The Latino Chamber of Commerce of Dane County (LCC), in collaboration with the Motivational Minutes, will debut a new weekly video series, titled “Emprendedora,” that aims to educate, empower, and encourage networking amongst Latina business owners.
The first episode will premiere Friday on the LCC Facebook page as well as on their website.
The goal of Emprendedora is to create an “ecosystem” for Latina women entrepreneurs, Latino Chamber President/CEO Jessica Cavazos noted.
“There are people out there who want to start businesses and they just they don’t know what,” she told Madison365.
Prior to her current position, Cavazos was the executive director of the Volusia County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Daytona Beach, Florida, during which a similar networking program was created entitled iLatina Conexion After 5.
“When I was the director there, we saw [how important] it was to give women their own hub to talk about business because sometimes their issues are a little different than our male counterparts,” Cavazos said.
“It’s hard for a woman, number one, to just get themselves out there,” added Brandie Delarosa, also a member of the executive board of the LCC. “But then as a woman of color, it’s that extra barrier that they have to go through in order to just show, ‘Hey, I got something valuable. I am valuable here.’”
As a business owner herself and a graduate of one of the LCC’s business cohorts, Delarosa emphasized the ways in which the Latino Chamber of Commerce helped her business.
“Just knowing where to network for my type of business, who to connect with, what are the right steps to have for the meetings, and everything underneath that umbrella, the chamber really just helped that,” Delarosa said. “They helped tremendously with that.”
Beyond being a place in which business owners can talk and learn, Cavazos also hopes to “empower people.”
As the daughter of an immigrant single mother growing up in one of Milwaukee’s poorer neighborhoods, Cavazos struggled to live without the resources she now works to offer others.
“When I left home, I didn’t have money to go to college, I didn’t have anybody. No one paid my ticket. I had two jobs to put myself through school,” she said. “I had to kind of figure out a way to survive.
“So for me, it’s really important for people to know that no matter where you come from, no matter who your parents are, no matter what your story is, if you decide today that you want to change your life, there’s opportunity,” she adds.
At the moment, episodes will be pre-recorded however, as noted by both Delarosa and Cavazos, the content and presentation of the series are subject to change in tandem with the needs of the community.
“We can always tweak it as we go,” Cavazos said. “We can tweak the messaging and we need to tweak the content that we’re going to provide. I want it to belong to the community. It shouldn’t just be like the chamber producing something, it should be what the community needs in order for it to really thrive.”
“We want to kind of grow this so that we could have live interaction or even a spin-off of maybe potentially a podcast discussion about the last episode that could be live,” Delarosa added.
Beyond this new video series, the LCC also offers a variety of other programs for entrepreneurs and business owners including an incubator program in which, according to Cavazos, 60 to 70 percent of the participants are women.
“Our goal is empowering Latino women to really let their voice be heard and not be afraid to go out there if they need an investment,” Delarosa said.
“Sometimes we just need someone to encourage us,” Cavazos continued. “That’s one of the most important parts of starting a business. If it’s not self-improvement, it’s your community or your circle of people encouraging you.”
