Transcription of Coastal Enterprises Inc. #206
Dr. Belisle: This Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 206. Coastal Enterprises Inc. Airing for the first time on Sunday, August 23, 2015. Coastal Enterprises Incorporated also known CEI has specialized in rural business development and financing since 1977. Founded in Wiscasset, CEI helps create economically and environmentally healthy communities in which all people especially those with low incomes can reach their full potential.
Today, we speak with Ellen Golden, Managing Director of CEI Investment Notes and Tae Chong of the CEI StartSmart program which helps refugees and immigrants start, strengthen or expand their own small businesses. Thank you for joining us.
Today in the studio with me, I have Ellen Golden who is the Managing Director of CEI Investment Notes. Ellen has expertise in research program and policy development with respect to women business owners and microenterprise development. She is a recipient of the SPA’s Women in Business Advocate, Minority Advocate and Financial Services Advocate of the Year Awards for Maine. She lives in Woolwich. Thanks so much for coming in.
Ellen Golden: Oh, my pleasure.
Dr. Belisle: I know that what you’re doing now the CEI Investment Notes is a little bit different than what you were focusing on before the microenterprise and the women business owners programming. Tell me what that is.
Ellen Golden: You think of that as impact investment. As you may be aware, there’s a history of people being interested in how they can allocate or direct capital in order to accomplish good as well as getting a financial return. Impact investing very simply is about looking for a financial return but also looking for social, economic and environmental benefit as well and CEI Investment Notes makes a fixed income product available to accredited investors who have a desire to allocate a portion of their assets to invest in the community because they want to do some good primarily here in Maine.
Dr. Belisle: Give me some examples of projects that you’ve been supporting.
Ellen Golden: Sure. Actually, there are two aspects to this program both of which are fun one is engaging the investors, right, because they’re the source of capital and understanding what their interests are, but then, the other is identifying really great projects, high impact projects that are going to benefit the community and putting the money out. I can think of lots of examples, it’s pretty diverse portfolio. It’s everything from refugee entrepreneurs who want to purchase a small restaurant in order to sort of recapture a life that they lost during a period of time when their country was in conflict.
We financed an Iraqi refugee family that had been restaurateurs in Baghdad, they’d had 15 years of experience. Obviously, they had to flee, they found their way to Maine and spent a long time learning English, saving money, looking for the right opportunity and we were able to give them a relatively modest loan that enabled them to acquire a restaurant and basically rebuild a life that they had lost. It was great. It’s everything from that to manufacturing, to young farmers acquiring farms and building obviously great lives here in Maine growing healthy food for Maine people and their families.
Dr. Belisle: It sounds like a win-win situation. You have people who want to support the young farmers and the Iraqi family and then, you have the family and the farmers themselves who are doing things to, I guess give back to the community as well as build their lives back.
Ellen Golden: Exactly. You have individuals or families that have money that they don’t obviously need for their immediate needs, they’re interested in getting some kind of return but they’re not interested in maximizing that return and they really want to feel good about where their money is going. The investors have a range of interests, some care about job creation, some care about affordable housing, some care about sustainable agriculture or renewable energy. It really varies pretty widely and we’re fortunate, they were able to develop and maintain a diverse portfolio that aligns with their personal interests and values.
Dr. Belisle: It seems as though that’s becoming increasingly important to people to know where their money is going and to feel good about the investments that they’re making.
Ellen Golden: Absolutely. We launched this program in 2009 and we now have 124 investors and a little bit over $7 and a half million that we’ve raised and it’s been so interesting to see sort of the nature of the conversation shift over that almost six-year period where we actually get people reaching out to us calling us and saying “We’ve read about CEI, we like the work that you do and we want to know if there’s an opportunity for us to invest with you,” so it’s great. It’s not just in Maine, it’s happening nationally and internationally as well, people are understanding that you can address certain kinds of social issues through let’s say a thoughtful allocation of money.
Dr. Belisle: Tell me about the specialties that you had before in female business owners and also microenterprise.
Ellen Golden: Sure. I started working, actually, a number of years ago with women business owners at a point when they didn’t have much credibility and they weren’t particularly visible in the community. Nobody was putting them on the front page of a newspaper and highlighting their accomplishments.
We started by doing some research because at that time, there was so little known about even the kinds of businesses they were starting and the kinds of situations that they faced, their experiences altogether and what we discovered was, of course, that although there are many women who are working very hard at being self-employed or as business owners with employees, they weren’t necessarily generating the income that they wanted or needed to support themselves and their families.
They weren’t necessarily getting access to the resources they should have, they were fairly isolated. We took that research and started to design and develop programs and ultimately created the womens’ business center at CEI which continues to thrive. We do a lot of individual advising to women business owners both women who want to start businesses as well as women who are in businesses and we’re also able to provide access to capital and equally important, although in a different way is we can help women form networks of support.
I mean there’s nothing like having a [inaudible 00:08:37] in your own life a great peer network to give you some advice and feedback on what you’re doing. It’s been great. Over a number of decades, we are able to see that not only are women accomplishing more but they’re finally getting recognition for what they’re doing.
Dr. Belisle: What about microenterprise?
Ellen Golden: Well, Maine, everybody is saying that Maine is this small business state. Well, it’s also really a microenterprise state and when we’re talking about microenterprises, there are a couple of ways to think about it. Some define it as businesses with five or a fewer employees and others say businesses that need capital in relatively small amount so under $50,000. There are over 100,000 microenterprises in the state and in some of the state’s counties particularly rural ones like Lincoln County where there really aren’t major employers, that’s a primary source of employment in the county.
Unlike women business owners, because they operate on a small scale, many microenterprises have difficulty getting access to resources, they also are sometimes not taken as seriously. People will misunderstand and think that they are hobbies when in fact, people are really very serious and genuinely need the income. [crosstalk 00:09:58 – 00:10:56]
Dr. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio. Show number 206. Coastal Enterprises Incorporated. Our guest have been Ellen Golden and Tae Chong. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Read our upcoming articles about CEI and Tae Chong in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of this week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our like Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful One on Instagram.
We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you’ve heard about them here. We’re privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. We hope that you have enjoyed our Coastal Enterprises Incorporated show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
They could really make a go of it, because there are a lot of things that many us do that maybe you don’t care quite as much about. Is there a scale to changing something from “I really enjoy doing this. I don’t need to make money off of it, but it’s something that makes me happy too,” “I really enjoy doing this, I want to keep doing it and I’d also like to have it become my life’s work.”
Ellen Golden: Yeah. I think there’s a huge shift in terms of how you think about it and the way you think about your time and resources. This is not an example from one of our clients but it’s an example that I love from years ago. It came from another organization, one of our peers in another state where they were working with a woman who loved making egg rolls. She love to cook and she thought she was going to make a business out of egg rolls and she charged let’s say, for the sake of argument, a dollar a piece.
Well then, she did the math and discovered how many egg rolls she’d have to make in a year in order to make a living. As a hobby, you wouldn’t care, right? You would simply just continue to make eggrolls because you love doing it but if you thought you are going to make a living out of, then you would have to start looking at the whole process very differently and thinking about how many X widgets do I have to make, what’s the actual cost to it. If I need to make X, is there a large enough market to absorb it. It requires a little bit more thought and planning and analysis.
I think it’s really important for somebody who’s thinking about that to really think about what their ultimate goal is. Do you want to make a great deal of money, do you want to make a modest amount of money, do you want to be in a position to create jobs, do you want to have a home-based business, do you want to sort of move it out into another space where you can really grow. There’s sort of range of things. There’s a business owner, maybe you know, Mad Gab, she does wonderful products.
Anyway, she has a business that CEI’s worked with over a long period of time and as you may know from her story, she started making lip lube on a part time basis as a student. She’s a perfect example of somebody who has really had to learn to think differently as her business has evolved. She’s had her challenges like every other business owner, but as she’s tried to grow it, and develop new products, then think through what her competition is doing.
Dr. Belisle: I do. I am familiar with Mad Gabs, I have teenage daughters of, so there’s a fair amount of their lip palm in our house.
Ellen Golden: That’s great.
Dr. Belisle: It is a great story to write. I think that several years ago, I read about her initial forays into this as a college student. It is interesting to me that this is something that she was able to do from a fairly young age so she didn’t have to wait until she was established anyway, she could … kind of keep showing up every day, keep putting her energy behind and actually build something over time.
Ellen Golden: Well, it’s an advantage. There’s so many different ways you can get into business. I mean some people buy an existing business, some people save. It varies a lot with the kind of business, but there are a lot businesses that you can get into on a very fairly small scale as she did where it was more or less within her means or she may have had a little bit of family help in terms of a little bit of capital to help get her going before she look beyond that, but by the time she started looking for outside capital, she also had a little bit of a track record and she had some experience.
Sometimes, you see people who start by catering for example, and ultimately they go into a restaurant or people who will do specialty foods and do it at home before moving into a larger facility or even people who will start with for example, a home-based child care and ultimately expand into a larger facility where they can care for many more children. I think there are lots of examples where there is a path where you can start by limiting your risk. If you start small, gain some experience, test the market, see whether or not your original idea is really the one that’s going to work.
Because lots of people start with an idea and end up in a very different place once they actually start presenting whatever they’re doing to the market.
Dr. Belisle: Yeah, that’s an interesting point because there has to be a flexibility, I would think, a flexibility of mindset between what you see as a possibility and what you learn overtime is the likelihood.
Ellen Golden: Absolutely. I mean, over the years, obviously, we’ve reflected a lot on why some businesses grow and some don’t, why some succeed and others don’t and I would say one of the biggest factors is that ability to adapt, right, to be able to pay attention to what’s happening, to see and understand trends, be aware of changes in the market or changes in competition, but then, also to be strategic and make changes as you need to.
You may love a product beyond all reason, but if nobody else does, it’s obviously not going to be very successful. You may have to abandon something, it may be even the first thing that you made to go into the market and I’m sure that can be very difficult for somebody, but in order to be successful, you have to prepared to really respond to what’s happening outside of you.
Dr. Belisle: It’s also an ability to see the things that are happening outside of you as not failures.
Ellen Golden: Absolutely.
Dr. Belisle: As, if you start with something that you love and it doesn’t really work for whatever reason because the market doesn’t support it, there’s just isn’t enough interest, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable or valid, it’s just wasn’t valuable or valid enough and it’s something from which you can learn.
Ellen Golden: Absolutely. Sometimes, it’s really a question of timing. I can’t think of a good example off the top of my head right now but there are lots businesses where somebody had an idea and it didn’t work but five years later, it does, right, because the market’s just not there yet. Things are constantly shifting, it’s pretty dynamic.
Dr. Belisle: Yes. I was just thinking about a conversation I had with an art professor of Bates and he just reminded me that many artists never become popular during the time in which they create their art. It’s only after they passed away and they cannot even financially benefit from this.
Ellen Golden: Exactly. I mean that would be a perfect example of people doing something that really matters a great deal to them. In the case of artists, you can only do what you can do and the public just not being ready for it. Yeah, it’s often sad and unfortunate. Van Gogh is a famous example of that of somebody who is certainly not appreciated during his life and look at him now.
Dr. Belisle: Your job as someone who is trying to match up investors with people who are seeking investors is try to make sure that the timing is right, that the product that whoever is wanting to put out in the marketplace actually is going to be wanted and create success.
Ellen Golden: Right. Well, the way that we actually work, our investors are actually investing in a pool of funds, so they don’t have a direct connection with a particular project although we certainly let them know where all the pool of funds has gone but fortunately, in addition to providing capitals, CEI has a great staff of business investors and so, we’re able to make sure that people have access to the good advice that they need in order to make sound decisions.
It’s an amazing resource because in fact, there’s no charge for all of that advice. Maine is a great place in some ways to be able to start a business because we do have a lot of resources available for business owners.
Dr. Belisle: How did you personally become interested in this line of work and how did you end up in Maine?
Ellen Golden: I moved to Maine, it was sort of a sense adventure. I was living in New York City and felt that my future wasn’t in New York. I had friends in Maine, I think it’s in a way a lot of people get here and we had spent some time up here and so, we thought we would give this a try and of course, there’s so many things about Maine to love beyond the physical beauty, but there are so many interesting and engaging people here. I think the scale of life certainly after living in New York City was something I really value.
The fact that as an individual, you have the potential to make a difference here in a way that you can’t in a more densely-populated place. Certainly, as a professional working at CEI, you have access to policy makers and decision makers in the state like Maine where you as an individual or as an organization can have some influence. In terms of CEI, quite honestly, I wasn’t necessarily interested in economic development but what I was interested in was working for an organization that align with my personal values.
I was personally interested in social and economic justice and wanted to do something that was closer to community, something that would add value and do some good, benefit some people. I was fortunate to stumble across CEI and so, it’s been, for me, it’s really been a great opportunity to align both personal and professional life and values.
Dr. Belisle: Talk to me a little bit about this idea of social justice and what that means to you.
Ellen Golden: Social justice really means, it’s about equality of opportunity in one way and certainly, that’s been the focus of the work that I’ve done at CEI, it’s really about making sure that people get access to the resources that they need, that as jobs are created for example in a small business, that they don’t automatically go the easiest to hire people, that there’s an effort made to make sure that people, low-income people or people that are unemployed or new Americans or women, have access to the information about those jobs, that they’re well-prepared when they go for those interviews, and so, that they got a chance to compete.
Unfortunately, there are sort of structural flaws in a way that societies are organized, and so, some of us don’t, as we’re growing up, as I’m sure you know all too well, just don’t have access to the same opportunities. I was personally fortunate to get access to a good education, lived in a middle class family. I don’t know anything personally about hunger, so I’m conscious of my own personal privilege and would like to see that everybody would have access to the same kind of opportunities that I personally had.
For a place like CEI, ironically, it’s using, you could say the tools of capitalism to address social issues. It’s about making sure that people have access to capital and sort of understanding the good that can come from the allocation of capital. Obviously, I talked earlier about impact investing, that’s one aspect of it, but it’s also investing in businesses that have good practices.
We wouldn’t work with a business that was a polluter, that didn’t have a safe work environment, that didn’t treat its employees fairly. We’re interested in sort of promoting the kinds of workplaces that are aligned with our organizational values that will then create good opportunities for people here in Maine.
Dr. Belisle: It sounds like there is more than enough of those types of organizations that are out there, that are seeking help.
Ellen Golden: I think so, it maybe of course that the kinds of organizations that come to us are self-selecting but I’m quite honestly amazed on an ongoing basis to see how many entrepreneurs are out there with great ideas who really see their businesses and opportunity to make a contribution to the community in one way or another where they’re thinking about being a good employer or where they’re thinking about how it relate to sort of some larger social issues. I can give you an example.
We recently supported something called Blue Ox Malthouse, which you may or may not have read about. He’s a young entrepreneur who’s really steeped himself in the technology of malting grains and as I’m sure you know, malt is a key ingredient in making beer. With the growth of Maine’s micro breweries, there’s been a desire to do more organic beer but there hasn’t been a source of organic malt in the state of Maine.
This young man has come along and he’s basically providing the missing link in the supply chain so there are growers in [inaudible 00:25:08] County who are interested in growing organic grain. He’s going to be able to process that in a way so that it can support the growing craft brewing industry in the state and he’s also going to be creating jobs. He’s a perfect example. I’m sure he wants to make money, but he also really cares a lot about what he’s doing and wants to do it in a way that he thinks is adding value to the community.
Dr. Belisle: I’m fascinated by our conversation and I think like many people who live in the state, I truly believe that there is something important about, I don’t know, living your values, creating a business out of your values and it sounds as though, CEI, this is something that’s of pretty significant importance to your organization as well.
Ellen Golden: Absolutely.
Dr. Belisle: How do people find out about the work you’re doing with CEI Investment Notes or just CEI in general?
Ellen Golden: Yeah, we do have a website, it’s www.ceimaine.org and of course, they can always call us at 8827552 and we do have a Facebook page and I understand we’re also in Twitter.
Dr. Belisle: Well, great. I hope that people who … if you’re listening and you have an interest in the type of work that CEI is doing, the type of work that Ellen is doing, you go to their website. We’ve been speaking with Ellen Golden who is the Managing Director of CEI Investment Notes. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and bringing great businesses together with the investors that are looking to support them and keep up the good work.
Ellen Golden: Thank you, and thank you for inviting me. It was a fun to talk to you. Thanks.
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Dr. Belisle: There are many guests whose names precede them, whose reputations are out there and then when we finally get them on the show, it’s kind of fun to meet them. Today, I have one these guests, this is Tae Chong who works in business development services at Coastal Enterprises Inc. Tae provides counseling through CEI’s StartSmart program helping refugees and immigrants to start, strengthen, or expand their own small businesses. Tae has lived in Portland for 36 years where he’s been actively involved in local and state issues regarding immigrants and refugees. It’s great to have a chance to meet you.
Tae Chong: Thank you, thank you for having me on the show.
Dr. Belisle: I’m very interested in your background because you came to Maine from South Korea Halloween of 1976.
Tae Chong: That’s right.
Dr. Belisle: There weren’t that many people from, or maybe there were no people from South Korea that were moving to Maine in 1976.
Tae Chong: Probably true, yeah.
Dr. Belisle: How did that happen?
Tae Chong: My uncle and my father, they were orphans after the Korean war and there was an American G.I. George Wyntle who actually grew up in Windham I believe and befriended my uncle while he was in Korea. When my uncle was a teenager, George wrote a letter to my uncle saying “Why don’t you come to Maine? It’s a great place to live.”
George sponsored my uncle to come here and he ended up in south Portland. He had that American story where he came with just like $10 in his pocket, a couple of suitcases and ended up being a janitor at the local church and also at Fairchild and he ended up working his way to being a general manager at Fairchild and ended up being Vice President AMD. Obviously, he said life is good here, there’s opportunities.
In ’76, Korea was economically, was in terrible times, and so, my father said “All right. What’s important is not my life but my children’s life.” And so, he wanted to emigrate to the United States and give his kids the education that he thought that the country could provide. We ended up in south Portland for a day on Halloween which was culturally amazing because there’s no Halloween celebration where I grew up.
I just remember vividly like me and cousins for the first time, we didn’t speak Korean and I have two older brothers and the three us were sitting in the living room just kind of looking at each other wondering what we’re supposed to be doing when my parents, my uncle and aunt went looking for an apartment and all these kids would knock on the door with costumes and they would say something in gibberish because we couldn’t speak English.
They’d take my oldest brother not knowing the culture or the custom, would grab handfuls of candy and give it to these kids and there was like this universal ah-hah in the neighborhood and all the kids just swarmed to our house and they took all the candy and just like we learned a new ritual which is like once all the candies out, we turned off the lights and just hide and pray that the kids don’t knock on the door.
That was the introduction to America for us and so, yeah, I’m still learning even though I’ve been here for 30 years, I mean almost 40 years but that’s how America was introduced to me was through Halloween and as a kid, all the candy being gone and not having any for me.
Dr. Belisle: Especially that part where you had to turn the light off and hide, I can only imagine, as a small child, being …
Tae Chong: Exactly. Yeah. I was a small child.
Dr. Belisle: “Why is this that people do this in this country?”
Tae Chong: Right.
Dr. Belisle: Yeah, that’s interesting. You reminded me of the story that I sometimes tell. I came to live in Maine in Yarmouth during the clam festival. I was pretty young and I remember going by the ferris wheel thinking “Wow, what a great place. Yarmouth has a ferris wheel.”
Tae Chong: Right. “It’s great. It’s here all the time.”
Dr. Belisle: Exactly. It’s the same sort of strange introduction to your new home. And then you moved to Portland. You actually grew up in Portland.
Tae Chong: Correct. Yeah. I’ve been here almost my entire life. I grew up on Brackett Street in the west end and just being a young person, I lived in almost every district in Portland but now, my home is in Winding Way of Capisic Street in Portland and so, it’s a great, great neighborhood and I just love how Portland has transformed.
Being the only kid of color, now, 42% of the schools’ population are multi-cultural and 40% of all the kids under the age of 5 in Portland are multi-cultural kids. I used to joke, there were only four kids of color in the Portland school system and two of them were my brothers and I was the other one and there was a Vietnamese kid who, and this is a true story, who ended up being my police officer when I worked for the police department.
That’s all I saw, were those three other kids of color including myself. It wasn’t until mid the ‘80s when you saw the Vietnamese and Cambodian kids come to Portland and I could see Portland starting to transform. I never would have imagined what it is today and thankfully, it is reflective of what the nation is. We might think Portland is an anomaly, but if you go to any major city in the United States, it’s actually more diverse and if you look at where the country is headed, it’s going to be like this for the foreseeable future if not, more diverse. I think it was fortuitous that I was here to see that change.
Dr. Belisle: You were telling me before we got on the air about going to the Riley School and having people follow you because they were so interested in the fact that you didn’t look like everybody else and waiting outside your door to see you come out and you described walking down or going down Congress Street and having cars actually stopped to look at your family.
Tae Chong: Correct. Right.
Dr. Belisle: That must, it seemed kind of weird given that you came from a place where that didn’t happen at all.
Tae Chong: Absolutely, yeah. It’s both scary but also fascinating. My wife had a similar experience. My wife is from New Jersey, she’s Irish Ukrainian and she has blonde hair, so when we went to Korea, it was the opposite. She’s stuck out and all the, whenever we went to a park and all these school kids saw her, they would ran to her like she was a rock star and they want to ask her all kinds of questions. That was sort of like what I experienced growing up but I couldn’t communicate and I wasn’t in charge because I was only seven so that’s where it was a little scary.
It was also fascinating in just, being the only one that stands out, you end up being the observer. You’re always looking for clues and cues. That’s what we do when we go abroad, we’re always looking to see what’s the social norm, how are people reacting, interacting. That’s how I grew up and I still have that where I’m always trying to observe what’s the norm. Even though I’ve been here for almost 40 years, that’s the kind of education you get as a person of color, in a place that’s not very diverse, you’re always, not necessarily fitting in, but just trying to understand your surroundings. That’s where it was fascinating.
Dr. Belisle: It’s interesting that you’re able to take that view of it and you’ve been able to parlay it into something that has become your life’s work rather than feeling so threatened by it, that it made you angry or frustrated or cynical or bitter. Somehow, you’ve taken all of these experience when you were younger and as you were growing up and you’ve worked with it in a really interesting way.
Tae Chong: Well, I’ve had my angry moments and cynical moments. I think everyone goes through that. As you get older, you realized we’re all connected and it doesn’t really matter, it’s just how you educate and how you present yourself, the energy that you give out and how it’s received is really important. Being here, when you’re here long enough, before we got on the show, we realized there’s already a connection. That’s the beauty of Maine. Portland is small enough, Maine is small enough that even if I’m a person of color, I can find a way to connect with you, with a friend or an event or something, and that’s what makes Maine special.
You realize that as you build relationships with people and you build relationships with the place and you try to cultivate it, you want to be part of it, you want to add to it and make it better and that becomes everyone’s life work. I think whether you are a business person or a clergy or whoever, you want to make the place where you are better and if you can do it a way you’re of service rather than trying to conquer it, you realize that doing things through service has a lasting impact.
Whereas if you’re trying to conquer something, it’s all about being angry and going for the win. It’s short-lived. I learned that after 20 years of advocacy and community work. Now, I’m in that stage where I’m trying to be of service and hopefully, that will be my reputation.
Dr. Belisle: Yes, we were talking about you’re having graduated from Deering High School a few years ahead of me and how both Yarmouth and Deering High School, we were the one at play festival and there’s that drama interaction. One of the things I find really interesting about that is that Yarmouth, if you had three people of color or four people of color living in the City of Portland when you were growing up, it had zero. Or maybe one.
Tae Chong: Right.
Dr. Belisle: Even by Yarmouth coming into the “Big City” we were actually experiencing some diversification, but we didn’t even think it that way, it was like “All right, we are the one at place,” we’re all going to be doing this thing that makes us kind of happy because it’s about drama and it’s about getting to know people. It really seems like that’s kind of the ongoing story of Maine.
Tae Chong: True.
Dr. Belisle: Is people on the same place at the same time realizing there’s a lot of commonality.
Tae Chong: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s the touchstones and sometimes, it takes work to find what the touchstone, where the touchstones are. Immigrants and refugees, they want a safe place to live. They want to raise their kids where education is valued and communities valued. But sometimes, we just can’t get over the appearances. It takes work to find the touchstones.
We did that with other communities, whether it was the French Canadians that had to integrate, they love God and Christianity as much as the Protestants, it was just a different touchstone. That fear, it took a long time for that fear to kind of absolve and it was through relationships and education, and I think that’s where we are with the immigrant and refugee populations and multi-cultural populations.
Yeah, we’re all human and we all want what’s best for our family and for our community and everyone wants to be included and everyone’s wants to feel like they’re part of a greater fabric and I think Maine gives people the opportunity to do that because it’s so easy to build relationships, it’s small enough and I think Mainers are open enough to do those things.
Dr. Belisle: I would agree and I also think it’s great that CEI is doing the StartSmart program where you’re actually helping people to do something that enables them to have a sustainable financially-viable life within the state.
Tae Chong: Absolutely.
Dr. Belisle: Tell me about that program.
Tae Chong: Sure. It’s a program that’s been around for about 20 years, it’s about 17 years old and we’ve helped about 13 immigrants and refugees through business counseling. We’ve started over 300 businesses in the state of Maine. It’s not just Portland or Lewiston, but it’s throughout southern Maine and some parts of northern Maine. If you look at any Maine streets in Portland and Lewiston and now in Biddeford, you see ethnic restaurants and stores that where CEI has had a part in helping those businesses. In fact, almost all the businesses in the Lisbon Street that’s kind of the gateway of Lewiston, that’s where CEI has helped so many stores and restaurants.
The same is true for Portland’s whether it’s Congress Street or Washington Avenue or Forest Avenue or Brighton Avenue, all those ethnics stores and restaurants, we’ve had a part in helping to create those businesses. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, in 2010, they did a study on the impact of multicultural businesses in the state of Maine, they contribute $400 million to state’s economy. It’s not a small number, it’s a significant number and it’s a growing number.
In fact, the multicultural contributions to the nation’s economy, so if throw in, you added up all the GDP of the Latino, Asian, and African American, native American population in the United States, it would be the sixth largest economy in the world, it’s over $4 trillion and that’s because they are third of the US population. By 2044, it’s going to be almost 50% of our nation’s economy, I mean our nation’s population and that’s not that far away. In fact, by 2030, it’s going to be almost 40% of the US population.
It’s the up growth, I mean that’s where the young people are, that’s where a lot of the energy is in addition to what everyone’s already doing. We have to include that as part of our strategic plan as the nation evolves. That’s what I’m trying to do in Portland. I want to carry that message. Just because we’re in Maine, we can’t forget what the rest of the nation is doing.
A great example is Massachusetts where in 1990, there were half a million immigrants and refugee. Today, there’s over a million and so, you can see how it’s transforming Boston and greater Boston and I think that demographic change is going to make its way to Portland.
You can already see it in southern New Hampshire. If Maine just doesn’t jump on that, it’s like missing the French Canadian back in the, at the turn of the century. We wouldn’t have the mills, we wouldn’t have the businesses that we have today. We need to see that as an opportunity and try to reach out to those communities and make it welcoming. Portland has done a great job and so as Lewiston and other cities, but as a state, we need to do that because as you know, we’re the oldest in the nation.
I used to joke that I always on the other side but now, I actually jumped over to the older side. The median ages is 43.9 and when I testified before the state legislature on behalf of the new American Resource Center, it was 42.7. That’s pretty scary when we’re aging that quickly and we don’t have people to fill in. The boomers are retiring, filling those skilled jobs and we simply don’t have enough kids in the state of Maine to fill those skilled jobs. We have more deaths than we have births in the state of Maine, so mathematically, it doesn’t work. We’ve got to figure out how to be more welcoming and inclusive if we want to keep Maine the way it is because Maine is going to change if you don’t have people.
Really, the concept of Maine isn’t sense of place, it’s the people who make the sense of place and it doesn’t matter if that person happens to be brown or black or yellow because when they come here, they value what all Mainers value which is we want to create a safe environment, we want to respect nature, we want to respect the place that we’re in. Those are Maine values that every immigrant has adopted, whether you are French Canadian, or Irish or German because they’re always the other at one point but now, they are the keeper of those values. I think immigrants and refugees will do the same just like all the other immigrants before them.
Dr. Belisle: What are some of the issues that you see as you’re counseling some of these business owners and trying to just help them understand how to better work within the city of Portland or the state of Maine?
Tae Chong: Well, it’s just familiarity with the US business culture and how you set up shop in the Middle East is different from how you set up shop in United States, so there’s a lot of technical assistance that needs to happen. It would be wonderful to have more business advisors to kind of do that work. It’s also access to capital. When you’re an immigrant or a legal resident, you may not have the capital because you don’t have the credit history.
Not having credit history makes it difficult for someone to get a commercial loan. They come to CEI, we’re a non-profit financing organization so we have products that we could offer, but it would be wonderful if people could get credit so they can get other or be able to get other products on the commercial market.
The other barrier is that we have a large Muslim population, it’s the fastest growing population in the state of Maine. It’s the fastest growing religion in the United States. They adhere to the sharia law which basically means you can’t take or accept interest. It’s fee-based which is really … it’s very similar to an interest but it’s the law. Right now, in the commercial banks, there is nothing for that particular product.
To me, it’s a missed opportunity for commercial lenders because if you have 15,000 customers which would be larger than the city of Yarmouth and there’s several banks in Yarmouth as there are several banks in Falmouth, just imagine having 15,000 customers who are loyal that wants to do business with you, if you create a new product for them, someone could be very rich doing that.
I hope that that message gets across that we need to work with this particular population because they’re some of the most entrepreneurial people I’ve ever met and because they’re not investing in stocks, some of them or interest-bearing products, they’re investing in businesses.
What I see are young people who are culturated and they have a bachelor’s degree or a PhD but they’ll start a business on top of their professional job and so, that’s the kind of stuff that I think commercial lenders are missing out if we could create something like that, that would be wonderful. Those are basically the two biggest barriers, it’s really financing and technical assistance.
Dr. Belisle: I’ve been thinking about my sister-in-law who is from Tunisia, she met my brother in France and she was trained as neurosurgeon, they have a different educational system there, but in order to come to the United States to practice medicine, she actually had to go back … First of all, she had to learn English much better than she had known it. Then she had to pass all the exams just to be considered a doctor even though she already had been a practicing surgeon. Then she had to make the decision as to whether she was willing to back through a neurosurgery residency.
All of the things that she had done up until that point were only somewhat relevant. She has to almost start … It wasn’t completely from the beginning but it was pretty close and yet, she did it. Now, she a neurology resident, she’s going through her training all over again, she’s learned English very well but just the amount of effort that she has put in to doing this is just staggering to me.
Tae Chong: You’re right. The New American Resource Center at Portland Adult, that is the vehicle to try to overcome some of those things but it’s staffed by one person. There’s over 210 professionals who have professional degrees that are working with Sally Sutton who runs the New American Resource Center and she’s the only person that’s looking at certification but also trying to assess people where they are and also trying to find jobs.
There’s 1,700 people taking classes at Portland Adult, there’s 4,000 people … in the SL program, there’s 4,000 people taking classes at Portland Adult. It would be wonderful if it was readily staffed so that we can help people.The state has been wonderful in granting a two-year program at New American Resource Center but it’s for one person. I think what’s needed is obviously more money and more people and more resources so that they can help your sister-in-law with the accreditation process but it would be wonderful if the city and the state could see that as an important vehicle too as part of economic development.
It’s like anything, there’s always competing measures but to me, if you have somebody that is close to working professionally because they already have the degree, it’s a really smart investment as opposed to waiting for a Maine kid to go through 12 years of education, hopefully four years of college and hopefully they’ll stay in Maine. That’s 16 years, that’s absolutely necessary and critical, but if you already have someone who has work experience, who has the college degree and all they need is maybe some English classes or maybe they need a navigator to go through the accreditation process so that they can be accredited or at least have most of their work history be accepted.
That to me is a smart investment, but the state is investing a little bit but it would be wonderful if that could be bigger. Even then, it is an arduous process. There’s no guarantee that’s going to be quicker, but if you have more help, perhaps it could be shorter and perhaps we could make a deeper impact. To me, it’s the biggest issue in the state of Maine. I was alarmed at how quickly we’re aging and how quickly boomers are retiring.
John Dorrer is a Research Fellow for Georgetown, used to be the Head of the Labor Statistics for DOL for the state of Maine. Basically, CEI did a presentation to [inaudible 00:53:41] and businesses at the Chamber, we worked in partnership John T. Gorman’s Foundations, PWI, Portland Workforce Initiate, greater Portland. The Mayor was involved, Mayor Brennan, Chris Hall was also involved, and obviously, CEI and we’re funded by Lerner Foundation. What he said was it’s not necessarily the number of people who are retiring, it’s the number of high-skilled employees that’s retiring that’s alarming.
We know that a company like [Whacks 00:54:17] if they don’t have high skilled software developers and they lost say half of that population, it has a dramatic impact on their business, the same is also true for IDEX or any other high tech businesses that we have whether it’s biotech or semiconductor or computer software, all those great companies that are kind of revitalizing, driving Portland’s economy along with the banking and healthcare. When all those skilled workers are leaving and there’s no one behind them to fill those positions, what happens to Portland’s economy? If Portland falters which is half of that state’s economy, what kind of impact does that have on the state of Maine.
Most people forget that even though Portland’s only 66,000 people, every day, there’s like 40,000 people that come to work in Portland and 15,000 people leave Portland to go work somewhere else. That’s a significant number of people that are contributing to the entire state’s economy and sometimes, it’s those small dominos that have a rippling effect and that’s why I believe what I’m doing and what CEI is doing and all those collaborators are doing is kind of, not necessarily sounding alarmed but educating and trying to be proactive before it actually happens.
Dr. Belisle: Tae, I’m sure people are going to want to learn more about this because there had been so many interesting things that you’ve brought up. I can imagine those who are listening are going to be left completely satisfied. How do people find out more about CEI and the StartSmart program and the work that you’re doing?
Tae Chong: We’re on our, the website at www.ceimaine.org or they can always call StartSmart and 7751984 and they can always email me or John Scribner at CEI and we’d be happy to talk with anyone and thank so much for this opportunity.
Dr. Belisle: We’ve been speaking with Tae Chong who works at business development services at Coastal Enterprises Inc. Thanks for coming in.
Tae Chong: Thank you.