Esperanza Unida
Richard Oulahan
1329 W. National Ave.
Milwaukee, Wis. 53204
(414) 671-0251

Esperanza Unida ("United Hope") is a wonderful model of creative thinking and self-reliance. It was one of the first grassroots groups I visited, and it remains one of the most exciting in concept, because of the simple beauty of its up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy and the elegance of a "charitable" program that runs like a businesses and by doing so pays its own way.

It began in the middle '80s with a modest but innovative idea: The organization purchased an abandoned auto dealership - a 58,000-square-foot building - in the Hispanic community, and reopened it as a working auto-repair shop owned and operated by a non-profit organization. Under the supervision of qualified mechanics, people from the neighborhood work at paying jobs in the garage, earning a decent wage while learning to work on cars and progressing toward paying jobs in the community.

During the first seven years of the program's life, it placed 275 people in permanent, quality jobs. "Only a drop in the bucket, but a beginning", Executive Director Richard Oulahan said, emphasizing that the program is not interested in training people for minimum-wage, service-type jobs but high-paying, skilled trades - auto mechanic, auto-body, construction.

Oulahan says the idea is simple: Use government job-training money not for make-work projects but to pay people to work on real jobs while they learn. "It's legal for a non-profit to run a business, so long as the money you generate is related to the purpose of the organization," he said. "People don't realize this." The auto-repair shop's revenues in 1989 generated $700,000, fully 70 percent of Esperanza Unida's $1 million budget -- while moving unemployed people into good jobs.

More significantly, however, Esperanza Unida didn't stop with auto repair but transformed that specific concept into a much broader, more widely applicable principle of establishing "training businesses" in a variety of fields, using experienced teachers to impart their skills to willing students who thus gain the qualifications they need to earn decent incomes at dignified jobs in the community.

So the group has spun off a number of other similar bootstrapping efforts. It rehabilitates houses in Milwaukee's inner city, using trainees to help its qualified carpenter with the construction work. For $1, they purchase houses that the city would condemn; by using trainees, they rehabilitate the houses for $30,000 - less than half the cost of commercial rehabilitation - and sell them for that price, making sound housing available to working poor people. ("In vocational school, they build a wall and then tear it down," Oulahan says. "That doesn't make any sense. We build houses.")

They taught their own people to do licensed asbestos removal, an effort later spun off as an independent, profit-making business owned by the original trainees.

Similar operations are under way with an auto-body shop, which not only does commercial body work but rebuilds and sells old cars that people donate for the tax writeoff; and a parts shop, rebuilding auto parts cannibalized from unsalvageable cars and selling them to the auto-repair shop and over the counter. And that's not all.

Discovering that there was a market for trained welders, and for large metal waste bins, the organization got a contract to make waste bins - while teaching men how to weld.

And, concerned that too few women were taking advantage of their jobs programs, Esperanza Unida opened a day-care training program that prepares women to become licensed home day-care practitioners. When this effort began in 1990, there were no Spanish-speaking family day-care facilities in Wisconsin; now there are well over 100.

During the eight years since Reinvesting In America's first visit to Esperanza Unida, it has continued to expand, to respond to community needs, and to reinvent itself. The original auto-repair shop has virtually ceased operations, not because of failure but because its graduates filled the marketplace and newer, more efficient programs came along. Meanwhile, the organization has expanded into a modern International Center, a three-story office building that houses many of its programs as well as other non-profits that help with the costs of operation by leasing space.

To that end, some of Esperanza's newest training businesses include a high-quality printing, copying and desktop publishing firm and a business (in partnership with Ameritech, the regional telephone company), training women for customer-service work. This is a relatively simple program that only requires four weeks' training to move women into jobs paying roughly $8 an hour. They claim a 95 percent job-placement rate and say the women are keeping the jobs and earning advancement, because even this basic training puts them a long jump ahead of unskilled competitors.

Esperanza has also formed a partnership with an "alternative high school" called El Puente, which will be housed in their International Building and offers a special curriculum for "at risk" kids, heavily focused on job training and entrepreneurship.

Much of Esperanza Unida's focus in the late '90s is based on welfare "reform," an initiative that has hit poor people particularly hard in Wisconsin under "W2," a peculiarly harsh welfare-to-work program. So the organization seeks to move as many welfare recipients as possible into fulfilling jobs as quickly as possible while also addressing child-care and transportation issues.

Although the organization is moving away from the car-repair and auto-body businesses that were the original inspiration, they've converted the concept into an initiative better suited for today's needs: Throughout the community, they are soliciting donations of used cars that Esperanza's mechanics can put back into running condition and then give or sell very cheap to welfare-to-work recipients who'll need transportation to get to work.

And, recognizing the critical need for safe, affordable day care as a key element in getting unemployed mothers back to work, Esperanza has expanded its day-care business/training model in a fashion that appears unique. They've created a partnership model with "Pick'n'Save," a major regional grocery chain, in which the grocery provides space for a day-care facility in its shopping center; Esperanza staffs the facility and uses it to train women as family day-care operators, and the shopping center gets first call on half the slots for use by its employees. This partnership -- with one center in operation now but more planned -- appears to fill a significant need while at the same time it holds significant potential not merely to pay its own way but to become a substantial source of income for the organization.

It is this kind of thinking that has made Esperanza Unida one of the most exciting stories in our collection.

(Last visit: Summer 1997)

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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