A $2.5 million state grant will go to elevate support for minority entrepreneurs across West Michigan and deliver resources to business owners who leaders say are often overlooked.
The West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce partnered with Grand Rapids Area Black Businesses, Latin Americans United for Progress in Holland, the Grand Rapids Urban League, and El Concilio in Kalamazoo to secure the funding from the Michigan Strategic Fund’s Small Business Support Hubs program.
“This is going to be incredible work. We’re going to show the West Michigan community what we can do together as organizations, and we really want to accelerate the work around economic development in this region,” Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Guillermo Cisneros said. “With this coalition, we want to make sure that our impact and everything that we’re doing around supporting our Latino businesses and our Black businesses gets accelerated.”
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Cisneros announced the grant award Thursday at the end of a Hispanic economic outlook hosted by Bank of America in Grand Rapids that focused on the rising economic power of the West Michigan Hispanic population, which is projected to grow 130% over the next two decades.
Cisnerossaid the funding will go to technical assistance programs for Hispanic- and Black-owned small businesses in Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Holland and Kalamazoo.
Assistance programs will include education and training in areas such as business development and planning, financial management and accounting, human resources, and marketing.
The West Michigan Hispanic Chamber will manage the grant, “but my goal is to distribute these resources equally,” Cisneros told Crain’s Grand Rapids Business.
“It’s amazing. This is a dream come true to bring Black and Brown organizations together. I always want to show unity, and we need this unity to be able to move forward in the next few years,” he said. “It’s going to be beneficial for the entire region. The economy will benefit if these organizations are funded and are doing the job to support businesses in those communities. We get to the corner of the community that organizations don’t get.”
The elevated programming will begin once the Hispanic Chamber hires additional staff, likely in 2024, Cisneros said. The assistance will go to microbusinesses that have up to 10 employees.
The state grant validates the growth and economic role of Hispanic and Latino businesses in the West Michigan economy, said Renee Tabben, Grand Rapids market president for Bank of America.
“When you see a trend that size, how do you not pay attention to it?” Tabben said. “Think about how many choices people are going to get as a result of going through this programming.”
Tabben also co-chairs an upcoming capital campaign to raise $4.5 million for a new $9.5 million office and business incubator for the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on Godfrey Avenue SW. The project this past summer secured $5 million through a budget appropriation.
More small business support
The West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce funding announced Thursday was among more than $73 million the state awarded to 27 organizations for Small Business Support Hubs. The funding came from the state’s allocation from the federal American Rescue Plan Act.
Grand Valley State University’s Muskegon Innovation Hub received $1.79 million that will help expand the lakeshore business incubator’s work, said hub Director Kevin Ricco.
Sixty-five companies currently work within the Innovation Hub, which was established by GVSU, the MEDC and the city of Muskegon in 2003 as a designated SmartZone for the region.
Ricco said the funding will allow the organization to hire two new staff members and boost the team’s capacity for community outreach and connection.
“We have a pretty small but dedicated team,” Ricco told Crain’s Grand Rapids. “We annually work with and help a lot of entrepreneurs, but our bandwidth is limited. Considering the geographic footprint that we’d like to work in, we struggle sometimes finding ways to connect with some of our communities … but this grant is going to allow us to do a better job with that.”
Funding also will be used to refresh the 20-year-old building with updated furnishings and equipment, most of which has been there since the building opened or is even older from hand-me-downs of other GVSU projects.
The Innovation Hub also plans to launch a business accelerator program in 2024 that will focus on minority-owned businesses for the first cohort. Ricco said the Hub is planning on two additional cohorts in the future, though the team is still determining what those will look like.
“We’ve been talking about that as a team for a few years. We just haven’t had the funding, quite frankly, to be able to do that,” Ricco said.
Other grant recipients for Small Business Support Hubs are:
- Start Garden Inc. in Grand Rapids, $3.4 million.
- Grand Rapids Nehemiah Project, $2.4 million.
- Battle Creek Unlimited Inc., $3.3 million.
- Can-Do Kalamazoo, which does business as Can-Do Kitchen, $1.9 million.
- Lansing Economic Area Partnership, $3.42 million.
“Michigan is committed to bolstering our entrepreneurial ecosystem by supporting the small businesses that drive our economy, as well as the trusted and expert partner network that serve them, across the state,” Amy Rencher, senior vice president of small business services at the Michigan Economic Development Corp., said in a statement. “By leveraging federal dollars, the Small Business Support Hubs will help us expand and improve resources across the state, as well as raise the national profile of the strength of our entrepreneurial community.”
— Crain’s Grand Rapids reporter Kayleigh Van Wyk contributed reporting to this story.
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