“Do I smell chocolate?” asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as she walked into Casa Bonampak on Valencia Street on Thursday morning.
As she ate a piece of chocolate from Kika’s Treats, an artisanal desserts company with roots in the Mission, Christina “Kika”
Arantes, the company’s owner, proceeded to tell her the history of her business: How she began cooking out of La Cocina, the nonprofit that helps small food enterprises, in 2006, and quickly expanded operations to her own kitchen in Dogpatch. Today her desserts can be found at Rainbow Grocery, Williams-Sonoma and other establishments.
“The fact is, and you are all living evidence of it, small businesses are where jobs are created,” Pelosi said. “Women are in the lead of creation of small business in our country.”
On the eve of Women’s Equality Day, a celebration of the passage of a bill that gave women the right to vote, Pelosi heard the success stories and the challenges facing women entrepreneurs like Arantes. The most pressing issues, small business owners said, are child care, access to capital and health care.
The event, organized by Bay Area-based Working Solutions and the Women’s Initiative, nonprofits that mentor and provide micro-loans to entrepreneurs, was a roundtable discussion on how government can help.
Tina Salibello, who owns an apparel company, Velvet & Tweed, said she would never have been able to start her own business without the $38,000 loan from Working Solutions. She started her business at the beginning of the 2008 recession, when banks stopped lending money.
“The momentum that you have, about teaching general business practices and credit and those kinds of issues, is invaluable,” Pelosi said about Working Solutions and the Women’s Initiative. “You really cannot put a quantitative price on it, because it’s really explosive in what you enable people to do.”
Now that Salibello’s business is up and running, however, she is facing other challenges, including retaining staff. Salibelllo talked about losing a valuable employee because she could not offer her benefits, opportunities for higher education or even a bus pass.
“When we run our businesses, it feels like we are a business of two or three, but as a whole, when we get together we are a business of 4,000-plus,” she said. “Is there a way the government can look at us as a collective of small businesses?”
Pelosi and a representative of the Small Business Administration responded that government values small businesses, as they are the ones that create jobs. Working Solutions has created more than 169 jobs locally and has loaned out more than $2 million, with a 90 percent payback rate, since 1998, members of the organization said.
Pelosi promised to bring the issue up with a congressional committee member.
Josey White, owner of the Front Porch restaurant in Bernal Heights and a graduate of the Women’s Initiative, raised the health care issue. She can’t hire any more people, she said, because if her employee count reaches 20, she will be forced to offer health care to all her employees. Currently she can only afford to offer it to two employees.
White said she doesn’t want to use Healthy San Francisco, a city program aimed at providing health care for uninsured residents, because she would be required to pass the expense on to her customers.
Provisions from the health care overhaul that take effect in 2014 could help her situation, Pelosi said. In the interim, Pelosi promised to find other solutions.
Sharon Medes, the owner of Carmel Blue Baby Steps, suggested a longer maternity leave — currently most paid maternity leaves are no more than a few months — and subsidized child care.
“Child care is expensive,” she said. “We are grateful for what we can get, but we compare it to other places and try to understand why it can’t be better.”
Pelosi agreed, and said that the country needs to have that conversation to make real changes.
“We have to have a drumbeat across America that says that we respect the time the moms take if they want to stay home.”
Throughout the one-and-half hour visit, Pelosi praised the eight women entrepreneurs present and commented that helping small businesses is a conversation she wants to continue.
“Is there anything more optimistic than starting a small business?” she asked. “Maybe getting married, I don’t know.”
Way to go, Nancy!