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By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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WEST MICHIGAN — While at least four major organizations across the state are currently engaged in advocacy for the Hispanic business community, those groups hadn’t really collaborated in the past.

Realizing the opportunities that could come from sharing, the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Great Lakes Bay Hispanic Business Association, the Lansing Area Hispanic Business Association and the Detroit-focused Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce recently signed a memorandum of understanding to formalize a partnership and to establish the Michigan Hispanic Alliance.

“This was created out of a need to find out what each other was doing. Being the largest minority in the country carries a lot of responsibility, and we needed to figure out how to best serve … our Hispanic businesses, but also capitalize on that new-found stature in the community,” said Carlos Sanchez, executive director of the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (WMHCC), a 6-year-old group based in Grand Rapids.

He said the idea spawned from a member who had joined both the WMHCC and the Lansing group and was surprised that the various organizations didn’t really communicate even though they were working on common issues. When they all started talking together, Sanchez said they realized they should make a formal, collective statement, which morphed into the creation of the alliance.

Each of the groups is in a different stage in its lifecycle, he said. The Detroit organization had been around the longest, while the Lansing group was more involved in advocacy. Some of the others bridged urban and rural concerns.

“We all agreed that the more united we are, the better we could be at everything. We’re now in the courtship type of period, and we’ll find out where this will go,” Sanchez said.

“First, we need to get to know each other and then ideally get a cohesive voice on our top five or top three issues.”

The initial discussions had the directors kicking around the idea of developing some overarching statewide organization that would be able to represent the growing Hispanic business community to Lansing lawmakers. Collectively, the groups have some 1,500 members, but Sanchez said the Hispanic businesses number about 11,000 overall across the state.

The WMHCC has 210 members, half of which come from outside the Hispanic community.

“This Hispanic community in general in West Michigan is young. We’ve not been here that long. The business community is even younger — it takes about a generation to start businesses,” he said.

Seeking a common voice

Already, the allied organizations have surveyed members and some non-members and have started meeting on a monthly basis. They anticipate working to develop a multi-year plan when they meet in October. And in the meantime, representatives from the various groups have started attending one another’s meetings.

While the Hispanic business community shares many of the same concerns as the other small business groups in the state like the Small Business Association of Michigan or local chambers of commerce, Sanchez said his members cannot avoid the immigration issue.

“We might see it differently than the other groups, and definitely different than some of the legislators,” he said. “For me, it’s somewhat easy to come up with a statement on immigration and speak for our members. They are of the same wavelength. (The other groups struggle to do that because) their constituents are more diverse.”

The Hispanic business community gets some help behind the scenes from other organizations, even if they find it difficult to make public statements regarding immigration, Sanchez added.

“I was very happy when the governor spoke publically of the importance of immigration for the betterment of the state and the economy,” he said.

Training infusion

Like any small business, those started by Hispanics often need assistance in getting off the ground. Recently, Sanchez said the region has made some progress in getting help to its Hispanic entrepreneurs by partnering with Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center Regional Director Dante Villarreal to translate some of the agency’s workshops into Spanish and deliver them to local small business owners.

Villarreal said all five of the MI-SBTDC’s fundamental theory workshops were translated and delivered by bilingual professionals in Grand Rapids. Each of the sessions thus far have received strong turnout, he said. The MI-SBTDC plans to bring the translated sessions to other parts of the state as early as this month at a one-day conference in Detroit.

To help increase the business development options locally, the WMHCC and the MI-SBTDC secured an $85,500 grant from the Grand Rapids Community Foundation to hire a full-time business development consultant to work predominantly with the Hispanic community.

“The need is there, it’s just a matter of providing more access to the services,” Villarreal said.

The hiring process for a bilingual consultant is ongoing. Once hired, the person will split his or her time between the WMHCC office and LINC, formerly called Lighthouse Communities.

“The idea behind it is that we want to show that when you invest resources with a community, the outcomes will be there,” Villarreal told MiBiz. “We’re hoping we will have around 30 to 40 new businesses. Once we have 12 months (into the program), we want to have $5 million in capital formation or infusion as a result of working with the consultant.”

Other partnerships

The WMHCC also recently signed an MOU with the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce to further strengthen the ties between the two organizations — Sanchez had worked at the Grand Rapids chamber a few years ago — and to pledge to work together on some shared programming.

“We wanted to send a message to two constituents: One, to our members, that we would not engage in predatory practices to go out after each other’s members. They have a great product and we have a great product, and we’d like for them to be members of both. And the other message was to financial supporters that we are going to try to find ways to work together more often to better use those funds because they’re shrinking,” he said. “The end goal is the betterment of our members. The Grand Rapids chamber wins in getting access to a diverse pool of suppliers and employees or a diverse market, and our members benefit from doing business with larger companies.”

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• carlos sanchez
• dante villarreal
• great lakes bay hispanic business association
• hispanic
• lansing area hispanic business association
• west michigan
• west michigan hispanic chamber of commerce