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 Two years ago, a town hall that created a welcoming space for tenants in the District of Columbia to come together to talk about tenant rights and the preservation of affordable housing in their neighborhoods served as the birthplace of a tenant-led campaign to improve housing conditions in the District.
Now, two years later, the 3rd Annual Citywide Tenant Town Hall on July 31st at the First Trinity Church will offer tenants the opportunity to celebrate the successes of their advocacy while creating a dynamic forum for their work to now hold public officials and policymakers accountable to their new commitments to ensure quality, affordable housing in the District.
“Through their testimony before the City Council, judges, and the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), tenants have secured improvements that finally give them the ability to protect their quality of life in this city,” says LEDC Affordable Housing Preservation Director Farah Fosse.
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 In honor of National Small Business Week in late May, LEDC and the Washington region’s first worker-owned daycare cooperative Semillitas was featured in a PBS documentary on Latina entrepreneurs.
PBS’ To The Contrary with Bonnie Erbe, the only woman-owned news analysis program on national television, interviewed LEDC staff and two women from Semillitas, a business cooperative made up of seven Latina women who have an education background and extensive experience working with children. Semillitas has worked closely with LEDC’s small business development program to formalize their business cooperative, a business model designed to help groups of individuals to share the risks and benefits of business ownership. LEDC and Semillitas have worked together to develop facilitation skills, learn how to refine their decision-making processes toward consensus, understand principles of cooperative financial management, as well as consider the implications of different legal structures for their business moving forward. |
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 As the debate over comprehensive immigration reform resurges, the Latino Economic Development Corporation is organizing small business leaders calling for rapid reform of the U.S.'s broken immigration system.
LEDC is working with numerous small businesses in the DC metro area that support the economic case for comprehensive immigration reform. One of our champions is Nizam Ali, co-owner of Ben's Chili Bowl. Read Nizam's testimony and see a growing list of businesses in the DC metro area that support comprehensive immigration reform! Immigrant small business owners are creating jobs, stimulating the economy, and have become a part of the fabric of our national and local business communities. Small businesses in the DC metro area, whether immigrant or non-immigrant, are sustained by the purchases of immigrants and through the immigrant workforce. The legalization of undocumented immigrants through comprehensive immigration reform would create jobs, raise wages, and generate at least $1.5 trillion in additional gross domestic product over 10 years - helping our economy recover. |
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