Rick

Hello, and welcome to Northwest Philly Neighbors.

I'm Rick Mohr, and my guest is Keturah Dior.

She takes us into some great worlds with stories of life in the Caribbean, her rich family history in Mount Airy, and how she helps hundreds of small business owners across the city.

She's the program coordinator for Power Up Your Business at the Community College of Philadelphia.

And you'll be inspired to hear how people running small businesses are making big strides with all the resources and coaching they get from Power Up.

We met in a study room at Lovett Library, which turned out to be noisier than you might think.

So, in addition to Keturah's stories, you can enjoy the background sounds of a great resource in the neighborhood.

Stay tuned!

Your program is about education and support for small businesses.

Could you say why that's an important group to support?

Kittura Dior:

Well, I think everyone is sort of aware of the recent news where so many cities were in competition to get Amazon to move to their city.

And the idea of that is that a big company like that will hire so many people and pay so many people and blah, blah, blah.

However, the actual fact is that if every small business in Philadelphia could hire one person, we could eliminate unemployment.

Power Up Your Business was designed for people who could not qualify for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program in Philadelphia.

Now, the Goldman Sachs program is national.

You have to have revenue above $150,000, and it's a very competitive thing to get into.

So thankfully, people in the city of Philadelphia did recognize that that type of information and training was not being made available to small business owners on the commercial corridors in the city.

So if you drive around Philadelphia, one of the worst things to see is a bunch of empty stores, you know.

And it also reflects on the neighborhood.

When that starts to happen, the economics of a neighborhood go down.

So this whole effort is one to address the issues of how these businesses on commercial corridors survive.

It came up through city council.

City council person, C herelle Parker, was probably the champion that got this thing started.

But for her, she was saying, you know, looking at these small stores, how can we help them?

And the idea was to create something similar to the Goldman Sachs program that could help small business owners grow and thrive.

Rick

So could you just say what the two main programs of Power Up are?

Kittura Dior:

Okay, sure.

So with Power Up Your Business, you can see it on our website at www.ccp.edu forward slash powerup.

We offer something called the Store Owner Series, which you do not have to be a store owner to do this.

These are single classes that are usually two hours, and they can be on a single topic.

Usually it's something like maybe using Facebook marketing for your business or how to negotiate a commercial lease.

We've done series that are specific to daycare industry, the beauty industry.

We've had some that were on family-owned businesses, and we keep the Store Owner Series classes open to anyone.

We don't require any business documentation.

These are free classes, and they're available.

Rick:

From those one shots, what do you see that people are really hungry for?

Kittura Dior:

Well, this is the interesting thing.

With those classes, we've had more than 1,300 people in every zip code in the city taking those classes over the last two years, and they're hungry for every part of it.

As a small business, I don't care what your business is.

If you're a daycare, if you're an ice cream shop, a barber shop, if you're a doctor or a lawyer or an insurance agent, you're a specialist in your area.

But the difficult part is how do you navigate things like negotiating a lease?

Even businesses that have been around for a while, social media marketing is brand new.

So I don't care what level you're at, you're going to need to know this stuff.

And the other part of it is that it keeps changing.

So, you know, you hear about it periodically.

Facebook has changed their algorithms.

What does that mean to a business person?

What is the best type of marketing to use for this?

And just for the record, I don't teach any of the courses, although some of them I might be capable of teaching.

I'm more in managing the program in that end, and there's a team of five of us, but I'm more in managing the program, hiring instructors.

We try to get the best instructors that are experts in their particular specialty to come in for the things about negotiating a commercial lease.

For instance, we have an attorney that comes in and talks about that.

We've actually partnered with Google and have had some really stellar Google-specific marketing for online things, and we're getting ready to do another one with that.

We're starting to look at basic things like SEO, search engine optimization.

You can't just get a website and stick it up and think something's going to happen.

You have to know the background information on how do you make that pop up?

How do you make sure you're found?

It's not as simple as people think.

So having this type of instruction and having it available for free is great.

And I will say this also, we're not the only one.

There are a number of great organizations.

It's the colleges, all the major colleges, their business departments have assistance.

SCORE is a really great one.

They provide free mentors.

The Free Library of Philadelphia has a brick office downtown in Vine Street.

And like every Friday, for instance, you can get a free head shop, first come, first served, from 11 to 1.

Rick

So then there's a second main program that you have.

Kittura Dior:

Yeah, so the first part is the single classes.

The second part is a 12 week series.

And for this, there are stringent requirements for entry.

And the requirements are, one, that the business be in Philadelphia.

Two, that your revenue does not exceed a million dollars.

Three, you have to be working full time in the business.

And then you also need a letter of support.

And a lot of people don't understand why, but we have a short list of where these letters of support must come from, and they are city council people, the neighborhood CDCs.

In Mount Airy, you have Mount Airy USA, or Germantown United.

Any of the chambers of commerce, any of the colleges or schools that do business training, we'll provide you with a sample letter, because most people, when you ask them to write a letter, they're like, what's it supposed to say?

But the reason we want you to get connected with this is that there are abundant programs out here that help business owners, and a lot of people are not aware of it.

It's kind of a back door to make sure that the business owners get connected with the resources that are already there.

Yes, yes.

And some of them, you know, the Department of Commerce for store owners and brick and mortar, they have things like grants for security cameras outside, grants for interior repairs, grants for exterior repairs.

Right now, the Merchant Fund has a short grant window for operational grants.

This is free money, and the grant can go anywhere from $500,000 to $10,000 to say it's a stabilization grant.

So if your business is on shaky ground, the Merchant Fund grant is open starting May 20th to June 20th.

So anybody who's in business right now, look up the Merchant Fund grant now, okay, and apply for it.

But getting you connected with these sources, there was one grant that came up two years ago where 10 full year business leases on the commercial core were given away, a whole year's rent paid for you.

And you had to submit a business plan and some other things.

They also gave you $10,000 to help you fit it out.

So, I mean, 10 people got a free store for a year with an option to buy the store at the end of the year.

The Department of Commerce had one in November, again, open a store in these targeted zip codes with food shortage issues.

They gave $83,000 away as a grant that you do not have to pay back for businesses who wanted to open in specific zip codes.

So getting connected to the city, to the Department of Commerce, to all of these programs, a lot of these nonprofits, all of this stuff is crucial for people who either have a business or want to start a business.

It's crucial.

Rick:

So once they get in, what happens?

Kittura Dior:

Okay, in the 12 week program, it is divided into segments.

So for the first two classes, you have thought and business planning.

The second instructor focuses on accounting and financial information, and we also include in that three weeks a set of meetings with financial lenders.

We connect them with a business friendly bank and also someone from the Department of Commerce.

So these people sit down in front of the class and explain what they offer and take connections.

I ran into a recent graduate of the program, and she told me that the person from the Department of Commerce that she met at this panel in the class called her to tell her about another opportunity.

So we give the people in the class the connections, the phone numbers, the emails of all of these people.

We urge them to stay in touch with them.

We're having successes being reported where some people are saying their sales have doubled or tripled since they took the class.

Several have hired new employees.

A few have expanded to new locations.

Rick:

Could you give an example of one or two of them?

Kittura Dior:

Sure. Let's see.

In Chestnut Hill, there's one called the Art Shop.

It's a barber shop in the basement across from the Chestnut Hill Hotel.

The owner, Sean Miller, was in the very first cohort of Power Up Your Business, and he opened the second barber shop now in South Philadelphia.

Rick:

Is there something that you see specifically that he got out of the class that helped him kind of get to that next level?

Kittura Dior:

Yeah, and it's funny because I put a picture up on my Facebook today, and it was an anniversary of my graduation from grad school.

So on the top of my cap, I had this drawing, and it shows a bunch of scribble, scribble, scribbles, and then it sort of gets less scribbly and then it goes to a straight line.

That's a description of how you accomplish something.

You think you're going to go through this easy step-by-step process, and it is a mess.

It is a mess until you get past this point of confusion and you get to this line of clarity.

Success is not a straight line.

It is a mess.

And for most business owners, they're in their heads, they don't have anyone to talk to, they're trying to juggle every part of their business.

At the early stage of a business, often business owners are doing every part of the business.

They have deals with staff, they have people that show up late, they have customers that don't pay on time.

Their heads are in a jumble of all this mess.

Then there's the taxes, and there's a leak somewhere in the building, or a delivery didn't come on time.

So often they're so confused and so not directed.

What we do is we start with giving them tools for planning, tools to help them visually map out where they are.

We put them in a room with peers who are also in business, and they share different ideas on how they solve the problem.

We bring in great instructors who are specialists in different areas.

We focus on planning and clear thought, accounting, then on marketing, and then on operations and HR issues.

Those are the four instructors we have.

We match them with a business coach who works with them one on one, not only during the program, but after they complete the program, they develop three goals through this program, which we call a tactical plan, which is a tool, and you can repeatedly use this tool.

So there are three goals.

It might be develop a website.

It might be hire someone.

It might be whatever.

And then we assign the coach, and we continue to pay for this for one year after they finish the program.

So we give them continued support and help to achieve the goals that they outline in their tactical plan.

So if somebody comes in, like Sean Miller did, and say, I want to open another store, his set of goals and what steps he needs to do are outlined in a tactical plan.

He has a coach that is somebody to bounce ideas off for him.

And these coaches are specialists, and they're all business people as well.

So what they do is they help them find a clarity and a direction and eliminate the fuss.

The Frosted Fox Bakery down here, for instance, is a graduate of our program.

And one of the challenges she had is that she absolutely loved to make these beautiful cookies.

And the coach kind of said to her, listen, you're taking a lot of time doing that, and what is the return on that?

You may have to really put that aside and focus on something else.

Another thing she did was hire a dishwasher instead of her doing it, you know, so that she could work on some other things.

So it's a matter of helping business people understand what their priorities need to be, understand the pathway to do it, understand the step-by-step process, help get them out of that scribble mess of trying to figure it all out and get them to that line of clarity.

So that's what we do.

The coaching seems like a key part of it, and not everybody is naturally a good coach.

Rick:

How do you find good coaches and what do you look for?

Kittura Dior:

We've been very fortunate with that.

We've found some great people.

A lot of them have had experience in business coaching.

They've all had their own business on some level.

With a lot of them, what happens is the same thing that happened with me.

You get to this point in your career where you've done things for a while, you've seen a lot of mistakes in other companies and this, that, and the other, and you see a certain way of clarity that you think you can help with, and you target, like, who can I help with this?

And a lot of them have all come to that same conclusion.

And a lot of times they call us.

Sometimes we seek them out.

We've heard about them.

Some of them are working at other colleges and universities, doing coaching already.

So it's a mixture, but we've been getting some really good applicants on the coaching as well.

Rick:

Could you give an example of one of your coaches that you think is particularly effective?

Kittura Dior:

One gentleman, he owns a company.

He's favored by a lot of the people he coaches.

His name is Nestor.

And he is one of those people who can, you know, clearly listen.

First you have to listen, and then you respond.

I have another one, John Thane, and he just came on board, and he's a serial entrepreneur.

We have a couple of women, one, Varma, who is a coach at Temple.

So listening is a key skill.

Rick:

What else?

Kittura Dior:

Listening, and also you have to have a certain level of empathy working with anyone.

And it's funny because that was one of the key takeaways from the NBA in innovation.

When you ask people what innovation is, they mostly talk about science and this and blah, blah, blah.

But the actual key to innovation first is empathy, because what you're doing is trying to solve a problem for people.

And at different times in the class, sometimes they sit with people who are in industries that are alike, and then sometimes we try to pair them with groups of people who are in completely different industries for different exercises throughout the program.

So that's how it works.

Rick:

Could you give another example of a business that you specifically saw have a takeaway from the class that they applied?

Kittura Dior:

Well, one of the most recent ones was Yvonne Blake, who owns Hakim's Bookstore.

It's a family-owned bookstore.

Her father started it 60 years ago.

And she sent me a note, and she said, thanks for dragging me, kicking and screaming into the class, because she gave me all kinds of excuses.

I'm going to send an employee.

I'm not going to come.

I don't have time for this, you know, whatever.

And I encouraged her, it has to be the owner.

It needs to be you.

It can't be anyone else.

And she was not happy at first, but now she's very thankful about having gone through it.

And there were a couple of takeaways that she had.

I think for one, you know, being in it for so long and growing up in it, she didn't realize how people regarded her business as an icon in the community for one.

But two, technology has changed so many things.

How do you market now?

It's not about putting out a newspaper ad.

You need to develop a social media following.

You need to look at those aspects in terms of how you look at your business.

She did those things.

Yes.

People were working on it for her, but she didn't really have herself the clear picture in her head of what was going on.

She was delegating without fully understanding where it was going, you know.

There are some things that you can take from old school methods, but imagine if the phone company said, you know what, we had done well with landlines and pay phones for a hundred years, we're not changing a thing.

They'd be out of business.

Rick:

So you wrote that you walked the major commercial corridor as of Philadelphia. What were your goals with that?

What was the purpose of that?

Kittura Dior:

Well, this is again how technology isn't the answer.

If you just email people all the time, often they don't even see it.

They don't answer it.

If you don't walk out and touch people and shake their hands and look them in the eye to inform them about these types of things, some of them are never going to see it and never going to hear you.

So with the team of us that work at Power Up, we do commercial walks on business corridors around the city.

We'll go out on a nice day like this and we'll just go into every store.

We'll take them to the pamphlets.

We'll talk to the owner.

We'll tell them there's an upcoming class that's going to be in the area.

And we invite them to come to our single store owner classes first, which we usually have in the area prior to the 12 week class.

So they get a feel of this and an understanding of the type of knowledge that they're going to pick.

And then we ask them to apply.

So touching and feeling and knocking on doors is a crucial part of this.

And it is not gone with the advent of technology.

Rick:

What were some of your personal takeaways from walking all of those streets and walking into all of those doors?

Kittura Dior:

Well, to my surprise, I always thought of Mount Airy.

I grew up in Mount Airy.

And I always thought of Mount Airy as the most diverse part of the city.

But to my surprise, the Northeast actually is.

And it wasn't that way when I was growing up.

It was not at all.

But you literally can walk several blocks of streets and nobody speaks English as a first language.

And none of the languages you hear are repeated.

So the diversity level that you see...

Rick:

What groups are you encountering there?

Kittura Dior:

People from several different African countries.

They may speak French.

They may speak English.

They may speak Swahili.

They may speak Dutch.

Then you're seeing people from all parts of Asia.

Asia isn't just China.

It's Taiwan.

It's Vietnam.

It's Korea.

You're seeing all of these things.

And there's still some of the people that were traditionally in the Northeast.

You know, we had a Greek restaurant come through, and they've been there forever.

Rick:

And did it seem to you like the commercial corridors are thriving or struggling or somewhere in between?

Kittura Dior:

I'd say they're somewhat struggling.

Yeah.

You know, when you look at places, restaurants, especially in January, February, March, those are their deadest, slowest months.

One of my favorite restaurants, which is gone now, which was on Germantown Avenue, the Wine Thief, they went out of business that year.

We had 18 snowstorms in a row, okay?

And when I talked to the owners after they had gone out of business, their food was fresh.

They didn't freeze it.

So if you're buying this food and spending money and customers don't come in January, February, March, you're putting money out, and it doesn't come back to you, you know?

So if you're trying to do a healthy or fresh food type of restaurant, that's a concern.

You don't want to run out if customers come, but then what if they don't come?

What if there are 18 snowstorms in one winter, you know?

The other store that went out that same year was the Chestnut Hill Bootery.

I had been a customer of theirs for years, and I talked to him when he was going out, and he said, you know, back 25 years ago when I started, if there were 18 snowstorms, people in Chestnut Hill came to me on skis and bought shoes.

Now they go to the internet, and he had this massive sale, he had too much stock, it didn't sell, and he decided to close after 25 years in business.

So yeah, businesses, they have struggles, and they need to think about things in new ways.

They may need to think of other revenue streams.

Don't just compete with online businesses, become one if you can.

Be a store with an online component if you can do it.

One of our recent graduates in West Philly, she has a juice bar, okay?

She ships juices.

Who would have thought?

But you know, this idea of thinking outside of the box is something that can help people, and these tools aren't often coming to small businesses or small business city corridors, and that's what we're trying to do.

Rick:

You said that the funding came somewhat from the soda tax.

The impression I got was people think that the soda tax is hurting small businesses, so let's do something to help small businesses.

Are you worried that that funding is in jeopardy? Could this program disappear any year?

Kittura Dior:

Well, initially, in the early days, I was, but I think that what we have now is we've created a momentum where we have impacted businesses in every single zip code and city council district.

So when you look at the results and the payback to the city of what the investment is, I think that for every city council person, who wants to say no to this?

You know, I would suspect that they would figure out a way to continue funding us.

And it would be because of when you look at the impact on the businesses that have come through the program, the payback for the city, if they're increasing revenue, if they're hiring new people, we take continued surveys from current participants and past ones to sort of gauge where are you now, and where are you now, and where are you now?

You know, six months a year out.

And it's great results.

I mean, they're great.

And even for some of our not commercial corridors, some of our home-based and online businesses, they're improving, and some of them have transferred their business from home to a commercial corridor.

You know, so if you're seeing this process of continual growth, you're going to say, no, we're not going to fund that.

You know, you would look bad.

It's just so needed, you know.

And I mean, I think back to my own days in business, I wish there was something like this, because there wasn't.

I started off my career in the jewelry business first as a designer maker, and then I went back to school for learning about gemology.

I got into diamonds and high-end jewelry sales.

I moved to the Caribbean, and I started learning about exceedingly high-end watches and was in sales involving that.

I can explain with a very straight face all the reasons why you need a $50,000 watch or more.

I've never bought one, you know, but I can explain to somebody who's interested how to and why they would want to buy one.

Rick

So you lived in the Caribbean for ten years.

Kittura Dior:

Yeah, I loved that.

Rick:

What did you love about it, and what were the challenges?

Kittura Dior:

Well, I left Philadelphia in 96 or 97.

After 96 was the year we had four-foot snowdrifts, and when I left, it was...

I worked at that point on Jewelers Row in Philadelphia, and I worked for the late Jerry Robbins, who was one of my favorite employers.

He was just a genius in marketing, you know, the diamond and the beard thing.

And he taught us so much about marketing, about how to talk to customers, about everything.

That could be a whole show on itself.

But when that series of snowstorms happened, I was frustrated.

I had been in a car accident myself a couple of years before that.

And the injuries and the cold, it was like, I just need to miss winter one time.

I had met a guy working on Jewelers Row, who had just come back from living in the Caribbean.

And he told me about a company.

They were based in New York.

I applied.

I went up for an interview.

They hired me.

I found a place to live online.

And I was out.

I was like, done.

And that was, I guess I left in October of 97.

Rick

Good timing.

Kittura Dior:

Yeah.

And I was like, no more snow.

And my tagline is that I don't want to see ice on the ground again unless I've accidentally dropped my drink.

And I went down there.

There are definite differences between living there and living here.

One of the things that you see is that there is no municipal water supply.

Here you have a basement in your house.

There you have a cistern.

It's a hole under your house that holds the rainwater collected from your roof.

You use that for everything in your house.

And if you run out, you buy water there, like you buy oil for heating here by the truckload.

And it's expensive.

The things that are expensive there are things like food, water.

Pick up anything in your grocery store here today.

It is no less than three times as much there.

I don't care what it is.

A pint of strawberries, $18.95.

When it was July and August, I would come home from my vacation, and my friends would say, Oh, this new restaurant.

I'm like, I just need a farmers market.

I just want raw tomatoes, some raw corn, some raw peaches.

I just want that.

I don't want restaurant.

I would have my mother FedEx me three ears of corn.

It would cost $35 to send me, just send me three ears of Jersey Silver Queen corn, please.

The corn there was horrible.

You know, so certain things like that were not great.

But the temperature is between 80 and 90 degrees year round.

The sky is blue.

You know, my car never got dirty.

I mean, here you got pollen on your car this time of year.

You got this dirt, the snow dirt, puts that black and gray soot on your car.

You know, the air is cleaner there.

The other thing I liked about it is that our customers were basically cruise ship passengers.

There was no overtime work in there.

You know, when I worked in the jewelry industry, we closed at 5 o'clock, by and then off to the beach, off to cocktails, off to whatever, or off to sleep.

I got in the habit of going to sleep very early, usually about when the sun went down, whatever time that was, and waking up very early.

A lot of times I would go to Megan's Bay Beach, which is a mile long stretch of beautiful beach.

I'd go there at 5.36 in the morning to exercise before I went to work.

I'd go to the beach after work.

You know, when I was weekends, if I had extra time off, I'd go island hopping, go to British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, wherever, you know, just take a weekend and go to a different island.

You start to become a connoisseur of seawater.

This beach has clearer water than that beach.

The snorkeling over here is better than here.

You really start to look at water like that.

My first trip to the Caribbean, I was about 12, and I was a swimmer since I was three.

I did a water ballet and all kinds of things like that.

So living here, I was always wondering, why do they paint swimming pools that fakey blue color?

When you go down there, you discover why.

When I came back from the Caribbean, I moved to Miami for a little while, and after being there, you know, the Caribbean is blue and clear.

Miami is blue and looks like milk is in it.

You know, it's not clear.

So I'm a beach snob.

Coming from up here in the Atlantic, Miami looks good, but coming from the Caribbean, Miami looks horrible.

I drove up from Miami when I came back to Philadelphia with a friend who was from Haiti, and he stayed with me a couple days.

He's an art dealer.

But when we drove down Kelly Drive, I was driving, and he says, Oh, my God, look at the water.

Stop the car.

It's horrible.

And I said, No, no, the water always looks like that.

He said, No, it looks like oil or something.

It doesn't look.

I was like, Let me just calm you down.

This is how our water looks.

Okay, it doesn't look like what you're used to.

And it astounded him that our water was this brownish, army greenish, murky color.

Astounded him.

I said, Yeah, you're here now.

But yeah, you get accustomed to that and to a certain ease.

And I know one of the things my mother used to say is like, When are you coming back to the real world?

And a lot of my friends who lived down there, their families were like, You need to get out of there and come back to the real world.

And one of my friends said, You know, she said, I think our world is a lot more real than theirs.

And I believe that's true.

I mean, we were close to nature, certain things you don't worry about.

The other thing is that things don't last there.

Like your shoes will last a year.

I have shoes that are 20 years old here that are in pristine condition.

But anything with metal, any TVs, anything, it turns to rust from the salt air.

You know, so nothing is old.

Everything is new.

Because once it gets old, it's trash.

Unless your clothes, everything dissolves down there from the salt air, except your skin gets great, your hair is great.

You know, everything else is great about you.

It's very lovely.

Rick:

So was there a moment when you realized it was time to come back?

Kittura Dior:

Well, yeah.

It was when the economy changed.

Now, I was there through 9-11 too, but the economy started getting wifty.

You know, everybody knows 2005 to 2008.

It was just a mess.

And I would say that probably 80, 90 percent of the people that I worked in in the jewelry industry completely left the industry.

I know a few people who have stayed down there, and everything's different.

I don't know how they manage really.

I never intended to stay as long as I did.

I really only intended to go for like six months and come back, but I loved it so much that I just would stay year after year.

But it was a combination of things.

When the economy changed, I was kind of floundering and trying to figure out what to do.

And at the same time, I had a family member, my uncle, my mother's brother, had become ill and he had moved in with my mother.

And she said she would not have called me if things were well, but she was saying, you know, I need your help here.

And I came back and he died about five years later.

And my mother, thank God, is massively healthy.

She's 83 and she swims five times a week.

And she still works full time for the state of Pennsylvania.

She's in great health, probably better than me in some ways.

I'm trying to catch up with her with that gym thing.

She just beats me going to the gym all the time.

But anyway, she asked me to come back.

So I've been back here since, I guess, 2006.

You know, at that point, when I looked around, not only the economy had changed, but there were more barriers to entry.

It turned out that when you even wanted an entry level job in a jewelry store as a clerk, they wanted you to have a bachelor's degree.

Now I only had a few more credits to do to get that, which is what inspired me to go back to school.

And I went back to Philadelphia University, which is now Jefferson.

They had an accelerated degree program.

They accepted all of my old credits, which most of the other colleges I went to wanted me to start as a freshman, which I was not willing to do.

It was a blessing because they were the ones that introduced this MBA in innovation.

You know, before I signed up for that, I would have told anyone I would never get an MBA because I thought it was too stuffy and too rigid and to all of these other things.

But this innovation approach is very 21st century.

And it uses tools from engineering, the arts and design to solve business problems, which I thought that was exactly what was missing for me as a creative person in education for the longest time.

The traditional creative education is all creative and no business.

And the traditional business education is business, and they have little respect for the whole creative industry.

And then they introduced this MBA that sounded like it was an answer to the educational dilemma that I had always faced about how to merge the creative and business sides of my brain.

And I got a degree in that in 2015.

When I saw the ad for the business, I had already started my own small business in which I was trying to work with small business owners.

The dilemma is that people in small business don't have much cash to pay you.

So when I saw the opportunity at Community College, I applied for that position, and I was selected to be the program coordinator for the job.

Rick:

So that uncle you mentioned, is that the same one that was in real estate?

Kittura Dior:

No. The uncle that I came home for for illness has passed away.

The one that's in real estate, he's 91.

His name is William Tucker.

His house on Lincoln Drive in McCallum has a historic marker outside for his late wife who died in 2005, C.

She was the first black woman to serve as Secretary of State in the country in 1971, in the 1970s under Milton Shapp.

She was the one who lowered the voting age in Pennsylvania to 18, who created the voter registration drive, mail-in voter registration form, sorry, and also who changed the face of Harrisburg by appointing women, black people and minorities to positions when there had been none before.

So in her last year, she was more known for her stance against negative lyrics in music and gangster rap.

One of the other things that happened, she had seen a statue that was buried in the Capitol Rotunda of women suffragettes, and there was a space there, and it was intended for Sojourner Truth.

That set her afire.

She decided to work on getting a statue of Sojourner Truth installed.

It took ten years to do it.

It actually happened four years after she passed away, but that was installed in the Capitol Rotunda in April of 2009.

I was there for the installation, as was my uncle and several other family members, and it is the only statue of a black woman in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC.

You can see it on a YouTube video.

Michelle Obama was there, Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, so, I mean, she has a list of accomplishments.

There were a number of organizations she started.

One of the things that happened to me at Christmas is I went to an event at the African American Museum.

I was recruiting for Power Up, and then one guy says to me, he says, wow, he said, what are you, is some kind of do-gooder type of business?

And I said, well, yeah, I guess I am.

And I said, I guess I got it honest.

And I said, have you ever heard of St. Delores Tucker?

He says, heard of her. Heard of her.

He said, I was in the College for Teens program that they ran in 2005, the last year she was alive.

And he said, I was a mess.

He said, I was 16 years old.

I had been arrested.

I was on house arrest.

And my life was going down the tubes.

But I got in this College for Teens program at the Martin Luther King Association.

And it turned my whole life around.

I got a college degree.

He said, I got my master's degree.

I own a business and a nonprofit.

And I'm working on my Ph.D.

I was in shock when he said that.

I immediately got on the phone and called my mother and my uncle.

And he got involved with the King Association now.

We're trying to get more funding to keep the College for Teens program going because it has turned people's lives around, you know, who were at risk and young.

And that's exactly what, his name is Kyle Morris, that's exactly what his program does, which is helps youth that are at risk to help them turn their lives around.

And he did it because of the experience he had with my late aunt and my uncle, you know, with the College for Teens program at the Martin Luther King Association in Philadelphia.

And you talked a little about what real estate in Mount Airy was like for him as a realtor in his career, which was fairly different than now.

Oh, yeah.

So my great-grandparents moved to the United States in the early 1900s.

They had 14 children themselves.

11 of them as adults with them came to Mount Airy in 1945.

And what a lot of people don't know is that most of these larger stone homes had been abandoned for 15, 20 years because of the Great Depression.

Rick:

Really?

Kittura Dior:

Yeah.

So they got one.

It was a fixer-upper.

It was huge.

And 11 adults and a couple with spouses moved into that house, and they each took a section to remodel.

So when I was coming out...

Rick:

Where was that house?

Kittura Dior:

That house is on Upsal Street, right off of Cherokee.

Every night when they drove there from the farm to work on it, the police stopped them and asked them why were they there as black people because the police didn't expect to see black people in the area.

So once they got it fixed and it was nice, out of the 11 adults that lived there, that were children and whatever, most of them were real estate agents.

Our family had been assisting people moving from down south and from the Caribbean for decades.

And my great grandmother had been in real estate since the 30s, 1945.

What would happen is that neighbors who were white, who were angry at other neighbors, would come to them to ask them to please show the house to black people because they were mad at their neighbors, but they would have to sneak them in to show them the homes at night.

My uncle will tell you that story today.

He's still in the real estate development business at 91.

When we take walks around Mount Airy, he'll point out entire blocks that he was involved in the sale of.

And in addition to that, like I said, the assistance was complete.

You want to move up from down south, you want to move up here from the Caribbean, we've got a path for you.

We'll help you find a job, we'll help you find a house, we'll help you with food, and we'll help you with church.

So my family is pretty well known in a lot of circles for those particular efforts.

Because you need a lot of help when you're moving.

You need a lot of help.

And this is the other piece of that that a lot of people don't realize.

Black people could not get a mortgage.

I don't care about if you couldn't get one.

So there were wealthier black people who would provide mortgages or give people payment terms on whatever because black people could not get a mortgage to buy a house.

But a lot of people bought homes that way rather than renting.

Yes, yes.

Because the goal was homeownership.

Rick

And probably those families are still around a lot.

Kittura Dior:

Oh, a lot of them are.

Rick:

Well, Kittura, thank you so much for sharing your stories.

Kittura Dior:

Thanks. Thanks for asking me.

Rick:

For more about Power Up Your Business and Kittura Dior, see the show notes or go to our website, nwphillypodcast.net.

I really liked reading the Power Up annual report.

It's not dry like you might think.

It's full of pictures and stories and interesting details.

If you like the show, please subscribe and tell your friends.

And if you want to get notified of new episodes, just hit the like button on our Facebook page.

I'm Rick Mohr.

Thanks for listening.

See you next time for more stories from Northwest Philly Neighbors.

Rick:

So it just so happens that, as we walked out of the library, we ran into Anthony Kirby, who was in cohort two of Power Up Your Business.

Rick:

So Anthony, what were one or two takeaways from the Power Up course that really made a difference to your business?

Anthony Kirby:

I think the interaction with all the students, because we got to collaborate with all different ideals, and everyone's business was a little different.

Number two is the instructors, who have been out there in the business world, who bring their expertise to help us areas that we find ourselves short in.

Rick

And what was one of those areas for you?

Anthony Kirby:

Marketing.

Rick

Marketing.

Anthony Kirby:

Marketing.

I mean, for me, that's very important.

For my company, it's Fenneke.

Market is a big part of my business, because it's really trying to get the brand noticed and get the brand out in the marketplace.

Rick

So what's an idea that you got from the class that you put into practice?

Anthony Kirby:

One of the things is using like my social media a little more.

And that's mainly I'm trying to use LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the most important parts of my business.

It's really trying to get more focus as a business brand in the LinkedIn world.

Rick

And Anthony, his product is menswear, and it's more on the elegant end of it.

So that makes a lot of sense that LinkedIn, which is a more professional business site, would be a good choice for him to look at for marketing.

Well, Anthony, thank you for sharing a word or two with us.