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news archives
07/05/2006
Tennessee's Hispanic chambers of commerce: helping businesses and building cultural bridges
By Edgar Miller
(originally published at "Mundo Hispano" in Knoxville, TN)
From seatbelts and car seats to business seminars, Tennessee’s fledgling Hispanic chambers of commerce take different approaches, but they share the same goal: to help businesses in their booming Spanish-speaking communities.
Ironically, most have had an easier time attracting non-Hispanic than Hispanic-owned businesses to their ranks.
Why don’t more Hispanic business owners sign up?
Luis Velázquez, executive director of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of East Tennessee in Knoxville, says many of them don’t understand the benefits they can get from membership.
“They don’t see [the benefits] because in their own experience they never were active in any chamber in their own country,” he said. “It is a very American idea.”
Of the 97 members of HCCET, 26 are Hispanic-owned. Several others have strong ties to the Hispanic community through key employees who are Hispanic.
In an effort to change that ratio, HCCET has offered a series of workshops for Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs, covering a wide range of subjects — from preparing a business plan to handling tax questions.
Eva Melo, a dynamic Mexican-born woman who founded the Franklin Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce about six months ago, agrees with Velázquez that a chamber of commerce is an alien concept for many new Hispanic entrepreneurs.
“They are not used to chambers,” she said. “We have to explain the idea for them. We have to build trust, getting them to see how we can help.”
The message Melo wants to get to Hispanic business owners is that the chamber can help them grow their businesses and make them successful.
The Franklin Chamber has about 50 paid members of which about half are Hispanic-owned.
Melo, who also operates Latin Market Communications in Middle Tennessee, works tirelessly to build up that trust, not just for her chamber, but between new immigrants and the established community.
“Melo is the woman in the middle, the bridge between Hispanics and their adopted homeland,” Nashville’s Tennessean newspaper said of her in a recent article. “She never grows tired of linking fellow Hispanics with her American friends.”
One of Melo’s most successful campaigns was to encourage Hispanics to use seatbelts and car seats for their children. A local insurance company donated about 500 car seats Melo enlisted the aid of an African-American radio station and a TV channel to get Hispanic parents to use them.
The campaign also helped build ties between the Hispanic and African-American communities, she says.
Yuri Cunza, president of the 4-year-old Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber, estimates that about half of his group’s 232 members are Hispanic-owned businesses.
His approach to attracting new members is low-key.
“We invite them (prospective members) to participate in our monthly gathering,” said Cunza, who is publisher of Nashville’s La Noticia newspaper. “In that we have a sense of how close we may be to fulfilling their needs. We don’t want to pressure anybody. Each one has different expectations.”
NAHC also offers workshops and other programs aimed at assisting Hispanic business owners.
Robert Chavez, president of the Nashville-based Tennessee Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, takes a little different approach.
“We’re a school more than a chamber,” he says of his 5-year-old non-profit organization with statewide membership.
“First of all, we have to understand that the state is still an infant state when it comes to having Latin businesses,” he says. “We have to give it time. The members we have now are members who want to get involved in the small percent of Latino businesses.”
The THCC has 220 members of which about 18 percent are Hispanic-owned, Chavez said.
All four chambers stress that their membership fees are minimal, usually about $75 a year, which they feel is a small amount for the services they offer.
Melo also points out that speaking Spanish is not a prerequisite for membership. Many people of Hispanic heritage don’t speak Spanish, she notes.
The message Knoxville’s Luis Velázquez would like to get out to Hispanic business owners is that the chamber can “open the door of opportunity” for them so that “they can obtain all the technical assistance that is available ... for them.”
“We can be the instrument that can connect them with different organizations and different sources of information on how to grow their businesses, from banking to the organizational structure of a business” Velázquez says.
As chamber members, Hispanic entrepreneurs become a bloc, “an organization that has a message to the whole community: Here is the Hispanic community that is moving to integrate with the American society by working hard and developing our own businesses.”
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