as race, gender, birthplace and wealth limit one’s ability to prosper. Since 1994, HOPE has generated more than $2.9 billion in financing that has benefitted more than 1.7 million people in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like this? CNote makes it easy to invest in great Credit Unions like HOPE, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Vanessa Silva has always been comfortable in the kitchen. As an introverted child growing up in Brazil, food was how she preferred to communicate. Cooking became Vanessa’s love language, and by the time she was 10 years old, she was quite fluent in that love language, preparing special dishes for her parents’ dinner guests and family gatherings.

However, despite Vanessa’s talent as a youth chef, when the time came for her to go to college, her parents wanted her to study something that would allow her to have a “serious, money-making professional career.” Therefore, Vanessa went to university and double majored in chemical engineering and food technology. After she graduated in the early 1990s, she headed to Prague for an internship in an organic chemistry laboratory. Although she traveled to Europe to advance her scientific career, Vanessa found herself working night shifts in a small cafe, both as a waitress and as a consultant in the kitchen.

Vanessa Silva, Founder, and Director of Culinary Artistas

“That was the first time I realized that there is a kind of universal language in the kitchen,” Vanessa said. “No matter where you are in the world, if you have some sort of proficiency in the kitchen, you can go and ask for a job.”

Vanessa left the Czech Republic for California around the Dotcom Boom. She pivoted from chemical engineering to web communications, and she took a job at a marketing agency that catered to biotech companies in the Bay Area. For the next 12 years, she spent her days working in corporate communications, and in her free time, she cooked. Over the years, she volunteered at a half dozen different cooking schools and programs, working alongside professional chefs and getting personalized attention.

According to Vanessa, those experiences made her realize that she had a special talent in the kitchen. For the first time, she recognized that cooking was her “language” and that she wanted to find a way to professionally communicate that language. When her daughter was born 11 years ago, Vanessa still had one foot in the corporate world and the other in the kitchen. However, she was ready to make her move.

An Entrepreneur in the Kitchen

Vanessa spent the next few years getting her entrepreneurial feet underneath her. She launched a homemade baby soups delivery business and, later, a bone-broth business. When her daughter entered preschool, she applied for a grant from the San Francisco Garden Society to put in a new garden at the school. Vanessa received the funding, and she started a food garden with the kids. The program was a hit.

“I was literally the most popular mom,” Vanessa laughed. “Moms would say to me “wow, my kid never eats this stuff at home, but with you, they love it.’ It was just so rewarding to work with the kids. I felt like I was onto something.”

At the parents’ urging, Vanessa decided to host a one-week summer camp out of her Mission-District apartment. Every day, she’d take the kids to a different neighborhood destination, including local bakeries, restaurants, and farmers’ markets. Vanessa even took the children to a chocolate factory. After every visit, the group would return to Vanessa’s home and tackle a food-related project related to what they saw and experienced. However, after four years, Vanessa was finding it challenging to make ends meet in San Francisco, especially as a single mom.

In early 2016, Vanessa was approached by a business woman who wanted to open an art and cooking school for children. She told Vanessa that she could put forward the money to open the school if Vanessa would be the sweat-equity partner. The two agreed to run the business fifty-fifty. Later that same year, Culinary Artistas opened in a 2,400-square-foot space in Ghirardelli Square, across the street from the beach. Six months later, however, Vanessa’s business partner had to pull out. Not only that, she left Vanessa $40,000 behind on rent. If Vanessa was going to be able to keep Culinary Artistas open, she was going to need some help.

Learning A Second Language: Business

Vanessa explained her situation to one of her good friends, who happened to be a serial entrepreneur. Together, they sat down to take a close look at Culinary Artistas’ viability.

“I didn’t know how much money we were putting in and how much money we were getting out each month,” Vanessa said. “All I knew was the pulse of the business seemed right. Every month, we were getting more students. I could understand those indicators, but not the rest. Our fixed costs? Sales projections? I didn’t know any of that.”

Vanessa’s friend helped her to better understand the nuts and bolts of running a business, and together, they came up with a plan. Vanessa went to her landlord, who agreed to not only forgive the rent she owed, but to have Culinary Artistas pay a significantly reduced rent for two years. Vanessa signed a new contract, and Culinary Artistas had a new life.

As she grew her business, however, Vanessa realized a couple of things. First, a teaching school for kids was too niche, especially considering that both chefs and teachers are underpaid for their services. Therefore, Vanessa decided to expand the scope of Culinary Artistas to include adult classes, corporate team offsites, and events. It proved to be a good move. Within a year, Vanessa and her growing team doubled Culinary Artistas’ revenue.

The second thing Vanessa realized is that she needed more formalized business coaching. That’s when Vanessa connected with Pacific Community Ventures (PCV), an Oakland-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) committed to investing in small businesses, creating jobs, and making markets work for good. Through the Wisdom Fund initiative, CNote partners with CDFIs like PCV to provide small business coaching, mentorship, and technical assistance to entrepreneurs like Vanessa.

Whereas Vanessa was appreciative of her friend who’d offered her free business advice, having a coach to meet with on a weekly basis made a big difference for Vanessa.

“It was huge,” she said. “PCV helped to groom me to become a CEO, founder, and owner, and they really helped me understand the business-side of my business. Until then, it was a lot of passion and commitment, but I didn’t understand all of the back-office stuff.”

According to Vanessa, her PCV business coach helped her to analyze and understand Culinary Artistas’ finances, as well as how the business’ revenues might fluctuate seasonally. Her coach has also been able to provide legal counsel, and PCV connected Vanessa with someone to assist her with marketing. Although Vanessa occasionally attends PCV’s online events and workshops, she says she mostly takes advantage of her weekly check-in calls with her coach.

“Having PCV has really helped me to understand how to make the business sustainable,” she said, “and how to grow it and to thrive in it.”

Surviving a Global Pandemic (and Thriving)

With a business coach in her corner and Culinary Artistas doing better than ever, Vanessa’s 2020 was off to a fantastic start. Culinary Artistas had 27 employees on its payroll, and Vanessa was considering opening a second location. She was even flirting with the idea of starting a subscription-model business aimed at parents and children wanting ingredients and recipes to prepare healthy food at home.

Then March came, and the COVID-19 pandemic made Vanessa rethink everything.

“Immediately, the business I had was dead,” she said. “One week, our calendar was booked through June, and the next, everything was gone. I went from feeling on top of the world to feeling like everything was running through my fingers and there was no way to hold it together.”

Vanessa wasn’t just stunned, she was scared. She was also resistant to the idea of shifting her business online, given that cooking had always been something that she enjoyed doing in-person with others. However, after seeing how happy her daughter was after taking an online dance class, Vanessa changed her mind and gave her team the greenlight to move forward with online classes.

Eliza Martin, Head Chef & Director of Culinary Education

It was an immediate success. Vanessa and her team have hosted over a dozen team-building events with corporate clients, and in the past 30 days, her team fielded nearly 60 inbound inquiries. Culinary Artistas’ online cooking classes are attracting between 30 and 50 kids per class, and over the summer, Vanessa and her team hosted a 12-week, in-person camp for over 100 students. Lastly, Culinary Artistas has sold almost 500 cooking kits, giving Vanessa an opportunity to begin to get her nascent subscription business off the ground. Amazingly, despite the global pandemic, Culinary Artistas’ revenue is up 25 percent compared to 2019.

“The business looks very different than it did six months ago,” she said. “We’re just thankful to not only still be in business at this time but to be thriving. There’s so much demand, and we’re in a really great position as a business. I feel very fortunate.”

With continuing business coaching and mentorship from PCV, Vanessa feels like Culinary Artistas can leverage its current momentum to continue to expand and evolve. As her business keeps growing, Vanessa wants to strive to take a page out of her role model’s playbook: Alice Waters, of Berkeley’s famous Chez Panisse restaurant.

“Alice really believes in creating a microenvironment of the people that work with her by elevating them,” Vanessa explained. “So, for example, the person who used to be the baker at her restaurant later went on to create Acme Bread, and Alice invested in his business. That’s something she’s done a lot, and I think it’s really beautiful.”

As Vanessa looks to potentially open a second Culinary Artistas location in the Bay Area, and as she ramps up her subscription business, she also wants to be sure that she’s working with her employees to help them actualize their own professional goals, whether that’s acting as an investor, a mentor, or a launching pad.

“In my experience,” she said, “for a business to succeed, it really takes a strong team of people that supports you. I was the recipient of that kind of support, and it’s something that I try really hard to do for my employees and for our students. This is a place where with the right kinds of role models and influences, you can go so much further, because you have people who believe in you and are ready to back you up.”

Learn More

• Culinary Artistas
• Pacific Community Ventures is an Oakland-based CDFI that empowers small business owners and helps impact investors make investments that create shared prosperity and sustainable communities through a “Good Jobs, Good Business” model.” 
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like this? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like Pacific Community Ventures, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

Nola Veazie grew up in Panama with the belief that she could do anything she set her mind to. Nola’s mother, who raised her children on her own, encouraged all of her children to dream big; however, when Nola was 16, she realized that the opportunities she wanted for herself didn’t exist in her home country: they were in the United States. At 17, Nola, along with her sister, got her mother’s blessing to move to the U.S. to live with their grandmother.

“We spoke very broken English,” Nola said, smiling. “But we went to school, and we learned the language. My mom had taught us that when there aren’t opportunities, you create your own. I had a vision of creating something for myself.

That drive led Nola to enlist in the Air Force, where she eventually discovered a psychology program that appealed to her. She got her master’s degree in counseling and eventually received her PhD in psychology. She began doing marriage and family therapy, as well as individual therapy. In 1995, Nola and her husband, who also served in the Air Force, left Nebraska to serve overseas. In 1998, the couple was transferred to Santa Barbara County, California. That’s when the Air Force gave Nola the opportunity to become a drug and alcohol addiction specialist.

“It was great,” Nola said, “because as providers, we were treating mental health, but we were not treating, nor did we understand, addiction. And so in order to expand my knowledge, I got certified in that field and was then able to treat people with co-occurring disorders.”

Around that same time, Nola began to moonlight as a licensed therapist and addiction specialist. Initially, she worked in group homes, meeting clients who were struggling with both addiction and mental health. Although she was seeing clients, Nola was also speaking at conferences. That’s what led the head psychologist at the United States Penitentiary, Lompoc, a medium-security federal correctional institute in California, to reach out to Nola to see if she’d be interested in providing training services for the prison’s staff. For Nola, it was not only a new professional opportunity for her, but it was a way for her to begin to transition to civilian life.

Life After the Air Force

After 20 years of military service, Nola retired from the Air Force in 2002. Initially, she worked as a director for a drug and alcohol nonprofit that provided a residential program for mothers; however, Nola also continued to work with children in group homes and to train prison staff. Over the years, Nola developed an offering of continuing education units (CEUs). Drug and alcohol counselors have to take a certain number of CEUs every two years in order to maintain their certification.

Nola’s CEUs were in high demand. Although she’d been working as an independent contractor since 1995, Nola officially structured V-Solutions Consulting as an LLC in 2016. She subsequently got a State contract through The Department of Corrections to provide training, consulting, and staff development in five California prisons. That number has since grown to 23 prisons across the state.

V-Solutions partners with two major companies, Amity Foundation and Phoenix House, and Nola’s team is those companies’ staff development and training specialists. V-Solutions, however, works with anybody with a drug addiction certification, providing the latest treatment protocols and interventions to those who need to maintain their CEUs.

Whereas Nola has created V-Solutions Consulting to be a B2B company, she’s also structured her Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business in a way that empowers others. Nola contracts doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows, therapists, and other drug and alcohol counselors to be trainers. In fact, one of her contractors previously spent time in prison. As such, in addition to providing training to staff, V-Solutions also trains long-term prisoners who’ve received their drug and alcohol certifications while in prison. Nola calls them “peer mentors.”

“I think that’s the most inspiring thing,” she said. “To see people who are justice-involved themselves getting inspired to help other people and to learn beyond what they’ve learned in prison, that inspires me.”

Having The Right Mentorship to Grow

In 2016, Nola was selected to be a part of Inner City Capital Connections (ICCC), a tuition-free executive leadership training program designed by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) to help business owners in under-resourced communities to build capacity for sustainable growth. The training was hosted in Los Angeles, and that’s where Nola was connected with Pacific Community Ventures (PCV), an Oakland-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) committed to investing in small businesses, creating jobs, and making markets work for good. Through the Wisdom Fund initiative, CNote partners with CDFIs like PCV to provide small business coaching, mentorship, and technical assistance to entrepreneurs like Nola.

“I have a great mentor at PCV who listens and gives me ideas that I was able to use to grow,” Nola said. “Before, I was fulfilling these contracts, but I didn’t see myself growing outside of what I knew and outside of my comfort zone.”

PCV assisted Nola with marketing and technology. More so, the CDFI advised her to go to colleges and universities to recruit contractors to work alongside her.

“They said, ‘a lot of small businesses don’t have the capital to hire people, so why don’t you go to colleges and schools, find people who are graduating or postdocs who need experience, and then pay them high enough so that they want to stay on and be part of your team.’”

That’s exactly what Nola did. Today, she has a team of five committed contractors that she works with, and Nola encourages them to create their own training sessions and content that interests them. That’s because Nola recognizes and views her contracted colleagues as fellow entrepreneurs who can bring new ideas and skills to V-Solutions.

Besides specific advice and mentorship, PCV has also provided Nola with reassurance and encouragement. According to her, it helps to have somebody both to act as a sounding board to her ideas and to tell her that she’s on the right track. With the support, she’s confident that she can grow her business. For Nola, that means expanding V-Solutions Consulting’s training offerings to include workshops on how implicit and explicit biases affect the way counselors provide services. She’d also like to expand into different industries, such as the security sector, and to work with businesses that would benefit from learning about how to deal with individuals who struggle with addiction.

Whereas the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating (she lost her sister to the virus), it’s also provided Nola an opportunity to reach a wider audience. This year, Nola got V-Solutions certified in the State of New York to provide drug and alcohol CEUs, and she’s looking for other opportunities outside of California to expand V-Solutions’ work.

“I was given a chance when I came to a new country,” Nola said, “and I want to help give other people a chance to become better. I want to be that person who inspires others to create opportunities.”

Learn More

• V-Solutions Consulting
• Pacific Community Ventures is an Oakland-based CDFI that empowers small business owners and helps impact investors make investments that create shared prosperity and sustainable communities through a “Good Jobs, Good Business” model.” 
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like this? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like Pacific Community Ventures, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.

When Christine Uwimbabazi came to the United States from her home country of Rwanda in 2000, she didn’t plan to open a small business. Instead, she came for college.

Christine enrolled at LaRoche University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Six years later, she married Reverien Mfizi, one of her classmates. The two had gone to the same high school in Rwanda, and with their undergraduate diplomas in hand, their next move was to Buffalo, New York, where Reverien had been accepted to a graduate program.

Over the 10 years that followed, Reverien completed a PhD in political science, he and Christine had three children, and she took a job in customer service. Still, it was difficult to make ends meet, and the couple wanted something more — they wanted to be financially independent.

“As immigrants and students,” she said. “It hasn’t been easy, and we’ve had a hard time. But at the end of the day, nobody’s going to take care of your family for you.”

In 2017, during a summer free from his academic teaching requirements, Reverien decided to work as a driver for a non-emergency medical transportation service company. Seeing that there was a “huge shortage” of wheelchair vans capable of shuttling patients to and from regional medical centers, hospitals, and doctors’ offices, Reverien convinced Christine to take a week off from her full-time job to give driving a try.

She loved it, so much so that the two decided to start their own company: Prime Care Transportation. They applied to be a NYS-licensed Medicaid transportation provider. While they were waiting to be approved, Christine got her Class C driver’s license and took a job as a service manager at a local mechanic’s shop so that she could learn more about vehicle maintenance. However, once the couple was given the green light to begin operations in March of 2018, Christine left the garage to drive full time.

In the beginning, she drove during the day, and when Reverien got home from school, he’d drive at night. As Christine says, the two started from scratch, but with each new client, contract, van, and employee, Prime Care Transportation began to grow.

“We are risk-takers, and we needed a change in our life,” Christine said. “We needed to be able to support our kids, so we just did it. It’s the African way: you try it, and if it doesn’t work, oh well. If it works, then you continue. We knew that there was a need, and if we took the right approach, we knew people would come. At the end of the day, I wasn’t going to let myself fail.”

Reliable Roadside Assistance

The Prime Care Transportation Team

Christine’s can’t-fail attitude and people-first approach translated into rapid growth; however, she and Reverien still needed help — both financial and non-financial.

That’s when she connected with Pursuit Community Finance, an Albany-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that serves minority- and women-owned businesses across New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. CNote partners with CDFIs like Pursuit in communities across the country, investing dollars into local small businesses and empowering entrepreneurs like Christine.

Christine had previously heard about Pursuit from one of her friends who’s also a small business owner in Buffalo, and in 2019, Christine decided to enter a pitch competition hosted by the CDFI. She ended up walking away the winner. Christine received a $1,000 check, but more importantly, she walked away with a new relationship.

“We were growing and trying to expand into different remote counties,” Christine said. “The problem was funding to get more vans and to hire more drivers, but we also didn’t know if we were losing or gaining money each month. We were working in the dark. Pursuit helped us to find a CPA who could help us balance the ins and outs. After that, we could plan.”

Pursuit also provided Christine with someone to help her improve her company’s marketing and social media strategies, as well as a human relations consultant who helped her draft an employee handbook. Additionally, this past March, Prime Care Transportation received a $32,000 loan from Pursuit to cover the costs of business insurance, operations, and payroll.

As much as she’s grateful for the money, Christine is arguably more thankful for how much Pursuit continues to care about the success and growth of her business.

“I don’t have the right credit score to go to a bank,” she said. “But what bank does what Pursuit does? They come to me and ask: ‘How are you doing? How is business? How can we help?’ These are things no bank will do. It’s one thing to give money, but Pursuit gives peace of mind. I don’t just have someone who gave me a loan. I have a friend.”

Christine says that the personal connection she feels with Pursuit has injected more stability into her business, and the CDFI’s on-the-ground presence and ability to connect dots in the community has paid major dividends for both her and Prime Care Transportation.

Rerouting for the Road Ahead

Despite all of the business support she’d received from Pursuit, Christine and Reverien’s business has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the slowdown of non-urgent medical care and surgeries, as well as a shift to telemedicine, Prime Care Transportation went from having 22 vehicles on the road to six, and Christine had to cut her team of drivers in half, to 11. Although those numbers are higher than they were a couple of months ago, when only Christine, Reverien, and two other drivers were working, Christine doesn’t think that business will return to normal anytime soon.

According to her, that’s okay. She’s finding the silver lining.

“COVID is the biggest challenge we’ve had,” Christine said. “But it’s given me an opportunity to focus on marketing, and it’s given me a break to step back and to rethink and to reevaluate what we can do in the future, because our market is not going to be the same.”

The lull created by the global pandemic has also given Christine some time to reflect on how far she and her small business have come in such a short period of time. She need only look out the window to be reminded of Prime Care Transportation’s very first ride. The van she used to shuttle her inaugural client to the medical center is parked out front, broken down and unfixable. Christine can’t bring herself to part with it — there’s too much emotion wrapped up in it.

“To even still be in business itself is a good thing,” she said, “but I’ll never forget the first day. We make such a difference in peoples’ lives. We are more than drivers. We make people feel comfortable and safe and cared for, and if we don’t transport these people, then the doctors won’t be able to do their jobs, and these people won’t get their blood cleaned or their shots or their surgeries. We’re part of the circle. We complete each other.”

It’s that focus on the big picture that’s driving Christine forward.

“I’m scared about what will happen tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t have money, and I don’t have connections. The only thing I have is me, working hard, and showing that I can do the best I can for other people. If we’re going to outcompete all the other companies out there, then we’ll beat them with tenderness.”

Learn More

• Prime Care Transportation
• Pursuit Community Finance: An Albany-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that serves minority- and women-owned businesses across New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
• CNote – Interested in helping create another story like this? CNote makes it easy to invest in great CDFIs like Pursuit Community Finance, helping you earn more while having a positive impact on businesses and communities across America.