Mechanism

for

Community & Connection in Manufacturing

Karleen Porcena’s Mission to Fund and Empower Small Businesses

Title, LISC Boston

Karleen Porcena’s past plays a major role in her work today.

She started her career overseeing direct services—everything from food security assistance to programs targeted at seniors—at Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), at the Mattapan Family Service Center, Boston’s largest anti-poverty agency. Her clients were low- to moderate-income individuals whose stories reminded her of her youth growing up in the city’s public housing system with immigrant parents.

“I felt like I shared so many of the stories of the people that I worked with,” said Porcena.

Throughout her ten years at Mattapan, Porcena found the work “extremely fulfilling,” but she was discouraged when she saw repeat clients who didn’t seem to be gaining more economic mobility. “Services were important, but equally important is to work on systems strategies that were more big picture,” she said.

Supporting entrepreneurial aspirations, she realized, was one way she could prop up “big picture” strategies around creating and sustaining wealth at the neighborhood level.

“I think a lot of times with low-income people we just think, ‘How can we fix folks?’” said Porcena. During her time working on small business development at LISC Boston, she said their approach was to “take what they [clients] already knew and do well and advance that.”

“It was an avenue where people had more autonomy over the trajectory of their lives,” she said.

She recalls one company, Sweet Teez Bakery, that received financial help to fulfill a big Whole Foods contract in a short period of time. That could have been a steep challenge without LISC Boston. “The owner was early on in her baking career so she basically had to put layers of different financing together to get the right amount of funds,” remembers Porcena. “Boston LISC helped provide that for her.”

Today Porcena works as a banker at Berkshire Bank, a regional financial services company where she supports entrepreneurs in the Roxbury neighborhood and coordinates a capital fund aimed at businesses without networks of wealthy friends and family. That fund, aptly titled the Friends and Family Fund, is being coordinated in part by the Runway Project, an organization that launched a similar seed fund for entrepreneurs of color in Oakland.

It’s all part of a career path that Porcena says has “made me see the power, strength, and value in the people I was working with who we categorize as low income individuals.”

Background

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.

Karleen Porcena’s past plays a major role in her work today.

She started her career overseeing direct services—everything from food security assistance to programs targeted at seniors—at Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), at the Mattapan Family Service Center, Boston’s largest anti-poverty agency. Her clients were low- to moderate-income individuals whose stories reminded her of her youth growing up in the city’s public housing system with immigrant parents.

“I felt like I shared so many of the stories of the people that I worked with,” said Porcena.

Throughout her ten years at Mattapan, Porcena found the work “extremely fulfilling,” but she was discouraged when she saw repeat clients who didn’t seem to be gaining more economic mobility. “Services were important, but equally important is to work on systems strategies that were more big picture,” she said.

Supporting entrepreneurial aspirations, she realized, was one way she could prop up “big picture” strategies around creating and sustaining wealth at the neighborhood level.

“I think a lot of times with low-income people we just think, ‘How can we fix folks?’” said Porcena. During her time working on small business development at LISC Boston, she said their approach was to “take what they [clients] already knew and do well and advance that.”

“It was an avenue where people had more autonomy over the trajectory of their lives,” she said.

She recalls one company, Sweet Teez Bakery, that received financial help to fulfill a big Whole Foods contract in a short period of time. That could have been a steep challenge without LISC Boston. “The owner was early on in her baking career so she basically had to put layers of different financing together to get the right amount of funds,” remembers Porcena. “Boston LISC helped provide that for her.”

Today Porcena works as a banker at Berkshire Bank, a regional financial services company where she supports entrepreneurs in the Roxbury neighborhood and coordinates a capital fund aimed at businesses without networks of wealthy friends and family. That fund, aptly titled the Friends and Family Fund, is being coordinated in part by the Runway Project, an organization that launched a similar seed fund for entrepreneurs of color in Oakland.

It’s all part of a career path that Porcena says has “made me see the power, strength, and value in the people I was working with who we categorize as low income individuals.”

Background

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.