GEWKC adds full day of Spanish programming to serve growing community of entrepreneurs

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Missouri Business Alert, a member of the Kansas City Media Collective, which also includes Startland News, KCUR 89.3, American Public Square, Kansas City PBS/Flatland, and The Kansas City Beacon.

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When Ana Nubia Duin held her first Café con Empresarias Latinas in April, the meeting for Latina entrepreneurs in Kansas City drew 79 attendees. The second meeting a month later brought in more than 200 people.

The event is catering to Kansas City’s growing Hispanic population, which now makes up about 11 percent of the metro area’s total population — an increase of almost 70 percent since 2010, according to the U.S. Census.

Many of them are entrepreneurs. Nationally, 14.5 percent of business owners are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy

As Global Entrepreneurship Week begins in Kansas City, the annual celebration of entrepreneurship is set to offer more programming for Spanish speakers than ever before. The multi-day conference includes panel sessions, workshops and networking opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn and make connections. On Wednesday, for the first time, it will feature a full day of sessions in Spanish.

Duin said she expects up to 300 people to attend the Café con Empresarias Latinas panel on Wednesday.

It is further evidence of what she said has been a surge in growth of Latina-owned businesses in Kansas City in recent years.

“I think once other people see the outcome that it has had and the success that it has had within our own community, I think that encouraged them to say, ‘OK, you know, what? If she can do it, I can do it too,'” Duin said.

Michael Carmona, KCSourceLink, speaks in April during the Forging the Future of Entrepreneurship event; photo courtesy of KCSourceLink

Michael Carmona is a network builder at KCSourceLink, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to entrepreneurs and organizes Global Entrepreneurship Week in Kansas City. He initiated the effort this year with the goal to make Hispanic entrepreneurs a part of the larger business ecosystem.

“The challenge that you have with the Latino community, Spanish-speaking community, is that we can give them a list of places to go to, but if those places don’t have people who speak Spanish, then it’s really not helpful,” Carmona said.

He added that many Hispanic entrepreneurs speak Spanish and English, but bilingual speakers may feel more comfortable speaking Spanish.

Global Entrepreneurship Week in 2023 included a panel on the state of the Hispanic businesses community. Michael Carmona said this year’s Spanish-language sessions arose after this event when attendees asked for speakers to present in Spanish; photo courtesy of Fresco Marketing

Gabriel Muñoz, executive director of nonprofit small business resource center The Toolbox KC, is among the Hispanic presenters participating in a session Wednesday. For him, the event is an opportunity to fill a trust gap he has seen when going door to door, trying to promote small business grants and resources to Kansas City’s Hispanic community.

“The entrepreneurs had no idea about these programs,” Muñoz said, “and they thought — when I told them about it — they thought they were scams.”

Muñoz’s panel is composed of well-known Hispanic entrepreneurs in the Kansas City area, which he says will help encourage others to trust these resources through word of mouth.

It’s important that Global Entrepreneurship Week-Kansas City’s efforts to reach this Hispanic community go beyond the day, Carmona said.

“You can’t treat it like a second-rate program,” he said.

In addition to offering Wednesday’s Spanish-language programming, the event will provide volunteers who are available translate English sessions to Spanish.

Duin is hoping these efforts will allow Hispanic vendors to reach a new market, as the Latinas in her meetings have been doing.

“Some of them have just been interacting with the Latino community, but now they’re stepping out of that shell, and they’re actually not so hesitant to go and offer the services to the English-speaking people,” she said.

The full day of Spanish-language sessions is meant to show “what Latinos are capable of,” Duin said, resisting the tendency to stereotype the work Hispanic people do.

“They’re always thinking, oh, we’re the house cleaners and the restaurant workers and the hotel housekeepers. And we’re a lot more than that,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with being a housekeeper, or, you know, a waitress or a dishwasher. There is nothing wrong with that. But I think that the Latino community, no matter what the challenge is, we’re gonna go above and beyond that.”

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