Overview

Why are you interested in becoming a Trustee?

We believe the aspiring entrepreneurs deserve access to capital. For far too long, entrepreneurs from immigrant, refugee, minority, and low-income backgrounds have been left behind -- unable to self-fund or access the capital required to operationalize their business ideas. We want to help bridge that divide through Kiva loans, supporting our clients in accessing the much-needed capital to make their dreams a reality.

What is the mission of your organization?

Our organization was founded in 1973 in response to the wave of immigrant and refugee migration of Southeast Asians to Hawaii following the Vietnam War. Since its inception, our steadfast purpose has been to serve those structurally, socially and economically excluded, uprooted and displaced. In our early years, our then-Executive Director—an immigrant from Myanmar herself—focused the organization on meeting the myriad of needs faced by newly-arrived immigrants and refugees, connecting them to housing, job placement, legal services, language classes, and, importantly, community. Our work focused foremost on dismantling the barriers faced by these communities as they sought to rebuild their lives with hope, respect, dignity. In the many years since, our core mission has remained focused on supporting immigrants, refugees, human trafficking survivors, BIPOC and low-income communities in Hawaii by dismantling barriers that prevent them from accessing opportunities while respecting cultural heritages. However, our organization has evolved from focusing on the immediate needs of the communities we serve to building an ecosystem of holistic support that creates an environment where our clients can thrive. Our work focuses across four key domains—social, immigration, economic, and cultural. We believe people’s most basic needs must be met first as a pre-requisite to their success and support in ensuring they have access to safe housing, food, and clothing. Thereafter, we work to help them launch and scale small businesses around the food-to-table continuum -- providing commercial kitchen spaces and farmland for rent, business coaching, and access to incubators to scale their businesses. Through this, we hope we can help create transformative opportunities for our community to contribute to building a better, brighter future in their places they live and work.

Borrower Due Diligence

How will you decide who to endorse as a borrower? What due diligence will you conduct?

All of the borrowers we work with will be Pacific Gateway Center clients working out of our commercial kitchens, from our farmland, or through our incubators and business coaching programs. Our goal will be to endorse only clients we have a long-standing relationship with who demonstrate grit, potential, vision to make their ideas come to life. All of our borrowers who we endorse will have undergone business consulting with us, including supporting them in business and financial planning, referring them to local experts in their field, and provided targeted business advising to think through their business launch and growth strategies. We will disproportionally endorse clients from the priority communities we serve (immigrants, refugee, BIPOC, survivors of human trafficking, and low-income leaders across Hawai'i') and who are committed to social good as a part of their business.