C.E.O. Women | Farhana Huq | Talks at Google

So my name is Robin Yilmaz. I'm here to introduce this wonderful group, CEO Women. Really excited that they're here for women at Google events. So I've been at Google two years and this is the first type of event that I've tried to help organize and the first organization that I've tried to help bring to Google. And you know, my involvement started probably about six months ago. I went to an event that they had and what I learned there is that this organization really has legs. And you're about to see what that's all about. They have a great team and I think that their model of what they're doing really works. The women that come into their program are really the right women to give these skills to and to be successful later on. And you'll see how that all works in a moment. But I was connected to this organization through a friend and I hope that you're all inspired to get involved afterward in whatever way, a lot of ways to get involved. And they'll take you through that. And with that, I'll hand it over to Keith, who will give a formal introduction of Farhana, who began this great organization. Thanks.

Great. Thank you so much to Robin and Lisa for organizing this and to the rest of you for being here and taking the time out of your busy day. My name is Keith Upton. I'm the resource and development coordinator for CEOW Women and I've been with the organization for two years now. And I started at the organization as a full time volunteer and I went through the AmeriCorps VISTA program. So I'm a full time volunteer and I'm just finishing up my second year as the volunteer. So basically what I wanted to share with you today was my passion for the organization and why I continue working with the organization as a volunteer. The women that you see go through the program are so inspiring. The organization, like Robin was saying, does have legs and we're moving and growing at rapid pace. And Farhana and Kate are going to be talking about that today and walking you through that. And you'll also be hearing from one of our graduates of the program and hearing her story of how she started up her business and how the organization really supported her in that. So with that I just wanted to give a little formal introduction of Farhana. Farhana comes from a family of self made entrepreneurs of the South Asian diaspora. In 2000 she founded CEowomen, the third startup venture that she has been involved with. After being inspired by the enterprise revolution of her father's native Bangladesh and after being inspired by the enterprise revolution of her father's Bangladesh and by the struggles that poor single women in her own family face to become self sufficient, Farhana has always admired the creativity and freedom of microentrepreneurs. She envisions a world where the most powerful and unlikely relationships come together to connect women in meaningful ways. Farhana created Micro Enterprise in Action, a self initiated audio documentary on the lives of women entrepreneurs from around the world. She was recognized as one of the 40 under 40 up and coming business professionals to watch by the East Bay Business Times. She was named the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year national finalist in the Supporter of Entrepreneurship category. Most recently, she was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship for leading social entrepreneurs of the world. Please welcome Farhana Haq.

Thank you Keith for that introduction and just want to thank you all for having us here today at Women at Google. It's my absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you both for really putting this together and I just want to take this time to thank you for what you do for our world. At CA Women's offices we are on campus Gmail. We have a Google AdWord grant. We use Google every day in our everyday operations. So thanks for the value that you lend to the community. And with that I am here to share with you more about CEO women creating economic opportunities for women. And I really just want to tell you my story about how I started this organization, what inspired me, what we do and where we're headed. I was motivated to start SIA Women after seeing the struggles women in my own family go through. My family is from two different countries. My dad's from Bangladesh as Keith mentioned and my mother is originally from Pakistan and I saw one of my aunts when at the age of 17 she had an arranged marriage which was very common in our culture go through very difficult times. That marriage ended in a divorce and it left her on the social welfare system for several years trying to make ends meet and raise three kids on her own. And she eventually got some training in beauty therapy and Indian bridal makeup from her community college and ended up opening a salon in the front room of her home. I remember going there when I was in high school and I walked in her house and I saw the salon on the right and all her sons helped her build the floor, put in the flooring. She got equipment from her friends and family, other family members around and she was running this salon and I saw a lot of other people in her community that were women in her community that were really in dire circumstances that really needed a leg up and access to better economic opportunity so that they could support their families. And so I became inspired to start this organization, CEowomen. I actually started CEowomen with $1,000 about seven years ago and like most entrepreneurs, worked out of my bedroom for two years before the venture. Actually, you know what I'm talking about. Before the venture actually got up and running and we were on a shoestring budget. I mean like $8,000 serving 12 women in the community. And since then, the organization's grown to sizable. I think it's sizable size compared to Google. It's not. But our yearly operating budget's just under a million. And We've served over 1,000 women since our inception through our programs. And the training has been extremely successful. The programs, which Kate will talk about a little bit later, have been extremely successful. In the number of women that we surveyed in our evaluation process, we found that 43% of the women we actually were giving services to started or expanded a business. 30% of the women that we worked with went from unemployment to employment. I Feel Like Barack Obama, 67% of the women increased participation in their communities and 100% of the women actually increased their confidence speaking English. So we're really, really proud of that. And you might all be wondering, what exactly do we do to accomplish those impressive statistics and evaluation? In a nutshell, we help low income immigrant and refugee women to become entrepreneurs and to improve their economic livelihoods. And when I founded CEO Women, I really envisioned a place where women could come and realize their dream and their assets and their skills, and especially women that didn't necessarily fit into sort of that 9 to 5 job mentality, but who had other aspirations and dreams, but really didn't have the opportunities to pursue those dreams. And also one of the underlying philosophies of our work is that the glass is always half full versus being half empty. So we really try and and work with women and see what assets that they do come with and help them build off of those assets. So I'll give you an example of what we mean by economic opportunity and what opportunity really means to the women that we work with @CEOWomen. I love telling the story about a woman named Erica. I had the pleasure of going to visit Erica at her salon about a year and a half ago. She's a graduate of our program. She is originally from Mexico. And Erica ran a beauty salon in Mexico in one of her villages. But the economic infrastructure of the economy there was just so Weak that she wasn't even getting any customers. She really couldn't survive there any longer, and she decided to immigrate to the United States. And when she first came to the United States, one of the first jobs she told me that she had was as a grape picker in Bakersfield. And so she's sitting here telling me this story how she was a businesswoman in her country, and here she was picking grapes. And I just looked at her and I said, you know, I said, I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm so sorry that you had to go through that really degrading process. And she said, no, Verhanna. She said, I was actually happy to have an opportunity. She said, even if it was picking grapes, she said, it was something that I could be doing. And so from there, she actually moved from Bakersfield to the Bay Area, started working in her friend's salon, saw a commercial for CEO women on television, and ended up enrolling in our program and going through the full training and graduating. And she took. This is a quote that I took from Erica when I met with her. So she said, since CEO women, I have changed all my thinking. Before CEO women, I was staying home and suffering from depression. I gained 34 pounds in two months. I quit my job. I would not answer the phone. CEO women opened my eyes. I feel excited. I feel complete and happy. I have one reason now why I live, and that reason is to open my business. It's my dream, and I know I can do it. So that is just. I mean, I think that resonates with me a lot, because just that knowing how little opportunity people have around the world and even right here in this country, just being able to provide them even some small opportunity, whether it be training, access to resources, mentorship, or connecting women together in meaningful ways. And I think it's very telling. And I was consequently talking with her husband, Erica's husband, when I was at the salon, and he turned to me and he just looked at me and he said, farhana, thank you for everything you've done for me. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, my wife used to come home every day from her, you know, your training program, and she would teach me everything that you taught her. And he said, I never knew that I could learn anything from my wife. And I said, oh, well, you're welcome. And so he said, well, I've taken everything that I've learned from my wife, and I've started mechanics business, and we're opening the business in a couple weeks. And she's helped me create flyers, and we're doing the marketing, we set the books up. So it's really incredible how even investing in one person in the family can really impact the entire family and really change the perception of a woman, change how she's perceived among her husband, among her children, and among the broader community, and how she actually ends up, in some ways, becoming a leader, imparting skills and knowledge to other people. So last year, I met with my team and we looked at the accomplishments of our organization, and we sort of talked it over and we said, you know, we've come to. We've established a certain amount of success with our model. But then we looked at the real need in the community, and we noticed a real stark contrast between the actual number of women that we were reaching and touching through CEO women and the amount of women out there in the community that really needed our services.

So.

So here are just some numbers for you to think about. There are an estimated 127,000 immigrant and refugee women in the Bay Area that could benefit from services that CO Women has to offer. So 127,000 women. There are almost 750,000 women in the state of California, and that number is expected to grow to 1 million by the year 2010. There are 3.2 million women that we've identified that have the potential to benefit from CEO women's services. 3.2 million women nationally. And on average, we're reaching a little over 500 of these women a year. So we have a long way to go in our journey. We do have a business plan that we've developed that will help us get to those numbers. And the first step in executing that is actually happening right here in your backyard. We're going to be opening up a CEOW Women Inside in Silicon Valley at the end of this year. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But there is actually a lot that goes into running an organization like CEO Women and even fulfilling our mission here in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a more regional level, we need things like more coaches and more volunteers to get involved with us. Graphic design services, venues for fundraising events, investors and advocates, especially around here in the South Bay, that can help us. Guest speakers for our program. And certainly without a program like CEowomen, there are far less opportunities for women to enter our economy. There are more business failures due to lack of planning, proper planning and training and education of these future entrepreneurs. Less jobs created for people, of course, because as women are starting businesses, they're Also creating employment and creating jobs for other people and really strengthening localized economies. My vision is to see a world where the limits any women, any woman faces have only to do with the limits of her own ambition and not with the factors beyond her control. It has only to do with the limits of her own ambition and not with the limits. Let me say that again where the limits any woman faces have only to do with the limits of her own ambition and not with the factors beyond her control. I wanted to say that twice just so it could sink in with everybody. This brings me to the future of CEO women. Our next steps, which I'll reveal later in the session, involves using technology and media in innovative ways to really spread the impact of our work throughout the Bay Area and beyond, and throughout the US and eventually throughout the world. So I'm excited, really, really excited to share with you where we're headed. Before I do that, I wanted to introduce you to co women's Director of development and also the organization's first employee ever, Kate Hamilton, who's here today. And she's going to share with you a little bit about the actual programs and how we go about achieving the mission, all the success that we've been able to achieve thus far. Kate.

So thank you all so much for being here today and thank you for Hannah for telling us about the organization's history. I always, and I get to hear this talk quite a bit, I always get a little bit choked up hearing about our history. Been a long road, and you all know this, working here in Silicon Valley startup land. But I was the organization's first full time employee. And when I met Farhana, she was CEA women. And we had a budget of about $50,000. And we were going out there and doing absolutely everything on our own. And now we are so much more than that. So it's really exciting to be a part of an organization that has grown so much. I first came to the organization after being a teacher in AS in China, teaching English as a second language to masters and PhD students who were hoping to defend their theses in English. And I would hold office hours and my students would come into my office and they would tell me about their hopes and their dreams for the future. These were all highly dedicated, educated, talented professionals. And almost every one of them had hopes and dreams of coming to the United States, the land of opportunity. And I grew up in the Bay Area. I was the daughter of two parents who were activists. Both of my parents have worked for their whole careers in the nonprofit sector for the Sierra Club. And so I knew that I was going to change the world. And I thought that the way that I was going to do that was through education. But I saw how immigrants were really struggling in this country. Many of my friends growing up in Berkeley were immigrants and many of their parents came here and couldn't make ends meet. They were working in low wage jobs, unable to use their skills and talents. So I was thrilled to meet Farhana and to hear about CEA women and the innovative approach to education that CEA women had. Their approach, combining entrepreneurship with English as a second language education was really giving women the skills that they needed in order to succeed and to use the skills and assets that they already had. So I signed up to be a full time volunteer. I was also an AmeriCorps VISTA for a full year and then went on to become the trainer, the program director, and now the director of development with the organization. So I want to talk a little bit more about that educational approach about what CEA women does that is so unique and that really transforms the lives of women. So we have three core programs. The first one is training. And our training is unique in that it combines both English as a second language and and entrepreneurship to give women the skills that they need in order to succeed. So it's a 16 week training program right now and women come in for two times a week, two and a half hours each night, and they're learning entrepreneurship within the context of English as a Second language. The second program is coaching and technical assistance so alumni support for those women after they graduate from the training program. We hold the philosophy that once a woman is a client of CEO women, she will always be a client of CEO women. And so that alumni training and support is there to really take women from that idea phase from having a business plan and get them to the point where they are supported, they're running those businesses and they are succeeding out in the world and becoming successful entrepreneurs. So that is comprised of monthly workshops where women can come in and get more information about how to run a business. So we have volunteers who come in and present on topics like financing your business, like marketing and advertising. We also have a alumni network that receives a newsletter. We have a bi monthly newsletter that goes out to that whole group. They get together to do networking. So we have an alumni reunion coming up where they get to come and see each other and hear about all of their successes. And then the other part of that is coaching and technical assistance. And we leverage volunteers from the community like yourselves, who have an expertise in some area that a woman is looking to develop in her business. And that volunteer will work with that woman on a one on one basis to help her get her business off the ground. So those are some of our support services. The third program, and this is a new one for us that we're really excited about. Ceawomen has started a micro equity program, and it's one of only three micro equity programs in the country. So we offer $2,000 grants to women to help them get their businesses off the ground. And we actually today have one of those recipients here with us, and she's going to tell you a little bit about what she used that grant for. But we found that women who are in our program really get a jump start when they get a cash grant of $2,000 and $1,500 of that they get in cash form that they can go out and use. And then 500 of it is business. So they get a marketing makeover of their business. Last year, we held an event where we displayed all of these beautiful businesses. They all had these poster boards and business cards and postcards, and it really transforms a business. When you can see those exciting marketing materials, women's eyes light up. Their businesses really, really come to life. So that's a really exciting new program that we have that's giving women the financing they need to to get those businesses going. So a lot of people think that everyone who goes through our programs is starting a business, and that's actually not the case. Farhana mentioned that about 43% of women that go through the program are starting a business after they graduate. But really what we focus on is increasing women's economic livelihoods. So sometimes that means starting a business right after graduating. But we also find that about 30% of the women who go through our programs are getting jobs afterwards. And a lot of times those jobs are related to the industry that they want to start a business in. But a woman might decide, I'm going to go out and get a job and get some more experience before I launch into this business venture, which we really treat as a success. We're also seeing that women's wages are increasing as a result of our programs, and we treat that as a success as well. So women aren't just starting businesses. They're really increasing their economic livelihoods through jobs, through increases in incomes, through becoming more active participants in their communities. Another thing that people think is that learning English is really easy, that you can come here and just sign up for an ESL class and you're good to go. And actually, right here in San Jose, there are waiting lists of up to 6,000 immigrants to learn English. So it's really difficult to learn English here because of those waiting lists and because of all of the barriers that women face. Farhana talked about some of these. But not only waiting lists, language barriers, cultural barriers. Many of the women that we work with are working two or three full time jobs to make ends meet. So getting to those classes is very difficult. And then another myth that some people have is that there are a lot of business support services out there that can teach you how to start a business. And immigrants and refugees should just go out and access those and learn how to start businesses. CEowomen is really the only program that exists that is combining English as a second language with micro entrepreneurship training. So really we are the only organization that's bringing those two worlds together, which is making that micro enterprise training that does exist with other organizations out there, but it's making it accessible to our unique target population, which is low income immigrant and refugee women. And that is why people are so excited about our programs. We have women calling us from five different Bay Area counties. We've had organizations from all over the country calling us to ask us about our curriculum. So we're really, we're something special. And I know that you are going to realize that when you get to hear from one of our graduates who are so lucky to have here with us today. So Sunny Supa first came to us in 2003, I believe it was. Is that about right, Sunny? Yeah. And Sunny came to me and told me when I first met her about her hopes and dreams for the future. And she brought this big book full of beautiful sketches with her. She is an extraordinarily talented artist who knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a fashion designer. And she had books and books filled with these beautiful sketches of clothes that she wanted to make once she became a fashion designer. So she had a dream, she had a passion, but she felt very alone. She tried a lot of other programs that were out there. They hadn't worked for her. She didn't really have a community in the Bay Area. She couldn't find something that was really meeting her needs. So Sunny came to our program. She went through our 16 week training. She was paired with a coach. And then she, as I mentioned, was recently a recipient of one of our grants and made a bunch of beautiful marketing materials, launched her business, which she will tell you about. It's a petite clothing line for women that is just out of this world. So I'm going to let her tell you the rest of the story. Sunny, come on up and and tell us about your experience with CEO women. Thank you, Kate.

Thank you, everyone. My name is Sunny Supa, and I'm a graduate from CEO Women's Enterprise Training Program, as Kate has mentioned. And first off, I'd like to thank Google and you guys for allowing me the opportunity here to share my story today. Actually, it was kind of a funny thing because this morning before I left for Mountain View, I got an email from somebody in Canada to my website, and he said he found my website through Google. So I think I have a lot to thank you guys for, and thank you for driving traffic to my website. My company is called 5 foot 2 inch, and it's a clothing company that caters to professional petite women who are 5 foot 2 inches and under. And I specialize in ready to wear pants. But before I continue, I'd like to tell you a little bit about my background and how I got to work with CEO women. I was raised in Bangkok, Thailand, and my parents sent me to the United States to study English with my sisters when I was 13 years old. They were really concerned with me because I couldn't speak English fluently, and I felt that that was a really important skill I needed to have in order to be successful in the future. So when I first arrived to the United States, I experienced many cultural shocks. I was used to having rules and grooming codes and strict guidelines and uniforms. But as it turns out, things are really different in America. And I actually had to learn the hard way that Velcro sneakers were not cool in high school, and things were really tough. And then also I learned that you have to look people in the eyes when you talk to them instead of looking down. My English was really limited, and I always felt intimidated in classes because I often didn't know what to do. Then a few years after the move, my parents lost their businesses to the Asian economic crisis. And as a result, my sisters and I were left with no financial support. And so we were responsible for our own living expenses, the mortgage, and our educational cost. We worked a lot while we were in school, and I funded my college through education, through my college education, through scholarships, financial aid, and working two jobs. And after I graduated from college, I decided to move to California to pursue a career in fashion design. And. And my ultimate goal was to start my own clothing line. So things seemed to be going well. Initially, when I first came to California, I had a job and I had a place to live. And really that was all that was important to me as a 20 year old girl living on her own. But then I ran into some challenges. And then that's when I realized that I didn't have a support system in California. I had no one to call when I was in trouble, and both my sisters and my parents were living thousands of miles away. And it wasn't something that I wanted to do pick up the phone and call my parents and telling them that I was in trouble. So I really felt that I needed to be strong and I needed to survive on my own. So a lot of people told me that I'm strong, but I realize now that it's really because I try really hard to not appear weak and fragile, which is how I've always felt inside. At that time, I was really afraid for my future. And so I didn't have much savings and I didn't have any family funds to fall back on. So my solution was to have a lot of credit cards because I read somewhere that you should have at least six months of savings for your emergency funds. And so that was my emergency funds, all my credit cards, and I had enough limits that I have enough to live for six months. It seemed like a smart move at the time, but it ended up ruining my credit. And even so, the money did help during the rough times. The credit card that also followed me for many years to come, I'm still paying some of them off now. When I joined CEO Women's Program, I had no job, no savings, and poor credit. But I still had my dream, which is pretty much all I had. I didn't know what I needed to do to turn my life around. But I was impressed with CEO Moon's program and their model. And so I decided to give them a try. And I believed in them. I'm glad I made that decision. And I'm really thankful for their program because without much explaining, they understood the complex challenges that I was facing. And that was one of the things that I really liked about CEO women. And I always appreciated the fact that they never demanded an explanation from me. They always seemed to understand. And that was great for me because at the time, it was really difficult and I felt ashamed to tell people what was really going on with me. It took almost three years of trying, and I finally graduated from CEO Women's Program. And during that, CEO Women paired me up with a mentor who was also working in a clothing business. Her name was Priya. And Priya helped me with my business plan. And she told me how things were in the apparel industry as an independent designer in San Francisco. And she worked on my business plan. And she saved me a lot of money when she suggested that I should walk the trade show before actually getting a booth there to present my line. And she also helped me get past vendors who were reluctant to work with a new business like me. And she was really, really generous and shared with me her business contacts that helped me get the foot in the door. No question was too stupid or silly for her. You know, I felt free that I could ask her anything. She was never judgmental. And through working with her, I gained the confidence to work with other business professionals on my own. The thing that I like the most about CEO women is the environment that they offer. I love being in the classes, and I know my classmates loved it too. Aside from the classroom lessons, it was just the environment that we were in. CEO Women has a special way of treating their clients that as if you were already successful, even though your business was still just an idea. And they would introduce you to other people as if you were already successful entrepreneurs. And that was such a paradigm shift for me because outside of the classroom, I would be feeling like I'm struggling to make ends meet and don't even know what to do with my life. And inside the classroom, I was suddenly successful, and I had classmates and professionals, instructors who believed in me. Since graduating from the program, I've been able to support my mom financially. I paid off some debts, and then I started my business and launched my website. I used the grant money for marketing material to promote my website further, and I actually spent a good portion of it on doing photo shoots for the catalogs of my products. And I also started volunteering, and I got more involved with my community. So through the program, I went from being someone who wondered the purpose of my life to a proud owner of a company I actually started. And feeling like a contributing member of society. I really couldn't have done it without CEO women and the help of their dedicated staff and their coaches and mentors and their donors and their community partners. It really made a difference to know that I wasn't alone and that if I needed help, I had CEO women to turn to. And I have called them sometime in panic. They didn't know what to do, and they were always there for me. Even if it wasn't listed on their schedule that that was one of their services, they were just always there. And I'd like to encourage you guys to get involved too. And I Think you'll be surprised how easy it is to help and what a difference it can make in a woman's life and in the lives of the people around her. So in closing, I just wanted to say that if you would like to learn more about my clothing company, you can check out my website at 5foot2inch.com and if you can't find it, you can use Google for pants for petite women. And I am on the front page, so yay. So thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you for your time and I really hope that you would get involved and take the time to learn more about this amazing organization. Thank you.

Thank you. Sunny. Sunny just mentioned to me as we were driving up, she said, yeah, if you Google my five foot two, I'm number six and I used to be number one. Can someone help her with it? It's always very, very inspiring to hear the stories of students and I hope you feel very much inspired by the work we're doing as well. I am now excited to talk to you about where CA Women is headed. And I like to sort of call this CA Women version 2.0. This is our next reinvention of our organization. Like I said earlier, our team got together last year and really looked at the impact that we've had for women in the community and also looked at the tremendous need that was out there. And we decided that we wanted to scale up the services that we provide to really make a dent that in the number of women that really need to be served. So we've decided to do this and I think you all can resonate with this idea. We've decided to do this using media and technology. What I'm about to show you is the first episode of an 18 episode series of an educational soap opera that is designed to teach women both English language skills and also entrepreneurship skills so they can establish successful livelihoods much like the training program that we do in the classroom at a community based level. So let's take a look. Just think of Days of Our Lives meets Grameen Bank. So that's the image I want to leave you with.

CEO Women is an award winning non profit organization dedicated to transforming the lives of low income immigrant and refugee women. By providing support and training in entrepreneurship and language skills, ceawomen changes lives 1 woman at a time. Right now in California, less than 3% of the women who need these skills are being served. CEO Women presents an educational telenovela that does more than educate, it inspires. The Grand Cafe is a groundbreaking soap opera or telenovela. As they're known in Latin countries where women dare to dream, where women persevere, where women strive for a better life. This innovative program will help extend CEA Women's proven training to more women around the country. Welcome to the Grand Cafe. Four women from different countries. They have different struggles. My boss treats me differently only because I'm a woman.

I hate that. Huang, you are not going anywhere in that outfit.

Zlatik is really creative, but not too.

Careful with her money.

But they have one dream in common.

We all want to be successful entrepreneurs.

And we're willing to take chances.

Here's to our success as future business owners.

They strive for economic independence and a better future in America. But what will stand in the way of their happiness?

Please, mother, I am going to the meeting.

Their hopes, challenges, triumphs and secrets are all revealed here at the Grand Cafe. Welcome to the Grand Cafe. The 10 minute telenovela is followed by a guided lesson. I'm your business startup coach, Rebecca Smith.

And I will guide you in deciding if you are ready to start your own business.

By weaving together drama with education, the Grand Cafe engages and empowers women in the same way Sesame street revolutionized children's television. Let's start by looking at the most common sentence pattern. In each episode, Rebecca presents grammar and vocabulary using scenes from the Grand Cafe, providing the repetition and practice that non native English speakers need.

And we meet each week for support and networking.

Networking is talking to people about your business ideas. Now you try net working.

Each episode includes practical advice from business professionals and established entrepreneurs.

It's really important to go out there and talk to other people about the business idea that you have.

You have to have the nerve to say, okay, I'm gonna risk everything I have. It might take me three years, but I'm gonna make it.

At the end of each episode, students complete an assignment based on what they learned.

Practice networking.

The accompanying workbook builds English and communication skills and further explains business concepts introduced in the video. All the steps needed for entrepreneurial readiness are covered during 18 episodes. The characters in the Grand Cafe were developed with the audience in mind to empower women to pursue their dreams in spite of the challenges that lay ahead. And to make better lives for themselves and their families. Because anything can happen at the Grand Cafe. To us.

To us.

So imagine this use of media and technology. And imagine Erica, the woman I spoke about before, calls up to access Sia women's services. She lives too far away to come. We can then take an episode of the telenovela, which is based on our successful classroom training model and Mail it to her. Kind of like Netflix. So she receives this in the mail. She can play it on dvd. There is a workbook to go with it. She completes her workbook and then she mails it back into CA women and gets feedback on it. And then she gets sent the second episode. And at a certain point, she's able to go to a local community organization that's affiliated with CEO women and meet with a teacher, meet with her other peer group, and eventually get connected with other business resources in the community. And that's really where we're going with this model in terms of leveraging use of technology and media. And I wanted to share with you a story about an educational soap opera that was produced in Peru. It's actually a model that's fairly prevalent in developing countries. And we're the first entrepreneurship training organization here in the United States that's adopting this type of methodology. So there is a novella called Simplemente Maria that was produced in Peru several years ago. And they aired that telenovela over. They used a broadcast model on TV. And SimpleMente Maria was about a woman who came down from the mountains, the Andes, and immigrated into Lima, Peru. And she was very poor, and she tried her best to enroll herself in adult literacy education. And she also purchased a sewing machine in this telenovela and ended up sewing her own clothes and making her own design. She had a real knack for design. And so she became so successful with her designs that she ended up starting a business which completely took off. And she became this very famous designer and moved to Paris and lived in a mansion. So it's a telenovela. They're very dramatic. But point being, a number of scholars researched the impact of this telenovela on the communities in which it aired, and they found three things. One was that first and foremost, the enrollment in adult literacy education skyrocketed wherever this telenovela aired. Second was that the sales of Singer sewing machines skyrocketed wherever the telenovela aired. And third, there was an increase in rural to urban migration patterns. So it's just an example of the impact that media can really have in especially the role modeling and seeing characters go through a process and a journey and really identifying with that and seeing how you can relate it to your own lives. So I just wanted to end by saying, imagine a world where we live in, in which a lot of you women that need our help and need the resources out there can actually now have opportunities that were never afforded to them before, and how having those opportunities and having the resources and training connections with other people can really impact the lives in profound ways. Very much like how we have been able to touch Sunny's life and more women like Sunny. Thank you very much for listening to us here. And I think now we're going to open it up to questions. Correct.

Okay.

Any questions? We were so thorough that you don't have any questions.

So if you're interested, like how can we get involved?

Well, we have two wonderful people, Geraldine and Keith, who are back there, and they are in charge of actually connecting volunteers to the organization. And they're several ways that volunteers can become involved. Working directly one on one with entrepreneurs, with women that are graduating from the program. Would you guys like to say a few words about involvement?

So basically I just wanted to say if you are interested in becoming involved, if you don't mind filling out this sign in sheet and Geraldine and I will follow up with you and connect you to the organization, there's a couple different ways that you can become involved in. You heard about the mentoring and coaching program. So working directly with clients, you go through a training on how to work with immigrant and refugee women that go through our program. And then you're connected with a graduate and you work with them for a certain amount of time, depending on the type of program that you want to go into. And then there are other ways to get involved on an organizational level, and that's the development committee. And the development committee basically helps steward our individual donors and connects the organization with other companies in the Bay Area to establish partnerships. So those are two of the two ways. Yeah.

I have to wear my development director hat and give you another option. And that is that we're hoping to hold our annual fundraising event here at the Google campus. And we will be looking for people who are really passionate about the organization to be table captains for that event. People to bring their friends together who they think would really benefit from hearing about the organization, to start to be champions for the organization and build the buzz for CEO women here in the South Bay. So there's lots of different ways, either through our programs or through development, all kinds of ways to do it. And they'll be following up with you to find out what your interests are. So, yeah.

Can you tell us where your offices are? And then you mentioned that you're opening a Silicon Valley office end of this year. Yes, our offices are located in downtown Oakland. So we're at 405 14th street and that's where we main run the main hub of our training program and all our Oakland staffing and our core operations team. And we are Going to be opening a satellite site up down in the Silicon Valley at the end of this year. And that will mostly be in downtown San Jose, most likely being downtown San Jose.

Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for just coming to see us and talk to us about this and all the work that you've been doing, given the success that you've had and every. I just was wondering if you could speak a little bit to the process as far as fundraising and just scaling. And for those of us who are involved in other nonprofits, it'd be helpful just to hear about how you were able to keep moving forward and progress. Who helped you, who guided you, that kind of thing.

Well, we, you know, like most businesses, nobody was really paid. I wasn't paid anything the first three years because we didn't have any income coming in. And I think it was really a process of just trying to start small. Like anytime you're trying to do something, doing whatever it takes to get that idea or that prototype up and running, and then finding a way to get it out there, even if it's not in its most ideal state, and testing it. So what we ended up doing was just getting a very rudimentary version of our training up and running, which was not a full training, but was workshops for women in the community. And we partnered with other schools as well because we didn't want to carry a big overhead and we brought the training to them and then we went back and actually submitted grants to different funders and said this is what we've been able to do. This is some of the insights into the issues that we found out and here's what is really needed. And that's when some of the larger support started to come in. So we are funded by all private foundations. We've never taken any government funding since we've started. So it's all private foundations, corporations, individual donors, and a lot of in kind support we've also been working on. Especially we did the same thing for this series at Telenovela. No one really wanted to take a risk with us. And they said, what? You're doing what? And we just kind of kept plugging away, ended up raising an initial seed investment and produced an episode. And we're in the process of testing all the distribution channels, web, the Netflix model that I spoke about, also television broadcast too, and got a lot of great data and feedback on how end users are really receiving the content, whether women are filling out their workbooks, what kind of support they need, are people mailing the workbook back to us. And now we're going back to some of our supporters and we're saying, here's what we found and this is how we're going to change the prototype or the model based on the feedback. And now we're going to raise larger amounts of capital. So it's never been easy. I don't think we have any one recipe for success in terms of fundraising, but I think just being able to diversify the. The sources of funding is really important. And also we've received over 20 unsolicited requests and offer and sales offers actually of organizations and schools around the country to purchase licensing agreements to the media, which is also interesting. And we'd never done any marketing or advertising. So now we're putting together a separate business plan just for our future affiliate model so that we can actually create an earned income revenue stream down the road. And when I looked at the initial projections, it's not looking like it'll generate any kind of earned income support until probably another two to three years. But it's just kind of keeping that in mind as we're building this and trying to figure out how to increase our chances of becoming a more and more sustainable organization. Does that answer your question? Okay.

With the new version, kind of looking forward with the organization, is there any thought to expanding to just low income women across the board or are you going to remain focused on immigrants and refugee women? Because I feel like there's a lot of low income women that aren't necessarily immigrants that could benefit from help with their English and entrepreneurial skills. So I was just wondering if there's any thought to expanding.

That's a great question. We're really now focused on the issue of immigrant and refugee women right now. And especially the language access issue is really important to us. My intuition tells me that once this program is up and running, I think it's going to appeal to a lot more women than just low income immigrant and refugee women. But that's something that we're just going to have to see when we get there.

Hi. Hello.

Thank you for coming. You're welcome.

I was just wondering, this is a lot more echoey than I thought. I was just wondering, what are your main recruitment strategies for participants and whether or not you work with local governments or other social service providers to get the women who are actually your participants? Because I think that that's a barrier too for people who are immigrants or low income to know about the services that are available.

There are a lot of social services, especially here in the Bay Area.

And it can be really hard to.

Know what's good and what actually does.

Meet an individual's needs.

So what about that? Yeah, that's a great question. We use a multi pronged approach to actually reaching the community. We do presentations and ESL programs at community colleges, at adult schools. We do flyering at the, you know, at the farmer's market. We also work with a lot of other partnering organizations, immigrant and refugee service provider organizations. We go in there, we talk about the program. We go to elementary schools to talk to the pta, immigrant parents of children that might be interested in attending the program. We also do a fair amount of outreach through ethnic media, so Vietnamese newspapers, magazines, periodicals, also public service announcements. Erica, who I spoke to you about, saw little PSA on about CEO women. And that is definitely something that we're continuing to refine and improve. We're now seeing an increase in the number of women that are finding out about the program via the World Wide Web, which actually wasn't the case not even two years ago. It's just sort of a recent phenomenon and we're paying more attention to how we can put more relevant information about the program and just have some kind of multi language capability within the website. So we're launching an entirely new website, back end, front end, at the end of April that will start to have some of those functionalities on it. So I think the access to the Internet is becoming more and more pervasive for a lot of our women, but yet still a lot of them don't have that type of access. Other questions? I'm having fun, so keep asking me questions.

If there isn't anything else. Thank you so much for coming. We really appreciate it.

Thank you for having us. It's been a pleasure. Thanks.