In Danbury, a need for multicultural business support

Efforts to start a multicultural business association in Danbury took a bit of a turn earlier this month when local business leaders invited a Hartford-based merchants”™ association to consider the possibility of opening a chapter in the city.

“There is a great need for a multicultural organization here,” said Alfredo Sarabia, who organized the meeting with representatives of the Spanish American Merchants Association (SAMA) of Hartford. The association has a chapter in New Haven and an office in Willimantic, and is considering chapters in Waterbury and Danbury.

“The regular chamber offers great services, but multicultural people don”™t look for those services.” What ethnic business owners need, he said, are lessons on the basic building blocks of American business operation in their own language or at least from people within their community who understand the unique needs and culture of ethnic entrepreneurs.

“I do a lot of work with many of the businesses in the community, and realize they need more than I can offer,” said Sarabia, a financial adviser with Merrill Lynch in Southbury. Classes and instruction in such things as marketing and QuickBooks would encourage “business people to develop their ethnic segment of the market and move into the broader part of the market” as well, he said.

An earlier effort to create a similar organization called the Multicultural Business Association stalled this year when its organizers ”“ Emanuela Lima, executive director of the biweekly Tribuna Newspaper, and Bernardo Ferrara, vice president of Ferrara Business Services ”“ ran into time constraints and family medical issues. “It was just a professional thing on our end,” Lima said. “We didn”™t have the time to get it going.”

Lima and Ferrara had hoped to organize ethnic business owners into an association that would provide just the sort of workshops and classes Sarabia recognizes the multicultural business community needs. Simple things like how networking works may not be obvious to a businessperson from a Latino background, Lima said earlier.

“The idea is to help the new and emerging business populations with some of the basic business principles, like how to apply for loans, use computers and market themselves,” said Steve Bull, president of the Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce.

Vibrant mix

Danbury”™s broad and varied ethnic business community includes Hispanics from Mexico and Central and South America, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, Indians, Pakistanis, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Philipinos, among others. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates Danbury”™s Hispanic and Latino population was 11,570 in 2005, while the Asian population was 7,650.The uncounted illegal alien population estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000 helps provide steady customers for ethnic businesses in the city.

Ferrara and Lima estimated there are more than 500 ethnic businesses in Danbury, more than 250 of them in the Brazilian community.

“We”™ve been talking about how we can service this fast-growing segment of our business population for more than a year,” Bull said. “What I see in Danbury is that an ethnic business will open but the owners don”™t have the proper information about marketing and cash flow and the whole host of business planning, and six months down the road, they”™re out of business. If they had counseling and help, we could stop that trend and continue to revitalize the downtown, where many of them are.”

Danbury”™s center is a vibrant mix of ethnic businesses ranging from markets and restaurants to clothing shops to insurance companies, many of which cater to their ethnic clientele. “Some market only to their own community, not to the larger community,” Bull said. “An important part of that wider reach is learning English, obviously.”

Sarabia invited SAMA executives to scout out Danbury to see if the city”™s ethnic business community could support a local chapter. “They liked what they saw, but to be able to open a branch and offer all the services takes time,” he said. The Hartford organization runs on member dues but depends on grants and other funding for its services and programs. “If they start in Danbury, it will probably take three to nine months” to raise enough money to fund the operation, he said. “We could maybe do it on an interim basis offering part-time services, starting on a minor scale and scaling it up.”