What began as an effort to help Summit County residents navigate their taxes has grown into a broader initiative to support local Latino entrepreneurs.
Mountain Dreamers launched its first Café y Emprendimiento in August, inviting business owners to exchange ideas, raise challenges and connect with organizations with resources for starting or expanding a business.
The series kicked off Aug. 20 with around 45 attendees, according to Mountain Dreamers’ Yerania Reynoso, who has spent years helping Hispanic residents navigate taxes and business affairs. Reynoso said she hopes the gatherings will foster relationships between entrepreneurs and connect them with local governments and organizations that can provide guidance on everything from business licenses to financing and marketing.
“They have businesses, but at the end of the day, maybe the infrastructure, maybe the loans, maybe how to grow, how to open another place, it’s the issue,” Reynoso said.
Café y Emprendimiento grew out of Mountain Dreamers’ efforts to provide free tax preparation services to Summit County residents. Around three years ago, Reynoso said she partnered with the Denver Asset Building Coalition to receive training in tax assistance. The program served about 70 people in its first year, Reynoso said, and doubled that total the following year.
Through that work, Reynoso encountered many residents who were filing taxes for the first time, including independent contractors working in industries such as cleaning and construction. Some were surprised to learn how much they owed in taxes because their employers had not withheld income taxes from their pay.
As she coached residents through those obligations, Reynoso also began offering guidance on establishing businesses, obtaining licenses and connecting with municipal governments.
More recently, Reynoso noticed that Latino-owned businesses weren’t represented among recipients of business grants offered by the town of Silverthorne. That observation inspired her to pursue stronger connections between entrepreneurs and local institutions.
For prospective business owners, Reynoso said, even understanding the steps required to get started can be challenging. Municipal applications and regulations can sometimes be confusing, and requirements vary between towns. For example, Reynoso said, some towns limit food truck leases to 180 days, which can create uncertainty for entrepreneurs hoping to rely on those businesses for year-round income.
Through the new events, Reynoso hopes to help participants navigate those requirements and eventually offer training in areas such as finance, marketing and human resources. The nonprofit is also working to strengthen relationships with municipal governments and the Summit Chamber of Commerce.
Expanding resources through the Chamber
Summit Chamber of Commerce executive director Cheri Ryan said the new series presents an opportunity to expand the chamber’s reach and make its existing business resources more accessible.
The chamber launched a business education series this year and already provides information on starting businesses in Summit County, financial resources and connections to the Small Business Development Center.
Ryan acknowledged the organization has room to improve its communication with the Spanish-speaking community.
“I will say that an area the chamber can improve on is to make our resources bilingual,” Ryan said.
She said financial constraints and the cost of translation services have posed challenges, but she hopes collaborating with Mountain Dreamers will allow the chamber to better grasp any gaps in their resources.
“Mountain Dreamers is really important because they already have a lot of the relationships and trust within parts of the community that the chamber may not be currently reaching,” Ryan said.
Ryan said the chamber could eventually organize a business “boot camp” or bring educational programming into the Café y Emprendimiento meetings. For now, she said she looks forward to listening to participants.
“It’s not beneficial for us to try and do anything unless we really, truly know what their needs are and how we can best support them,” she said.
Finding community beyond the workplace
Longtime Summit County restaurant owner Joyce de la Torre knows firsthand how the demands of running a business can leave little time to build relationships outside the workplace.
In the beginning, she said, “It was a lot of learning as you go.”
De la Torre and her husband, Michal Ulehla, own Bagalis, Bread and Salt and the Old Dillon Inn. The couple took over Bagalis around 2010 after previously working at the restaurant and later expanded into other ventures.
Building those restaurants involved plenty of trial and error, de la Torre said, but she described Summit County as a welcoming and ideal place to operate a business.
“I’m telling you, Summit County is great,” de la Torre said. “Every time I have a question or something I need, they’re more than willing to help.”
Despite spending years in the industry, de la Torre said she hasn’t developed many relationships with other Latino business owners.
“To tell you the truth, maybe not too much. We get embedded in trying to do our own thing and it’s so time-consuming,” she said.
As both owners and operators, de la Torre and her husband spend much of their time managing the day-to-day demands of their restaurants, leaving fewer opportunities to connect with others outside of work.
“With me living in my world working and stuff, I had no idea Hispanic people owned businesses here in Summit,” she said.
De la Torre said she regularly directs people seeking business advice or assistance to Mountain Dreamers. She said the Café y Emprendimiento series could help entrepreneurs develop relationships that might otherwise be difficult to establish.
For owners and longtime county workers accustomed to handling those challenges largely on their own, she said, the Mountain Dreamers meetings present a well-earned opportunity to learn from others in similar situations.
“They’re (Mountain Dreamers) trying to make us connect with the community and come together to talk about issues and problems and how to help,” de la Torre said.
The next Café y Emprendimiento meeting will be held at Fritangas in Frisco Wednesday, Oct. 21, from 1-3 p.m. Attendees must be entrepreneurs or have an established business in Summit County. Representatives from the county and the town of Silverthorne will be the guest speakers.
