This summer, I am interning at the City of Irvine in Councilmember Tammy Kim's office. One of her priorities is making starting a small business in Irvine easier and more accessible to the general public. Furthermore, she looks to specifically support minority communities living in Irvine as the city has a high population of immigrants. 

My Leadership in Action project, Building Better Business, seeks to combine these two efforts by laying the foundations for a business concierge program for the City of Irvine. Many cities, especially in California, have business concierge programs ranging from online guides and resources to teams of city staff dedicated to assisting small business owners to set up a business in their city. 

The plan for my LiA project is to (1) create a guide to setting up a business in Irvine, (2) create text and graphics that our city clerk can post to the official City of Irvine website, (3) create a one-pager describing the resources available to people looking to start or maintain a business in Irvine, (4) translating all resources into the top spoken languages in Irvine, and (5) writing a memo for Councilmember Kim which will call for the establishment of a new team of staff dedicated to concierge services. 

This first week, I established a group of interns I will be leading as part of my internship. These interns share an interest in business policy and we will be working together to achieve the 5 aforementioned goals in this short 6-week period. I planned weekly team meetings for us and we discussed the best ways to divide the work and implement all of these large policies in a short period of time.

Second, I put out a call for staff members who speak foreign languages and would be willing to contribute their time to translating the aforementioned documents. I did this early-on, before we had any documents to translate, as I assumed it would be difficult to gather a large, diverse team of foreign language speakers. So far, I have three volunteers who speak Korean, Cantonese, and Spanish. 

This week helped me realize how many moving parts are going to be a part of this project. I will work to stay organized via spreadsheets and communicate with my team via several different channels, including email, Slack, in-person, and text messages to ensure that we will be able to move efficiently and coherently as a team. Overall, I'm incredibly excited about this project and hope it will make business more accessible to all citizens of Irvine, regardless of their level of education, primary language, or any other factors that could potentially be limiting.