Our goal is to increase housing, business, wealth, and employment opportunities. We provide lending for housing, business-start-up, acquisitions, or expansion. P-Solutions train and cultivate entrepreneurs from the pool of unemployed, and assist trained entrepreneurs and small businesses to build and invest in businesses providing and preserving jobs and other economic gains to the economically disadvantaged individuals and families and distressed communities.
Vetpreneurship & Civic Entrepreneurship: P-Solutions’ Entrepreneurship is a five year program in which volunteer community business owners become mentors to and help train veterans and civic entrepreneurs, helping them form companies, cooperatives and partnerships, obtain finance to start, and build or acquire businesses or assets. This program equips veterans and civic entrepreneurs – with needed technical expertise and business savvy needed to run a business – through our six-week small-business incubator booth-camp. After an entrepreneur has graduated and owned their businesses, P-Solutions usually continue to walk alongside the entrepreneurs providing necessary expertise in form of business development, business planning, finance & accounting, capital, and operation logistics until the sixtieth month of the relationship, which is usually the end of amortization for our secured start-up or acquisition loans.
Employee-Owner Program: P-Solutions’ employees-empowerment loan program helps groups of trained employees, usually graduates of our Veteran and Civic Entrepreneurship program, to partner with collaborating Private Equity firm, to buyout retiring owners of small and mid-size businesses in distressed communities. This program uses our Knit-Partnership loan that is secured by assets of businesses acquired. This attached-business-loan is structured to include a mandatory provision of technical assistance to the business-borrowers. Our business lending is tied to long-term relationship with borrowers in the form of financial education, business management training, and ongoing technical support and assistance.
Business Lending: Our non-traditional financing tool is different from the other financing mechanisms currently available to the communities because of its utilization of a proprietary underwriting criteria and platform that assign value to (1) acquired/retained entrepreneurial skills, (2) the business-assets, and (3) viability of business plan. This model is needed in our community because it has been almost impossible for families of average means and civic entrepreneurs living in our target communities to access credit because of unfavorable credit profile or the traditional lending institutions’ discomfort about lending to small businesses in these communities. Residents of these communities are without adequate access to credit due to factors that cumulatively exclude them from the credit system.
USDA Programs: P-Solutions’ Southern California Urban Rural Food Network (SCURN) generates opportunities and resource for farm workers and aspiring farmers to grow and sell crops from across the counties. SCURN contributes to a sustainable food system through the development of: 1) tomorrow’s farmers and sustainable agriculture leaders; 2) growing marketing alternatives for small-scale, limited-resource farmers; and 3) enhancing biological diversity and protection of natural resources – components of the food system. Through SCURN, P-Solutions and its partners, fight obesity among residents of low-income communities by facilitating fresh-produce farmers’ market in “food-desert” communities through linking rural farmers with urban food systems. Apart from providing households access to healthy food, SCURN also provide developmental, training, and technical services that is comprehensive, culturally and linguistically appropriate for the disadvantaged and limited-resource farmers and farm-workers. The technical assistance provided by SCURN includes training and mentoring in cooperative development, business management, financial management, marketing, application and bidding procedures.