AnewAmerica Community Corporation
Jeff Butler
Business Program Manager, AnewAmerica Community Corporation, US
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the AnewAmerica Community Corporation is helping break the cycle of poverty for “New” Americans and is working towards transforming America into a more just and compassionate nation through exposure to opportunity, entrepreneurship, empowerment and social responsibility.
Founded in 1999 by a group of community leaders representing immigrants and community development advocates who saw a continuing lack of integrated job creation, asset development, and community empowerment strategies for low-income new Americans living in the San Francisco Bay Area, AnewAmerica’s mission is to promote the long-term economic empowerment of new Americans - new citizens, immigrants, and refugees - and to encourage their full participation in the political, social and cultural growth of America.
“AnewAmerica’s innovative strategy helps new American entrepreneurs and their families build upon their existing community assets and bring them into the formal system of opportunities available to any U.S.-born American,” stated Jeff Butler, Incubation Program Director for AnewAmerica. “Our model helps the new American family access the building blocks—the know-how, the networks, the financing, the assets, the credentials and the civic participation—that create a path out of the margins and into the mainstream.”
Studies show that one quarter of foreign-born Latino and Southeast Asian individuals in California live at or below the poverty line. Despite their high entrepreneurial energy and well-developed community support networks, newcomers from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Mexico and Central America often find it immensely difficult to break out of this pattern of hardship.
To address this need, AnewAmerica has created a holistic three-year program, the Virtual Business and Assets Incubator(VBAI), that assists new Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area to establish or expand microbusinesses, build personal assets for the sustainability of their families, and develop the community assets necessary to support the political, social, and cultural empowerment of their communities. The program, which integrates business incubation, asset-building and social responsibility, provides entrepreneurs and their families with powerful financial education through a package of comprehensive services for three years to meet their cultural and linguistic needs.
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