Aprende y Prospera

Aprende y Prospera’s solution is to provide virtual training, mentorship and coach support, as well as access to diverse talent for hire and case study opportunities for small Hispanic business owners in the United States.

Firstly, our virtual platform will provide classes for these small business owners in the following subjects: Strategic Planning, Marketing, E-Commerce, Accounting, Market Research, Design Thinking with a focus on HCD, Project Management, OKR's, Leadership, Market Trends and more with international instructors and facilitators.

Secondly, the virtual platform will include mentorship on raising capital, formalization, fundraising, loans, branding, and marketing. The coaches will be essential as the process of entrepreneurship requires emotional support to balance the responsibilities of what is required day to day.

Thirdly, we will provide to small business owners access to our diverse talent who have completed our educational programs taught by our professional instructor volunteers in our ‘Talent Bank’. To date, we have designed and piloted our platform for students in Latin America in 2020 and 2021. The first cohort graduates from our Leadership and Project Management program in 2022. In addition, we would like to offer these small business owners the opportunity to present a problem/need to our students as a case study in our Leadership and Project Management program. 

Lastly, we seek to establish a virtual marketplace where entrepreneurs and small business can market their products/services.

Technology utilized in our platform includes our own website, Moodle, Zoom and StreamYard.

According to Charitas, Hispanic-owned businesses make up 14% of the roughly 33 million businesses in the U.S. which is about 4.65 million in total. Hispanic owned businesses remain small-sized within the last 10 years, despite the number of Hispanic business owners having increased by 34%, compared to 1 percent for all other owners according to research from Stanford University. This particular population encounters challenges including poor access to funding as well as language and education barriers. 

While growth is minimal for these business owners, there are more than 30 million young Latin Americans that work ‘under the table’ jobs or are unemployed due to their lack of marketable skills.

India has the largest example of a population diaspora and they have demonstrated the power of education on sought after skills. The median Indian household income is $107,000 – almost twice that of American-born households, and more than three times of a Hispanic business owner that earns $36,000 on average. Only 3% of Hispanic-owned businesses earn at least $1 million in annual gross revenue, according to a Stanford report.

 The three largest industry sectors for Latino business owners are only in services. A large share of these industries experienced low or negative annual revenue growth, according to a Standford report of 2019. 

According to the 2020 LDC U.S. Latino GDP Report, the size of the U.S. Hispanic market measured by GDP was $2.6 Trillion in 2018.

Our Small Business Lab solution addresses the third and fifth challenge. 

It aligns with the third challenge because it offers focused guidance/professional development for building specific functional skills for internal staff of Hispanic small businesses and the courses provided to our participants are also available to our volunteer professional instructor staff.

It aligns with the fifth challenge of supporting and fostering growth to scale through comprehensive and relevant technical support assistance such as marketing, and procurement skills because we plan to teach technical support and we currently have classes that teach procurement skills such as our e-commerce course.

Immigrant Hispanic small business owners in the United States may experience language and education barriers. Our solution addresses these limitations since our classes are taught in Spanish and we also provide English classes geared towards professional formal English in the workplace.

 Immigrants frequently arrive in the United States with high levels of education and work experience, however, they are deemed unqualified based on the qualifications in the United States. These individuals often begin a small business as a way to earn a living and these businesses are often not related to their previous careers.

 Our target population is Hispanic small business owners age 18  and older who have acquired post secondary education and who have arrived in the United States at adult age. 

 As a part of our program to meaningfully improve their lives, we plan to offer a coaching program to help them navigate their own life plan with the goal to orient them on their business initiatives by honing in on their skills, strengths and interests.

Our solution is virtual, therefore, we would eventually like to target every state in the United States. Our initial target, however, will be states with a larger concentration of Hispanic small business owners.

Expansion plans include marketing our programs on our website and social media as well as reaching out to small business resource organizations and providing information on our services and contact information.

The market opportunity for our business is massive since we will provide many services to these business owners on our one platform. Currently in order to take part in the services we offer, business owners would have to participate in multiple programs in order to receive all of the services we offer.

Aprende y Prospera (Learn and Prosper) aims to raise levels of inclusion, socio-economic development and leadership of young visionaries with inclusive online training programs taught by diverse and multigenerational professionals. These programs support and sustain venture initiatives in the local and global entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

Our mission is to develop the most financially equitable quality online certification program for entrepreneurs for job security and to support their business initiatives by designing an academy business model accessible to all.

Our vision is to provide access to quality education for job security.

Aprende y Prospera has worked on two pilots in October 2020 in Peru and March 2021 in Mexico. The activities developed were virtual live online classes providing skills that helped the students. After the lessons learned in these two pilots, we launched an integrated program Project Management and Leadership in the Culture of Innovation divided in three modules: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced. In addition to the business classes, we incorporated coaching sessions and consulting projects based on real challenges of three sponsor organizations. We also added virtual Forums, that were handled periodically with invited experts in some specific topics of interest.  

The short term outcomes  were 72 students graduated from the first two pilots and we expect 20 students to complete the program in May. These students were better prepared and empowered for the job market and their own ventures during the pandemic. 

We are launching this coming June our Entrepreneurial and Innovation Program: Project Lab which is an hybrid Incubation program that combines pre-incubation and incubation phases. Our participants from Latin America will receive training and mentoring to develop and strengthen their business ideas and to scale their products and services. 

The Small Business Lab will replicate the methodology learned and implement at a  larger scale the same type of educational activities tailoring to the needs of the market in the US.  

As outputs we expect the participants to gain knowledge and practical skills to access new markets, develop new strategies and access more resources such as the pool of talent and services provided by our programs in Latin America.

As short term outcomes, we expect the business owners to have impact in their bottom line, and in qualitative metrics such as improving the quality of their products- services. 

As long term outcomes, we expect our participants to be able to grow and scale their businesses, create strategic partnerships with counterparts in Latin America. The Hispanic community would have new role models and empowerment that could be transferred to the young population. 

We currently serve 20 entrepreneurs. We expect to duplicate the number in one year and in five years grow by at least five times this number.

The community we serve includes Latin American diaspora of Hispanic small businesses and individuals from Latin America and the United States seeking a job or to begin their own entrepreneurial venture. Our community mainly speaks Spanish.

Key decision makers include our Board of Directors, Advisory Board, and Executive Director.

Stakeholders include angel investors, our volunteer educators and our students, and Board of Directors in Peru for 'Aprende y Prospera LatAm'. For example, the Board of Directors in the United States communicates with the Board of Directors in Aprende y Prospera LatAm to align design and strategy to serve our community.

We are working with a diverse talent pool of professors and facilitators that are located in different countries from Latin America, US, Canada, Germany and Spain.  They know well the reality of the young population's lack of opportunities in Latin America. 

We are working with Dana Group Associates, an organization that provides mental health counseling and support. They know well the reality of the immigrant community in the US, therefore they will be coaching the participants in the Small Business Lab.  We also partner with Society for All, an organization that focuses on inclusiveness, they train the professors from Aprende y Prospera to teach considering some special needs. 

We plan to partner in the US with organizations that are already working with immigrant entrepreneurs and they know well the voice of the customer 

Aprende y Prospera has been growing with a group of volunteers that trust in the mission of the organization and want change. We have built trust committing what we stated we would do, and because we have shown results our community of volunteers have grown in Latin America and the US. We are mainly using social media for our outreach: facebook and linkedin.

Impact goals for the next year include a measurable impact on small business community owners and their employers. In the first year, we will provide training, guidance and technical support to at least 20 businesses in the US. Since our programs are virtual and live via Zoom for synchronic sessions and Moodle for asynchronous sessions, entrepreneurs living in different parts of the US will have full access to our programs. We plan to apply to 12 grants for financial support and include two new academic programs (ex. Instructional Design) with ten courses for a specific career. We seek to add two new board members, two part time paid staff, and 20 new volunteer professional instructors to expand our operations.

Impact goals for the next five years are to increase participant applications by 5x the number of current applications which is approximately 30. We seek to fundraise 1 million dollars as well as have 10 paid staff.

We believe that we have the staff and technical support to make it work effectively and successfully.  We have a diverse team, multi generational, from different nationalities and backgrounds. All committed with education as a key for prosperity.  Our team speaks the language and understands the culture of the immigrant entrepreneurs located in the US. They have different backgrounds and business expertise. With online tools it is very easy to get close to the individuals that we want to serve, and we have created a good model to do it.  

We believe that we have an excellent solution that will greatly impact on the empowerment and growth of the hispanic small business community in the US, in particular the Spanish speakers  Having the opportunity to receive training in their own language will strengthen their potential to grow their business and will put them closer to compete with other businesses who have in their target the hispanic community.

 Aprende y Prospera was born in a Hackacthon: Latin America vs Covid organized by MIT in 2020, under the team named Learn and Prosper. After the experience, the team decided to launch the solution and started the journey in Peru. 

We believe that the Truist Foundation Solve program will provide the support needed for the growth that we envision.  

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We are looking for partners to support our programs as well as human capital to develop a strategic  expansion of users and customers.
We also need assistance to measure, monitor and evaluate our progress.
Another important aspect is the financial support to develop a technology that will integrate all our programs with our customers and users.

-We are looking for foundations that provide funding to sustain our programs and technology support to continue building the platform and to develop our Virtual Fair as an immersive experience for our users and customers.

- MIT support for accreditation and innovation in our  educational programs

- Partnerships with other organizations helping hispanic small business  such as:

• Eforall that provides incubators and accelerator programs
• Amplify Latinx that provides consulting programs