Together, These Female Partners Mean Business
This is business. You may arrive with your problems, but without any excuses. And board meetings are mandatory. The five women partners understand this. They are banking on each other to uphold the code.
Only Ofelia is a no-show.
Martha reports that half of Ofelia’s face is swollen from an impacted tooth. Martha, who has brought along her 2-year-old, Junior, makes a face that perhaps approximates what Ofelia must look like now. It looks painful.
Yes, Ofelia is trying to get medical help, but it’s not easy. The clinic, the bus, the lost wages, the kids. . . . The other women understand. They have been there; they know . Poverty is an exhausting grind.
Still, Ofelia had better show for the next meeting. Otherwise Gladys and Maria are going to have to wait longer for their second business loans. They’ve each just paid off their first loans today. (Applause. Applause.)
It’s all part of the group’s contract with the Coalition for Women’s Economic Development, a nonprofit agency in Los Angeles, one of about 40 such peer lending programs nationwide.
Here, it is all for one and one for all, like it or not. Most women like it a lot. “Solidarity circles,” these groups are called.
Suits of the world, take note: Since it began making small-business loans to low-income women three years ago, the coalition hasn’t had a single borrower default.
Based on a model imported from Bangladesh, women form into groups of five, then meet for up to 10 weeks to get to know each other and their businesses. Two women are then chosen to borrow up to $1,500 the first time around.
If they make two payments in a month, two more members can take out a loan, and finally, the fifth is given a chance if the other members follow through. The entire program takes a year and a half.
Dues are required, a forced saving that serves as a group safety net, for emergencies ranging from business expenses, to escaping an abusive husband, to problems at la frontera down south. The interest rate is 15%. Collateral required: good intentions, determination and willingness to make new friends.
It’s a cross between Tough Love and Consciousness Raising 101.
Now the minutes from the last meeting are read. This circle, named Renacer (“Rebirth”) by its members, is conducted in Spanish; about three-quarters of them are.
The minutes reflect that Martha, who sells clothing door-to-door and from her home in South Central, had mentioned a problem with a client who hadn’t paid for some merchandise that Martha had dropped off. So Martha brings the women up to date:
She is still out the $180, but she has some leads. She camped out at the woman’s house, with her children--”Thank God, there is a park across the street”--from 9 in the morning to 3. That was when the mailman came.
Martha had hoped that the woman’s welfare check would have arrived, but it did not. Martha thought that might have brought the woman around. Then a cousin of the deadbeat appeared. Seems the woman had moved to San Diego. Martha took her children and went to the welfare office herself. She was hoping they could tell her where her client had gone. They could not.
“As soon as I find out where she is, I’m going,” Martha says. She adds that she knows somebody who works in another welfare office. She hopes that he can help find the no-good, no-account. . . .
Then there is Maria. At 52, she is older than the other women here, so when they address her, they put a Dona in front of her name, out of respect. Maria, a former factory worker with a third-grade education, says that a client hadn’t paid her for $40 for two bedspreads although they were delivered a while ago. The client, however, says that she did.
But Maria, a natural saleswoman from way back, knows what her records say! Even though her records are never written down.
“Maria, I have to force you to write things down,” says Paula Sirola, the coalition’s program manager, who sits in on all group meetings at the agency’s Los Angeles office and makes “site visits” to make sure that businesses are on track.
“This affects a lot,” Paula goes on. “I am not going to consider a second loan for you unless you write things down.”
Angelina, meantime, wants some help finding more clients herself. She is 45 and a mother of seven; her husband abandoned the family 12 years ago. Angelina sews mostly children’s clothing in her garage in Cudahy and tries to sell them wholesale when she can. That’s easier, she says, especially since retail means everybody wants to pay on the installment plan.
“Well, I save myself by hitting the apartment houses,” Martha volunteers. “There’s always a lot of little kids running around.”
“So you shouldn’t allow people to pay in more than two installments?” Gladys asks, picking up on a remark by Paula that suggested money up front is always best. And Gladys, a seamstress, needs other advice as well.
“I want to charge more. I know I work too cheap, but I don’t know how to tell my clients,” she says.
Gladys, Gladys, Gladys.
The group goes into play-acting mode. “OK, I’ll be a client, and I tell you that the price is too high. What do you do?”
“What she needs is decisiveness!” Martha says. “What you do is you say, ‘That’s the price. Look at the quality of my work!’ ”
After an initial round of “yeah, buts,” Gladys, a mother of four who also holds down a full-time factory job, comes around.
She says that from now on, she will not announce a minimum price of $40 for labor on a custom-fitted suit or dress. She will look at the picture that the customer brings in and then decide what the price will be. Maybe it will be $50, or $60, or who knows, it will depend!
The business meeting is wrapping up. The women offer that they’ve been learning so much, that they are more self-confident, that they are doing right by themselves and their kids. No longer do they feel desperate or depressed.
They call Paula, the program manager, a cross between a teacher, a counselor, a sister and a friend.
Then, on my way out, Gladys looks at me, smiles and says, “If you ever need any clothes made . . . I do quality work.”
