It won’t be long until these girls are their town’s business leaders and entrepreneurs.
A reader wrote to me about an influx of low-income people into his town, using subsidized housing and other community services. He said a town council member had talked about them as “a drain on resources” and “dead weight.”
I got angry when I read that. But it took me awhile to figure out the real reason.
My reply to the reader was just this:
What if the families with low income are actually your best asset, your potential entrepreneurs, and within a generation will be your business leaders?
And now we get to the real reason I got angry. Because this is my family’s story. My great-grandmother was a teacher who relied on subsidized housing, staying with families in the school district until the community banded together to build a tar paper shack for her to live in with her daughter. On the other side of the family, my grandfather moved his family through a series of run-down, borrowed farmhouses as he tried to recover financially from the great depression and serving in the second world war and the hard times immediately after.
Both of these people worked their way up to being self-sufficient and more, and their children became business and civic leaders in their communities.
Yes, times have changed, and people are different. That doesn’t change my original question:
What if the families with low income are actually your best asset, your potential entrepreneurs, and within a generation will be your business leaders? How would you treat them then?
You help them start that journey today with the Innovative Rural Business Models
- For easier social media marketing, fill in the blank - August 5, 2019
- Need a downtown business idea? Try a Cookie Crawl - July 22, 2019
- Need funding for the next step in your business? - July 17, 2019
- Youth business idea: phone clinics - July 8, 2019
- Chain link is everywhere in downtowns. Here’s how to dress it up. - June 30, 2019
- Stop using “3 legged stool” to describe any idea - June 24, 2019
- What are your challenges? Add your voice here - June 17, 2019
- How to publicize your biking trails before they’re finished - June 10, 2019
- How $5 and a bowl of soup can rebuild your community - June 3, 2019
- Getting people to mix at an event - May 27, 2019
One only needs to look at the flood of immigrants in the 1900’s or after WWII, many arriving in Canada or the US without a lot of resources but determination and a willingness to work hard. The children and grandchildren of those folks are now running our countries. A hand up, not a handout as they say.
Thank you, Paul. We all have plenty of examples if we look for them.