Building Small Businesses

PATH is an acronym for Personalized, Accessible, Targeted, and Holistic. We believe that each small business owner deserves an individualized plan for their business specifically tailored for their skills, background, and goals. The education required to succeed as a self-employed person can be obtained on the job or through programs like PATH. Business ownership provides social capital that helps change expectations of how clients see themselves and how they relate to their community.

PATH clients are entrepreneurs who are either already running a small business or are planning to launch a small business in one of our target communities or neighborhoods.  We target communities and neighborhoods that have an above-average percentage of low to moderate-income individuals and families: the communities that need more locally owned and operated small businesses to provide goods and services. Or program specifically helps women, refugee, veteran, and minority business owners and entrepreneurs. 

Through our work with the refugee community locally and internationally, PATH currently has clients as far away as Uganda and Sudan. PATH has recently expanded into the whole of the Texas Panhandle through Texas Panhandle Women (TPW), a group of women in business and civic leadership. TPW is focused on bringing new economic development opportunities to our rural panhandle communities by focusing on women-owned businesses. PATH has aided and consulted with sixty small business clients since its creation in 2018.

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in economically depressed communities and neighborhoods, but for a variety of reasons the businesses that launch in these areas generally operate with less formal structure, less capital and lower profitability, despite equal or greater effort and value provided to their customers.

Like all business owners, PATH clients work to provide for themselves and their families, but they also work to improve the economic and social stability of the community or neighborhood they work in.  They set an example for other local entrepreneurs that investing in this neighborhood is worth it and that success can be achieved here.  We are honored to help them plan, launch and grow their businesses.