Meet Alma Flores, who brings a lifetime of advocacy and passion to her role as the Latino Economic Development Center’s new executive director. She discusses the path that brought her to LEDC, how she sees the organization, and what changes we might see next.
Peter Majerle: What is the journey that brought you here to Minnesota and into the executive director position at LEDC?
Alma Flores: It all started with who I was born to. My parents are both Mexican immigrants and they came to the US … wanting to live the American dream.
They came with nothing. My father was a minister. I was raised in that household where we took in stray dogs, we took in homeless people and tried to help anyone we could. And I think my first memory of what led me down the path that I’m on today and what led me to LEDC specifically is that my mom would always ask the congregation, do they need any jobs? Do they need any assistance finding childcare if they’re going to go back to work? Do they need housing?
My entire life was my mom helping people find housing, find jobs, using her personal networks and vouching for them, so to speak. She was the ultimate connector. If one woman wanted to start a daycare, she would immediately put them in touch with this other woman or family that wanted daycare in order for them to go back to work.
You originally wanted to study medicine, correct?
Yes, I specifically wanted to be a pediatrician. I would see the families I would come through my dad’s congregation, they were not getting the care because either they couldn’t access the care because they were undocumented immigrants or felt like they can’t, even though there were clinics that they could go to. And I just felt like there was so much need in my community that I had to give back in some way. And I was very interested in medicine at that time. I would spend times at the clinics my mom worked for during the summer.
But I took organic chemistry and that weeded me out. … So, I had to find a different path. I really liked my liberal arts classes, sociology, immigration, history, that type of thing. So, it led to Chicano studies because I figured … I didn’t really understand my background. The history, most families don’t talk about their history. And if they do, it’s amongst the adults. It’s not down to children.
And you just hear it, but it’s not being spoken to you. So, I figured I really need to understand my background and my history. And understand immigration history specifically. And how Mexican Americans came to the US.
And how they worked on farms. And the whole Chavez movement. And how that impacts people’s lives. And how unfortunately there are disparities in our American system around housing, jobs and education. How people of color are criminalized, that they’re just assumed to be criminals first before they’re seen as humans. And all of that really impacted me. So I chose a different path and chose Chicano studies. I focused my attention on day laborers.
Because again, it was one of those scenes that was influenced by my mom’s experience in the church. And what I observed was that people didn’t have very many options to live. You’re either independently wealthy, you’re a small-business owner, or you’re an employee. And there is no in-between sometimes. But the day labor movement was kind of an in-between. It was the informal market. And they were doing jobs for very wealthy people in many cases.
And yet they weren’t seen. And so that really impacted me. And there had been a lot of research done on male day laborers, but very little on female day laborers.
That influenced me to then pursue city planning. Because some of this construct is city planning related. Like economic development, the economy of a place are all dependent on different policies and actions and programs. And I focused on housing community and economic development.
For my master’s thesis, I focused on Dominican women in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Because I did move to the East Coast for my master’s program to understand how they got jobs, businesses or childcare.
And at the end, it was clear to me that the role of community development corporations, CDCs—I consider LEDC kind of like a CDC. We’re a CDFI, but we’re also a community development corporation. Our mission and our focus is the community. And in this case, the Latino community.
The role that -CDCs- played in assuring these women got jobs or started their own business or got connected to daycare in order to be able to start their business or work was critical. And housing was also another critical aspect in terms of helping them navigate the systems of finding an apartment or tracking down a house for them and their families.
The CDC was a critical player in that role. But the reason why I ended up in government for 20-plus years was because I got a grant that paid fully for my master’s program. And it was a federal grant. It was for the Housing and Urban Development. HUD gave me a two-year scholarship to attend MIT on a full ride as long as I gave back for two years minimum in government. Apparently, I was the only one in my cohort who took it seriously and ended up working in government.
I started out in government as a downtown development manager to do Main Street work. And so that’s where the love of Main Street and commercial corridors came from.
I didn’t focus just on Latinos or any particular group, but I understood the importance of entrepreneurship and micro-entrepreneurship for people who had lots of barriers. So, if they couldn’t join the traditional workforce, the only option they had was to start their own business. For whatever reason, right? Maybe it was their passion to become a business owner. Or they had cultural and linguistic barriers to enter the traditional workforce. So, owning a business was their only option.
So that played in to all of my work and making sure that the cities that I worked for were doing a good job of outreach and understanding the dynamic of that commercial area.
It wasn’t until 2020 … that I felt that government was not the place for me anymore.
I was very disappointed in our government at that time in the way that they were behaving. And I didn’t really want to lend myself to it anymore. So, at that time I decided to pivot.
I needed to work for a nonprofit. I needed to go back to where I started in my research and in my interest and the ability to be on the ground doing the work that nonprofits do.
And I went to work for Reach CDC, which is a nonprofit, affordable housing developer. I became their housing development director.
How did you find out about LEDC?
I already knew about LEDC. I was on the board of a similar organization in Oregon called Hacienda CDC. But they didn’t just do small business development. They also did affordable housing. I was on their board. At that time, we wanted to do a mercado as well. And we had heard about Mercado Central -in Minneapolis, and which LEDC developed- in our research of other locations around the nation that had them.
We were invited to come and talk to them about potential funding and meet with leadership of LEDC.
That was my first entree into what LEDC. I loved it because it was exactly what we were trying to do in Portland. So, I was connected that way. Still, even though I worked for government, the way that I felt I needed to give back my time was through volunteering on boards of nonprofit organizations that were doing good work in the community, both economic development and housing related. So what led me to Minnesota was my husband’s job offer. And when LEDC’s position came online, I saw it. And even people who I had just met here—I’d only lived here for a year—saw it and thought of me and said, “you need to apply to this. This is meant for you!”
I then went through the process and here I am today because I think that not only the important mission of LEDC matches with my background, but it matches with my desire to help the community get through those barriers, get through those disparities and build the wealth that they need to succeed in the American dream that is very capitalist.
That’s what we’re made of. We’re a capitalist society and that’s what people aspire to: They aspire to own a home; they aspire to own a car and to live like everyone else. So, I wanted to be at the forefront of helping guide and move LEDC in that area.
Now that you’ve had a little time at LEDC, how do you assess the organization? Where do you see strengths? Where do you see areas to improve?
Our strengths are our people, who keep the mission going in terms of small-business development. That’s our bread and butter as a CDFI -community development financial institution-. And then we have this wonderful agriculture department. My parents live in Fresno, California, the agriculture capital of America. I read up on some of the history behind ag in Fresno in Fresno and all of the work that’s coming out of there has always intrigued me. My aunt was very active in Cesar Chavez protests when the grape boycott was happening.
She died from the pesticides because she was out there picking and out there protesting. So the ag side of LEDC is also very intriguing to me and something that I want to elevate and improve how it fits alongside our CDFI lending and our CDFI business development. It all merges as one. I think that is the strength that we hold. I think we could be doing so much more. We have powerhouse potential. Some small changes I’d like to make are on the operational and professional sides of the organization. And that’s not a problem for me. I tend to do that anyway. I come into an organization, I evaluate, I assess, and I make changes.
I like proactive, stable organizations where people understand their roles and responsibilities
and they’re collaborative. And they work as a team. I am very strong at looking internally but I also know that my role is to look externally. I’m going to focus internally first, get the house in order and then I can do all those other things. -It is important to know- that my team is well taken care of, that they’re on the right path, they’re doing the right things and they’re moving LEDC ahead. But until that time, I need to focus internally.
What are your aspirations for LEDC in the future?
(Laughing) I don’t want to give away all of my secrets right now.
How about a little taste?
We need to bring our strategic initiatives to the fore, -especially- our commercial revitalization efforts. We need to highlight and celebrate the fact that we are place-making, that we’re doing small-business development on St. Paul’s East Side. So, the East Side of St. Paul initiative, if we want to call it that, needs to be out in front of people. It’s been overshadowed by some of our other initiatives, like Taco Tour, the golf tournament, our scholarship program.
The work we’re doing related to commercial revitalization efforts in St. Paul must be elevated. So that’s one initiative. The other initiative is to elevate our ag program as it relates to both our CDFI lending in business development, or in this case, land development and land ownership for wealth-building purposes.
How do you see our community?
I think the Latino community is poised to grab the reins and take control and have the power to advocate and move the needle here in Minnesota — not only to be heard but also to be able to meet the community’s needs, including for lending. Lending is one part of what we do, but LEDC also provides much-needed technical assistance and I think that one-on-one cultural and linguistic understanding of what our community needs is key. This is our added value as a CDFI in this space — we bring to light the needs of the Latino community. We’re a premier organization to do that. We are the only one who really has that focus that I’m aware of, so in that regard we need to grab it by the reins and make it known throughout the entire state.
