Small Business Profiles
After more than 45 years of business, Dante Hamilton, owner of Internet Webpages Newspaper Inc., has found himself in a resource renaissance thanks to the newly prevalent online tools that have been available since the beginning of the pandemic.
Photo Credit: Ben Getz
Without a trace of experience in the food industry, Matt Weyandt and his family sailed into the world of chocolate and launched Xocolatl in late 2014. Although their business is based in Atlanta, Matt and his wife Elaine discovered the wonders of chocolate and chocolate-making processes in the Costa Rican jungles.
Diane Hernandez knows from raising her own four children and one grandchild how hard it is to get quality childcare in her small, rural town of Julesburg, Colo.
So after retiring from retail management, she decided to take a leap of faith and opened a home-based, licensed childcare business in January 2020.
When Terry Norris left the Marine Corps, he needed a part-time job. He soon found one at a calibration lab working with the government on aerospace initiatives. On his first day there, he met his now wife. Just a few months later, they opened their own calibration lab in Palmdale, California. 27 years and 17 employees later, Precision Labs Calibration serves a variety of customer bases, including the medical, aerospace, agricultural and film industries.
During lockdown, New Mexico transplant Skylar Shafer found herself homesick for the flavors of her New England childhood. Looking to connect herself back to her roots and find a distraction from her emotionally intensive day job as a community support worker, she started Sky’s Sweets, a bakery that specializes in Jewish and Brazilian desserts. Skylar’s role as a small business has helped her feel connected to her New Mexico community while her baking connects her to the community she left behind on the East Coast.
Janna Rodriguez has always been an active leader in her community—when she was 16, she began volunteering for political campaigns, from her local school board, all the way to presidential elections. In 2018, her entrepreneurial spirit led her to establish the Innovative Daycare Corp. in Long Island, New York. Her mission is to ensure that minority children in her community have the resources and privileges that children in other communities experience.
When Ramon Alvarez was 9 years old, his family moved to a small ranch just outside of Fresno, California. He worked to help his family make a living until he left for school. While working to pay his way through college, he fell in love with retail.
After years of gaining experience at corporations like Home Depot, where he oversaw the opening of stores across the U.S. and in South America, he fulfilled his dream of opening a business of his own with his wife.
Vanessa Avalos noticed a need for bilingual education for young children in her community, and she immediately decided to execute on it. She launched Luna y Cielo, a play café and Spanish learning center to aid Latino and Hispanic mothers in raising bilingual, bicultural and biliterate children.
Edwin Sandoval, the proud owner of Xatrucho Concepts, moved from Honduras to the Colorado Springs area when he was only 10 years old. At age 14, he began working at restaurants, where he quickly realized his potential and passion for the food industry. He pursued a degree in culinary arts and continued to work at various high-scale restaurants until he had the gumption to start a business of his own.
Full-time health policy advocate and part-time doula Knetta Adkins is striving to make the Georgia healthcare system more accessible for everyone–especially families of color.
Knetta started practicing as a doula three years ago in Alabama, but soon after she relocated to Georgia and started her own practice, Douwella, where she supports parents through their pre and postpartum journey.
She says, “It’s important to me that I ensure that the families I work with have agency over their birthing story.”
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