Local Nonprofit Has A Three-Pronged Approach To Creating Jobs In America

As a child, Katia Essyad watched her mother, a Moroccan artisan, weave carpets. Years later, Essyad returned to her roots, opening the Casablanca Market, which sells home goods and accessories handmade by Moroccan artisans like her mom.

Essyad began small, with a tiny shop in California. But as she started connecting with artisans and forming relationships, her vision — and her business — grew. Eventually the shop expanded into an online store where consumers can buy everything from textiles to olive oil to tagines, terracotta vessels used for cooking stews.

Casablanca Market is a job creator, Essyad says, but it is also more than that. “We not only provide jobs for these women and men, but we also preserve the culture and the history of handmade things in Morocco,” Essyad says. “It’s a very old tradition, and what we do is, we advise the production and empower the artisans behind it.”

Essyad bridges the gap between artisans in Morocco and consumers in the U.S. She works to make sure the products meet the demands of customers and the standards — including food safety standards — of the U.S.; Casablanca Market only sells tagines, for example, that are lead-free.

But as her business grew, it got harder for Essyad to run it on her own. Demand was intense, she says, and she needed help organizing operations. That’s when a friend told her about Pacific Community Ventures.

Pacific Community Ventures provides loans to small businesses, matches businesses with advisers, and actively measures the impact they have on underserved communities. When small business owners like Katia Essyad need help, PCV steps in, because they believe brick-and-mortar shops are the future of job creation.

Based in San Francisco, PCV is a nonprofit social enterprise that works with small businesses, often in underserved communities, providing access to capital and mentorship. Its mission is to help the businesses grow and create quality jobs. They’ve won the James Irvine California Leadership Award, among many other local honors. Over the past 17 years, PCV has advised or funded more than 4,000 small businesses; 237 in 2015 alone.

Learn more about the Bay Area’s own award-winning, job creating, community wealth-building nonprofit.

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About WeSeeGenius
WeSeeGenius is a gathering place where people who are unsatisfied with the world seek to make a true meaningful difference with their lives. Named to honor the best of the late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, WeSeeGenius is part of C-Change Media and serves the higher education market. As such, many of our stories will focus on recently graduated students–both undergraduates and graduates–who are using their education to pursue less traditional paths in social entrepreneurship.

About Pacific Community Ventures
Pacific Community Ventures is a nonprofit social enterprise that engages small businesses, investors, and policymakers to build an economy that works for everyone. We provide small businesses with access to the capital and mentorship they need to grow and create quality jobs for working people in low- and middle-income communities. We also work with impact investors to help define, measure, and communicate the social outcomes of their investments to stimulate more investment in underserved communities.

Pacific Community Ventures is a nonprofit social enterprise that engages small businesses, investors, and policymakers to build an economy that works for everyone. We achieve our mission in two ways. First, we provide small businesses with access to the capital and mentorship they need to grow and create quality jobs for working people in low- and middle-income communities. Second, we work with impact investors to help define, measure, and communicate the social outcomes of their investments to stimulate more investment in underserved communities.

51 Federal Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

This release was published on openPR.