Kansas City women already face barriers opening businesses. Banks shouldn’t be another | Opinion

Sweet Peachers Cobblers started as Denisha Jones’ attempt to guess her grandmother’s cobbler recipe. After figuring out the missing ingredient and getting a shout-out on Facebook after a family dinner, more people wanted to taste it for themselves.

But because of a lack of finances, Jones initially took only small steps to grow her business, which sells the desserts in grocery stores nationwide.

In 2022, she won a grant through Kansas City G.I.F.T. — Generating Income For Tomorrow, a program that provides financial assistance to Black-owned businesses. Along with the $25,000, she received support for creating a business plan, refining elevator pitches and working with an accountant.

Because of that help, Jones said she was able to know how to educate herself on her business and present ideas to investors.

Schools should require not only personal finance classes, but entrepreneurial skills like these to encourage students to develop ideas and know how to pursue them.

“In the beginning, I invested almost 50 grand myself, and I maxed out all of my credit cards,” Jones said. “I didn’t realize it was gonna come back to bite me.”

Banks were hesitant to work with her because of the lack of credit, something she didn’t know would be a problem.

UnitedWe, a local nonprofit championing women’s leadership, released a report from a focus group of 10 entrepreneurs. They found common barriers among them: bias, securing capital and accessing credit from banks.

Jones is not alone in her confusion of the banking system. We should be preparing our high school students to face the banking system.

On Tuesday, I attended an event where Kansas City-area entrepreneurs celebrated their success with UnitedWe and Takes Heart, an organization to bring women-owned businesses to the community. I spoke with the women about some of their biggest challenges: money and banks.

“There were terms I genuinely did not understand,” Allie Lohman, co-founder of local nonprofit All For Moms Foundation, told me.

She wrestled between paying someone to help her learn about funding or saving it for her nonprofit.

“How do you balance between $120 an hour to educate me, or do you save that for your community?” she said.

Lohman’s organization aids mothers and their families by resetting their homes and cleaning clutter. But having taken one accounting class in college, she didn’t know how to navigate the requirements for nonprofits to apply for grants.

Neelima Parasker, the founder of SnapIT Solutions which creates learning and employment opportunities in the information technology field, said she would have benefited from more knowledge of funding from banks. Initially, Parasker’s clients helped her — sending early payments and continuing to use the service during COVID-19 — when she wasn’t getting funding from banks. She fronted her own money too, like many other entrepreneurs, because she didn’t know how banks could assist her.

“What I came to know later is, the banks should have funded us, normally for other businesses, they are funding,” Parasker said.

Gender and racial biases are already barriers against women starting businesses. Their knowledge of banking and finance issues should not be another.

In 2022, entrepreneurs and small businesses generated 66% of all new jobs in Kansas city, with an upward trend from recent years.

It’s not news that entrepreneurs help drive our economy. So we need to provide our current students with the skills to navigate some of the challenges with starting a business.

Surprisingly, there are differences in how Missouri and Kansas approach K-12 financial education.

According to the American Public Education Foundations Report Card, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education gets an A grade on financial literacy education. Kansas received a C.

Kansas plans to implement a one-semester financial literacy graduation requirement starting with this year’s high school freshman, something Missouri has had since 2018.

The required class is set to cover income, spending, saving, investing, managing credit and risk, similar to Missouri.

But both states should include entrepreneurship in the curriculum. Entrepreneurs, especially women, experience barriers in attaining capital and support for their businesses, and would benefit from education on what they need to be successful.

Knowing how to create a business plan and a pitch are important skills that will support the success of not only our future entrepreneurs, but all students.