GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — In honor of Black History Month, FOX 17 is highlighting a community development financial institution that boasts 47% of its clientele as African American owned.
Rende Capital is a nonprofit lender that gets a majority of their funding from private foundations and a few banks. Their goal is to give communities of color a fighting chance at succeeding in business.
At Last Mile Cafe in Grand Rapids, there's a partnership that makes Cameron Whitmore's coffee roasting business a reality.
They lend him their roaster, where his beans go from green to ready.
“I started drinking coffee when I started my first corporate job. We had to have everything with creamer. We were obsessed with having creamer, because it was such poor-quality coffee. So I wanted to create a coffee that tasted good, that you didn’t need the creamer for,” Cameron Whitmore, owner and master roaster of 24K Gold Coffee, said.
This story is about more than just a cup of coffee. It's about the other helper that made Cameron's business dream a reality.
Cameron got a small business loan from Rende Progress Capital, a community development financial institution.
“Community development financial institutions have been created since the '70s to be alternative mission-based lenders to communities that are often not receiving capital and financing from traditional banks and credit unions for whatever reason,” Eric Foster, chair and managing director for Rende Progress Capital, said.
Rende Progress Capital works to eliminate barriers.
“Our specific mission is to provide small business lending and free business technical assistance to our customers as well as diverse businesses that are applying for our loans, in order to be at times the first source of business loans — that they normally won’t receive,” Foster said.
The loan helped Cameron take his coffee business from a small roaster he bought on Amazon to the big leagues. His products are now sold at Meijer's Bridge Street Market, with hopes to expand to other Meijer stores soon.
“We are dismantling the barriers of capital that businesses of color face for different reasons,” Foster said.
“It has grown substantially over the years. It started as a small hobby. I’ve been able to get a lot more exposure working at farmers markets, working at various events,” Whitmore said.
Whitmore is building for the next generation.
“It just shows that you can start, have an idea, improve on that idea, and get better and better and turn it to a legitimate business that you can ultimately pass on to your family, to my two sons,” Whitmore said.
Fitting with the name 24K Gold, every batch of coffee is topped with 24-karat edible gold as the finishing touch.
Follow FOX 17: Facebook - X (formerly Twitter) - Instagram - YouTube
