Stix: A friend of mine at one of my climate justice partners referred the ThinkWatts Foundation to Mastercard and after a few conversations, we realized we were really aligned with wanting to help small businesses, especially in underserved communities.

Our first collaboration was a community breakfast and I invited 30-40 small businesses from Watts, California to meet with Mastercard executives. They spoke to the business owners about their needs and identified resources they would need to have positive outcomes as they grew their businesses. It was so successful that we started talking about how we could bring Mastercard’s Digital Doors program to Los Angeles. From that, we created the Business Builder program fueled by the Digital Doors small business curriculum.

We are now into Cohort 2 of the Business Builder Program. Cohort 1 graduated about 25 businesses this past April and an additional 60 businesses on December 16th. Seeing the transformations of these small businesses have been incredible. For example, the Business Builder program provided a business with an updated Square mobile system to make itemized sales and tracking transactions easier, which helped increase sales by 78%.

Stix

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