Kuleana meetings

Met with Susan Dik, professor of Business at Kapi’olani Community College. She teaches the Basic Entrepreneurship course, so I sought her advice on the level of preparation needed for our borrowers at Kuleana Micro-Lending. She initially said that a certificate could work or even creating a booklet of handouts that helps applicants articulate their business idea, identify their customers, estimate revenue/cash flow (basically Peter Drucker’s principles). Essentially, though, she said the class she teaches could be a bit daunting to an incipient entrepreneur and that the drop out rate is very high even among her current students.

The bottom line we determined is that the business preparation should be simple and doable versus technical or overly academic. She thought it would make sense to give each borrower a box or a folder in which they would keep all receipts and everything else having to do with their business (ideas, brochures from other/related business, etc.). Then the mentor or business counselor would help the borrower organize everything at their regular meetings. They could also use Quick Books to enter all the information that related to revenue, costs, and cash flow. Bottom line, she maintained, is that the business support needs to be organic so that it can adjust according to the unique circumstances for each borrower.

A final idea that came out of our conversation is the idea of instead of just conducting workshops at various partner agencies we should turn it into a competition. That way we can generate some “sizzle” to get the people in the partner agencies excited and could possibly get more media coverage, thus generating additional interest from the public and potential donors. The judges could be the Loan Review Committee and various members of the community.

I also had a chance to speak with John Reppun from the Kaneohe Ecumenical Youth (KEY) Project. He expressed interest in micro-lending for some of the people they work with. Some of the projects he envisioned are a farmer’s market hosted at the KEY facilities that also had movies for kids and celebrations of various kinds. His grander vision for the area is to use the natural resources and the educational resources to create an alternative education for non-school hours. He wants people to “see the community as a campus.”

From this meeting Rep. Wooley and I explored the idea of convening a meeting to pull together various parties from the Kahalu’u/Kaneohe area to discuss:
— school garden program viability
— farmer’s market
— micro-lending
— land use (county and state)

Some of the people she proposed inviting are:
— a representative from the Lieutenant Governor’s office
— Kokua Foundation (Lydi Morgan)
— Dept. of Education (Glenna Owens, Director of School Food Services Branch)
— Feed the Hunger (Patti Chang, Denise Albano)
— Ulupono Initiative
— Punahou School (Eliza Lathrop)
— Reppun family
— Ho family
— Hakipu’u Learning Center
— Waiahole/Waikane Community Association