Since 2012, Build Institute entrepreneurs have created over 500 businesses and 1,300 jobs across 144 zip codes in and around Detroit. To date, they have graduated over 1,850 aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs, many of whom have gone on to start successful businesses in the city.
Build’s intentionality around and success with inclusivity is what excites UMA about partnering with them and including in the Pathways to Patient Capital cohort; 83 percent of Build’s graduates are women, 63 percent are people of color, and 45 percent are African American. Almost two-thirds (62 percent) are 35 or older and three-quarters are low-income.
Beyond Build’s participant demographics, UMA is also impressed by how the organization thinks about the impact it’s having with participants. Since December 2013, Build has endorsed 24 small businesses and raised $136,450 in micro-loans with a 98% repayment rate through the Kiva funding platform. (Kiva also serves on the Pathways’ Advisory Board.) To date, almost 600 businesses have been started by their graduates.
The organization spurs community, too; over half of alumni collaborate with one another on their projects and businesses. And recognizing that entrepreneurship and business ownership can be intensely personal journeys that require as much nerve as knowledge and know-how, it’s noteworthy that more than 90 percent of graduates indicate that they feel more confident in business as a result of their participation. Perhaps that’s, in part, because 77 percent of graduates were connected to resources they say they were not previously aware of. Build works hard to collect this difficult-to-measure, qualitative feedback to make sure their programs are fulfilling the participants’ needs.
Build also finds creative, effective ways to reach into communities and meet entrepreneurs where they are. Classes are offered throughout the City of Detroit, Metro Detroit, and beyond. They host coaching events in neighborhoods throughout the metro area, including at local coffee shops and bakeries. If a participant is not able to pay for coaching, Build will barter with them for in-kind services.
They are also about to launch the Pay-It-Forward Fund. Recipients will be able to borrow up to $5,000 at zero percent interest and won’t have to begin paying back the principal until they reach $100,000 in business revenues. This will in turn make the Pay It Forward Fund a shared-risk impact investment fund in the long-term.
Moving forward, Build is eager to apply these successful community-building strategies to reach the growing number of local manufacturers in the food, furniture, textiles, and metal fabrication sectors. Jacquise Purifoy, Build’s entrepreneur-in-residence and Pathways’ participant, and her coworkers believe Pathways syncs up nicely with their work as they continue to dive into problems around makers and access to capital. “It’s not that [underserved entrepreneurs] don’t have ideas, it’s that they don’t have the funding to do business,” she said. “So when the RFP came across our desk, we were like ‘This would be the perfect fit.’”
This case study was co-authored by Mark Foggin and Johnny Magdaleno and published in 2020 as part of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance’s “Forging Fairness: How community-based lenders are centering both inclusion and manufacturing to promote equity [link to report].” This report highlights the work of practitioners in UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital cohort, and approaches these leaders are taking to help entrepreneurs of color–including makers and manufacturers–get access to the capital and know-how they need to realize their business ideas and plans at scale.