Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center

Business Hub: Entrepreneurship is a key component of economic empowerment. We leverage local and regional experts and economic development initiatives to facilitate technical support, mentoring, access to capital and know-how for immigrant-led businesses. The Business Hub was created to help immigrants understand, navigate and thrive as an integral part of the Maine business community. We are building programs to support the development and success of new and established immigrant-owned businesses and offer seminars with experts from different business professions, access to co-working space and other IWCs resources, and the opportunity to connect with the others in the business community.

Civic Engagement: While we view civic engagement broadly, we will begin with a strong emphasis on the right to vote. There are currently 36,000 immigrants in Maine eligible or close to eligible to vote -- 25,000 who are already citizens and the 11,000 mentioned above. We will canvas and leverage community partnerships to register voters and get them to the polls. For Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV), we will focus on collective opportunities for early in-person absentee voting through mosques, churches, community associations, and other trusted community hubs. Non-voters will participate in all programming as we build an increasingly prepared and aware pipeline of future voters and civic participants.

iEnglish: English proficiency is an essential gateway to economic opportunity for immigrant workers. Yet access to acquiring these skills is persistently limited by a lack of resources and attention. Increasing investment in adult English instruction-through targeted outreach and digital language literacy -will enhance the human capital of immigrants that could lead to enhanced career opportunities and better outcomes for their families. Through the iEnglish Project, we hope to provide regional business leaders with the opportunity to enhance the economic mobility of their current and future workforce by investing in adult English instruction.