Mid-June through July: Small Business Training Season

• What is the current status of your project?
• How does your fellowship experience compare to your initial expectations?
• What has been the most rewarding and challenging aspect of working with your community partner?
• What role has your faculty mentor played in guiding your work and helping you to address any problems that you have faced?
• In what ways have you needed to be flexible?

Current Status of the Project

I will divide the status of this project into three categories: small business trainings, community partners and volunteers.

Small Business Trainings

As of July 31st, we have completed two small business trainings: one in downtown Durham and one in Chapel Hill . In the last week of July, we started the third small business training in north Durham.

The first small business training in Durham was hosted by the Center for Responsible Lending. It is a beautiful space: a high-ceiling conference room with a large projection screen and it gave the training a very professional, esteemed feeling. There were five attendees. Three were from the shelter, one from transitional housing, and one lived in a nearby neighborhood. There was excellent chemistry in this class- a lot of support and creativity amongst the participants. Not to mention, three Self-Help Credit Union employees took their lunch hour to come down to volunteer as teachers and consultants which really added substantial expertise and positive energy. They were able to add a lot of real-life and local examples that made the curriculum a lot more relevant

Two of the participants really distinguished themselves and are working with us to this day. One client has been homeless for eleven years and has five children, ages 4 to 17. Born into the foster care system, she has struggled all of her life to find stability and security and hasn't found it. She is currently in the shelter and fears for her own safety and that of her four-year-old daughters. She has an indomitable spirit and warmth and has a sincere desire to get of her situation. As she has a learning disability, school has not been a viable option for advancement, and so she believes a small business is her best bet for getting out of poverty. She has cleaned houses in the past and hopes to build a more formal and sustainable house-cleaning business. We discussed the "green industry" in class, and she hopes to incorporate green products and practices into her business. A housecleaning business is an excellent option for her because it requires very low start-up costs. We are currently working with her to make a logo and brochure. We are also working with her to find housing, hopefully in Orange County where it is safer for her daughter, transportation is free, and where more resources are available to her. Of all the clients we have served, I would say that her situation is one of the most alarming. Plenty of our clients are in and out of housing, but very few have young children with them. Three of us will work with her personally at least up until December. She is a strong and motivated woman and I think she is on the cusp of making substantial improvements.

The second client is a vibrant, motivated lady in her 60s living in the Walltown neighborhood. This neighborhood has changed considerably over last ten years. It is a very diverse, healthy and cooperative neighborhood with a good number of low-income residents. Her business idea is to convert one the second bedroom in her duplex apartment into a media center offering fax, notary, and computer services. She is thinking of the senior citizens who are not able to travel far and students who do not have access to computers and printers at home. She is a popular and respected lady in her community and they have expressed a lot of hope and joy in her starting this business. CEF is especially supportive of this business because of its community-building capacity. Self-Help was able to find office chairs, a fax and two computers that the client has bought for a very affordable price. CEF volunteers are working with her on her logo and on installing the equipment. This client is a truly inspiring lady who took to the concepts of marketing, bookkeeping and pricing immediately. She is a natural entrepreneur.

From this first small business training, we learned that five students makes for an optimal number of students. You can have a relaxed, conversational environment and there is a better chance of meeting their individual needs and getting to know them better. Also this was the first time we did not offer loans. We were afraid that no one would attend without that incentive, but that was not the case. We learned that for recruitment, we have to do a lot of on-site flyering and hand-shaking. In the future, we will hold the first session (which is a business idea brainstorm) on site at the various locations. We also learned that the Self-Help is a very generous supporting group of people and that holding the course there helped both organizations understand one another better. Special thanks to Sherry, Merald, Napoleon and Ashley for all of their support and assistance.


The second small business training took place in Chapel Hill instead of Durham because it was too logistically challenging to get enough UNC volunteers to come to Durham that often. CEF also wanted to keep a presence in Chapel Hill and we were stretched too thin to add a fourth small business training. This is one example of how we have had to be flexible this summer. (Flexibility in CEF is a way of life. One skill we really worked on was going into a situation and trying to find opportunity in what at first seemed like a failure. For example, if only a few people showed up to a class, we would grab the opportunity to substantially help those two people and not be concerned with low attendance. Our attitude and approach in this regard helped enormously.)

The first day we had more than 15 people show up (along with 10 children, which we were not prepared for!) . This number dropped down to six graduates by the end of the course. A lot of students (both those that stayed and those who left) were outside of our scope. They already had businesses or they were educated middle-class individuals that had just been laid off. It became clear very early that our curriculum and skill set did not match those of the needs of perhaps 50% of the students. Of those that were in the target population, all but two dropped out. Why? Unclear. We didn't track reasons for recidivism only because our energies and resources were limited and we only had the capacity to put energy into those that stuck with it. I think we will focus more on retention in the future as our capacity to serve grows and becomes more stable.

We are currently focusing our follow-up energies on the two graduated clients that are in our target population. One was recently released prison and wants to start a landscaping business. A volunteer is designing a logo with this individual. The other client is currently homeless but employed. She is saving money with our program so she can get housed and start a beauty consultant business. Both are wonderful people with a lot of drive and motivation.

I will discuss the third small business training in the August posting.

Information on community partners and volunteers forthcoming....