Kareen Boncales and Moriah Heaney drive some of Mountain BizWorks’ main support programs for entrepreneurs in Western North Carolina.
Both say it was their interest in entrepreneurship abroad that helped them realize how much work still had to be done back in the U.S.
Boncales was born and raised in the Philippines and moved to the United States when she was eight-years-old. After college, she joined the PeaceCorps and was sent to Cameroon, where she helped budding entrepreneurs access business skills—a no-coincidence similarity to her current role as Mountain BizWorks’ learning services specialist.
As for Heaney, she comes from a family that’s long been deeply steeped in microfinance. Her mom traveled throughout the world to study community investment models before landing executive jobs at USAID and the Calvert Foundation. Heaney later did internships in Kenya and Bangladesh, but realized that she could have the biggest impact back home.
“I started to think about how uncomfortable I was with the sense of importing Western values into non-Western countries,” said Heaney, Mountain BizWorks’ community investments manager. “It felt somewhat imperialist to me, and I was recognizing that there was still a lot of poverty in the United States.”
Now the two are part of UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital program, where they’re working to widen the impact of their manufacturing-related programs while sharing their experiences with local creatives.
With a large presence of food producers, craft workers, and outdoor gear manufacturers, Western North Carolina is bustling with fabrication activity. In 2019, manufacturing businesses made up 20 percent of Mountain BizWork’s loan portfolio (up from 14 percent between 2013 and 2019).
Craft Your Commerce is the main program they have on deck targeted towards that audience. It features lectures, six-week business training courses, one-on-one mentorship, and financial training.
“Asheville and Western North Carolina as a whole have a deep history in manufacturing, whether it be specialized craft or legacy manufacturing, like textiles and furniture,” said Heaney. “Our current barrier at this time is finding best practices in outreach and program development that will make our craft business trainings more interesting, valuable, and attended by the makers of color in our community.”
Despite wanting to expand their audience, Boncales says they’re content with the positive transformation they’ve brought to existing customers. “From the time they first come in and get connected with us, we get to see them coming with their dreams and ideas, and how they make their dreams into reality. As cheesy as it sounds, it's true,” she said.
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 how these leaders are helping entrepreneurs of color – including makers and manufacturers – access to the capital and know-how they need to realize their business ideas and plans at scale.