Overcoming barriers

However, advocacy is an established part of the 15-year-old Boulder County Latino chamber’s mission, Colin said.

“We are part of the Northwest Chamber Alliance, which is all the chambers within Boulder County and surrounding areas,” she said.

“We work with all of them to make sure we are advocating for our members and the Latino community in local and state government.”

The challenges of forming a new organization Ramos’ group is facing are in the past for his Boulder County counterpart, including having an office of its own again after going three years without one since it closed its location in downtown Longmont’s Old Town Marketplace.

“COVID happened,” Colin explained. “We were closed so much, and maintaining the lease with no new members but still trying to support the community made it very complicated.”

The new office on Pike Road in Longmont opened in October and held a ribbon cutting on Nov. 4, Colin said. She’s its only fulltime employee, along with two part-timers.

The Boulder County chamber has an established schedule of workshops, webinars and inperson classes, including a series of four during Hispanic Heritage Month that focused on marketing and social media, finding the right insurance, building a sustainable business and locating access to capital.

Its partnerships include the Colorado Enterprise Fund to help Latino-owned entrepreneurs find loans and grants and Longmontbased Intercambio to help with translation or interpreting “when they navigate systems that don’t have their information in Spanish,” Colin said.

What differentiates the Boulder County organization from other Latino chambers, Colin said, is that “we do so much oneon-one with businesses to make sure they can overcome barriers.”

It helps to have the office of nonprofit Entrepreneurship for All nearby, with its free, one-year business accelerator program and pitch contests — all offered in English and Spanish.

“We partner with Eforall and refer clients to it,” Colin said. “Business owners who want to grow their businesses are referred to Eforall’s Spanish and English cohorts every year. We refer most of our members to the Spanish one.”

For 2023, “We want to increase capacity to serve our members better and have more access to funding ourselves so we can work on our programming,” Colin said.

Things are changing, she said, “but a lot slower than we wish.”

This article was first published by Bizwest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2022 Bizwest Media LLC. You can view the original here: Chambers work to boost Latino businesses