Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 29, 2008
This was the title of a recent article on the Northfield News in Northfield, News Editor Ariel Emery wrote it after attending an introductory on a new business venture under development called Turiventures, an international community tourism company that we are sponsoring here at the Rural Enterprise Center. We meet at the community room of First National Bank of Northfield on September 12 to gather feedback from a selected number of community leaders with expertise and possible interest in this project’s outcome.
The article does a really good job at describing the project, so I would like to point readers directly to it instead of saying too much more about the project here. Here is the direct link to last week’s article. And here is a link to a previous article written by Suzanne Rook about the same project when we first announced the project initiation phase.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 18, 2008
At the Rural Enterprise Center we are always looking for new information that can point to critical paths and strategies for the areas that we serve. I am linking below to an article with encouraging prospects for our region’s possibilities as leaders in enterprise development, and what may be some of the strategic components of policies and approaches that could put our region on the competitive edge. The article is posted at the Blandin Foundation but here is the direct link to it.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 16, 2008
I have been working with a young couple, Adalinda Sanchez and Carlos Ascencio, owners and operators of Carlos and Adalinda Painting and Gerdening Services LLC. Their new business is based here in Northfield but service other areas around the region. Most recently, I visited them at a jobsite on 114 Maple Street, next to Carleton College, where they are painting an old farmhouse that was moved from down highway 3 to its current permanent location.Introducing Adalinda and Carlos’ business in this blog is part of the process that we follow as we profile each business as a way to better understand them fully as we determine the services that they may use the most. Building their image locally and regionally is as important as providing them with the tools and internal systems to serve this market.Adalinda is originally from the state of Durango and Carlos from Sinaloa, Carlos attended Saint Olaf College while Adalinda attended Carleton and graduated in 2007 with a major in American studies and languages. Both of them are in their early 20’s, have a lot of energy and skills and a shared vision of building a company from the ground up.
Their new venture was started with a couple of jobs in 2007 and became more established in the summer of 2008, they cover the cities in the area such as Farmington, Dundas, Northfield, Faribault and would go as far as Cannon Falls and Owatonna.
To contact them call Adalinda at: 507 301 56967
Here is a photo movie of two of their most recent and current jobs.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 11, 2008
Natividad Lopez, his wife, their two kids and his three friends and their families joined together to grow 2 acres of black turtle beans and harvested 2,000 pounds this year. Maybe this sort of information is not news by itself, especially since black turtle beans are grown in large amounts by industrial farms in Michigan primarily, where an acre can produce upwards of 3000 lbs of conventionally grown improved varieties. The newsworthy part of this story won’t come out of the production data, here is the real scoop.
Natividad is from El Salvador, and as his friends, grew up in traditional rural Latin America. Black turtle beans is a staple food from Southern Mexico to the Southern tip of the continent. They are consumed with corn tortillas, fried eggs, squash, potatoes and other simple to grow and easy to process and store foods. For many rural Latin American communities, these foods represent the full diet for a family.
Though we don’t expect this small production to be a simbol of a new industry for rural Minnesota right away, the experience does have the potential to become an alternative source of income for rural Latino farmers. Most importantly though, this source of fresh product, and the process of joining forcers to produce something of common value goes beyond the conventional understanding of the business “bottom line”. It takes a family from feeling hopeless, into the opening of possibilities that come as a result of tackling a major destination of their income, their daily food needs. Now that they have done this for a season, the possibilities of an enterprise utilizing their already acquired talents becomes more reallistic proposition.
Growing your own food is something one would normally do in rural El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. When these families migrate to the U.S., this connection to the land is lost together with the hope of regaining it. With the lack of access to land goes the traditional diet, the lifestyle associated with this simple way of living, and the sense of pride and self-sufficiency, further deteriorating the sense of hope and opportunity. Socially, the family also losses the place where they take the kids after school and where they are thought values, the ethic of hard work, are kept from trouble in the streets, etc.
At first sight, this project does not look like much, but if looked in depth and at its net worth, it is a milestone for these families. As an economic development program we are here to build the infrastructure so that these families awake to the many resources around them and use them to build their new enterprises. At the center of these new enterprises is the mission of improving each family’s economy based on their own existing assets (cultural, economic, traditions, etc.)
These strategy has proven to be an effective way to giving value to the contributions of these folks to small rural communities, to building a support infrastructure to bring diverse opportunities to these areas, and an strategic way to capitalize on these folks assets to maximize results, minimize risk and leght of time that it takes to get things done, consequently, lowering the cost of these proceses alltogether.
If poverty has a direct connection with earnings, then avoiding the bleeding of the little earnings in the family must be part of the solution. Having produced a large amount of their own food supply, means that more of the earnings stay in the family. Growing the food close to home means that it won’t be shipped accross the country with the subsequent polution and cost associated with transportion in our current food distribution system. For a family of 4 or 5 with one employed adult earning $10 or less an hour, having access to a food production plot is a gold mine.
We work in economic development, we target the entrepreneurs in rural communities, but our aim is at the folks with the least opportunities, those who have real use for a program of our nature, so at the end, we are here to address the needs of the poor through the enterprise protential among them. In the fight against poverty, obesity, diabetes, poor quality food in the conventional system, high food transportation costs, and other economic factors that push poor families further into cycles of poverty, the possibilities that this model of engagement represents could be one of the most important real answers to how we win this fight in rural communities where food production can be achieved in large scale with a small scale approach.
As we add this scenario to the over 40 families in our community garden, the three market gardening operations, and the many “agripreneurs” emerging from our different projects, the agregated value isstarting to show real results at a larger scale. We have also structured this process to be replicable in other rural communities, through a process of adaptation to the local needs, interest, and resources available.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 4, 2008
In order to fit our services to the rural communities we serve and to respond to the changing rural business environment and growing Latino communities, we have adapted our name to reflect our full strategy of integrating our support systems to the local economic and community development infrastructure.
The name of our program will now be the Rural Enterprise Center. There will be more changes coming such as our website, which will now be www.ruralec.com as well as other changes of this nature. Our mission continues to be the same.
A business training program will get underway starting September 27 and going through October 18. This program is the result of a larger regional strategy to building technical managerial and planning capacity of Latino entrepreneurs in the Northfield, Faribault and Redwing region.
The training will be based on the Core Four (TM) business training manual and will be directed by trainined professionals. The Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation has been instrumental in making this first workshop possible and many partners such as First National Bank, Community Resource Bank and Wells Fargo’s Northfield branch, are directly contributing resources to this process.
The Rural Enterprise Center is a program of Main Street Project that focuses on enterprise development. Our mission is to strengthen communities by bringing together the support infrastructure, systems, resources and programs that rural entrepreneurs need to succeed. More...
Farmers connected with the Agripreneur Training Center may become members of the Hillside Farmers Cooperative. Co-op members produce free-range poultry and other naturally grown farm products in southeastern Minnesota. The co-op connects Latino immigrants with established farmers, helping families and the whole community thrive.
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