In addition to lending, the organization puts considerable emphasis on training as one of its three main service components — educate, invest and innovate — to serve its three types of clients: someone with an idea and no plan, someone with an idea and a plan, and someone currently running a business whose needs are satisfied with very specific training and classes.
The organization provides business-specific classes that cover, for instance, food-based and retail businesses — for the former, ECDI provides access to a USDA-certified commercial kitchen — and courses designed to address a specific entrepreneur group — for example, ECDI has a women’s business center that focuses on addressing the needs of female entrepreneurs trying to start or expand a business.
For those starting a business who don’t have a physical location, ECDI has shared office spaces in Akron, Columbus and Cleveland.
Something of their own
The organization officially launched in 2004 in Columbus, but the concept was born in 1998 and had a single employee: Kinney.
Kinney is a refugee whose family fled religious persecution in the former Soviet Union in 1974. She was 11 at the time, traveling with her father, pregnant mother and four-year-old sister.
Though her father was an engineer in his former country, his first job in the U.S. was working at a junkyard, making very little money.
“I think that’s where the journey began,” she says. “Many immigrants, they come to the United States for the opportunities that it affords them, specifically as it relates to entrepreneurship and having something of your own, because in many countries that’s not something that’s available for us.
“Seeing my father and his friends, people from within the immigrant community, their journeys of trying to start businesses, many of them fail because they don’t necessarily have the understanding of what it’s like to run a business,” Kinney says. “They don’t understand the laws behind it. They don’t understand marketing plans, and certainly they don’t have the capital that can get them going.”
After seeing firsthand the difficulties refugees faced in finding living-wage jobs and integrating into the financial mainstream, Kinney, in 1998, began offering financial literacy and microenterprise development training courses through the Jewish Family Services Association. She also created small business capitalization through Individual Development Accounts and a revolving microloan fund program.
Since then, ECDI has grown to serve all 88 Ohio counties, which required the organization to hire more staff — it now employs 52 people — provide more services and raise its leading ceiling from $25,000 to $350,000. And there’s still work to be done.
“I think we need more collaborations and partnerships between ECDI and other service providers — municipalities, foundations,” she says. “We need to better educate our people, the constituents, not ECDI clients, but everybody, about how important it is to support small businesses.”
