Worker Ownership Resource Center (WORC)
Kevin Hennessy, Executive Director
151 Genessee St.
Geneva, N.Y. 14456
(315) 789-0261
(315) 781-3287 fax
Website: http://www.atworc.org

Even in the beautiful Finger Lakes region, a rural area that most of us would consider delightfully bucolic, where the operators of a roadside cabbage stand can leave their wares unsupervised with a box asking customers to leave payment on the honor system, you'll find harsh signs of poverty amid the trim farmhouses and almost manicured-looking fields: Here and there older houses stand windowless or boarded; small factories that once provided good jobs are abandoned and deteriorating.

As far back as 1982, when the town of Elmira was hit with the first wave of plant closings under the first Reagan Recession, the Catholic Diocese of Rochester's social ministries program (later Catholic Charities) began looking for ways to foster economic development opportunities in the rural areas that would be appropriate to the Church's teachings of justice and peace in the work place. Convening community meetings and focus groups, diocesan officials soon settled on the idea of fostering the development of democratic, worker-owned cooperatives, using the Spanish Mondragon concept as its model. Unfortunately, however, despite the organizers' best efforts, this hopeful plan met with little success. The challenge of grafting a fairly sophisticated business model with complicated management issues onto an unskilled, rural population proved too difficult to overcome. So, in the early 1990s, armed with a five-year grant from the Campaign for Human Development, the organization reinvented itself. Based on strong input from its board, of which one-third are low-income individuals from the community, WORC in 1991 shifted its focus from cooperatives to micro enterprise development, helping individuals create jobs by preparing them to own and operate their own small businesses.

Based in part on its own concepts and in part on the model of the Chicago-based Association for Enterprise Opportunity, WORC offers two to three training programs annually from five of its six regional offices in Geneva, Elmira, Rochester, Steuben County, Seneca County and Ithaca. Would-be entrepreneurs attend three-hour evening sessions weekly for eight to 12 weeks, taught by staff and guest speakers and focusing on all the elements of operating a small business. Participants also receive weekly one-on-one counseling, and upon completion of training, access to small loans (up to $5,000 at first, and up to $10,000 after successful repayment) for startup funding. WORC also operates a downtown "retail incubator" with space for four small businesses to operate during their startup phase.

Hennessey estimates that 500 people have gone through training since 1991, with well over 100 new businesses resulting. The organization has a staff of 14 and an annual budget of about $500,000.

"It's one small business at a time," Hennessey said, "but when you do it over a period of time, the impact starts to mount. When you talk about more than 100 people with their own businesses in small, rural communities, that's not insignificant." Worker Ownership Resource Center (WORC) Refugee Microenterprise Program Jose Cruz, Program Director 25 Franklin Square (Sibley Tower), 7th Floor Rochester, NY 14604 (716) 262-7075 (716) 232-6486 Fax

This year-old Rochester branch of the Geneva-based WORC program works closely with Catholic Family Services, an active refugee-service agency; it literally translates WORC's entrepreneurial-training model to meet the unique needs of a refugee community that includes recent arrivals from the old Soviet Union, the Ukraine, Bosnia, Sudan and Somalia and Southeast Asia.

Funded by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (with a staff of 2 and a $118,000 annual budget), this small program has already trained nearly 60 refugees in small-business management and operations, with 20 people currently "actively pursuing" worker-owned businesses, including a Vietnamese woman who's opened a retail nail salon and several Bosnian masons who have brought their trade over from the old country.

Trainees are expected to have some working knowledge of English, but in practice, many fall well short of fluency, which poses a challenge for WORC's traditional classroom setting. Accordingly, this branch has converted WORC's standard 8- to 12-week classroom process into a set of five free-standing class "modules," presented weekly, covering business basics, marketing, home finances, business finances, and finding capital to start a business. Participants also undergo considerable one-on-one business counseling, working with a trainer who speaks their language or an interpreter. As with WORC's classroom system, though, the individual goal remains to have a complete business plan put together at the end of training.

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.

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