Saipan Rotary, CNMI SBDCN agree to team up to boost entrepreneurship

The Rotary Club of Saipan has joined the CNMI Small Business Development Center Network at the Northern Marianas College as the network’s newest community partner, with a memorandum of understanding signing at the Crowne Plaza Resort Saipan in Garapan last Tuesday.

With the same mission and goal to further develop the CNMI economy, both CNMI SBDCN and the Rotary Club of Saipan will be working together in the upcoming year—and through the MOU partnership agreement—to co-sponsor business development seminars and assist each other with the marketing of co-sponsored training events, and to provide the clientele of either organization information about the other.

With Rotary Club of Saipan referring clients and other small businesses in need of a business startup or expansion counselling to SBDCN, SBDCN, in turn, will provide clients referred by the Rotary with free confidential one-on-one start and expansion business counselling services and load packaging services.

Northern Marianas College president Dr. Galvin Deleon Guerrero, and SBDCN associate director Mercilynn Kaneshi Palec, and outreach specialist Roman Tudela were the event’s guests and speakers at last Tuesday’s meeting, with Tudela and Palec sharing with Rotarians the many services SBDC provides for entrepreneurs and businessowners.

Tudela said the CNMI’s SBDCN gives business-related assistance and knowledge to all entrepreneurs to help them start, run, and grow their business. He said it has a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration and the NMC.

“It is really deeply rooted in our commitment as an institution to ensure that the people for the Northern Marianas work toward improving the economy through entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency [because] sometimes there’s this misperception that folks in the Pacific islands just rely on handouts, and that’s just not true. …Many of our ancestors were farmers and our fishermen were navigators, and when you look at how we as a set of islands have survived wars and typhoons and economic turbulence, the only way we get through it is by coming together—and many of the values of the Saipan Rotary Club and Rotarians [we] share. And so for us to have our own network for the Small Business Development Center is more proof of the college’s commitment to rebuilding the economy one entrepreneur at a time,” said Deleon Guerrero, who was the Saipan Rotary Club’s Citizen of the Year in 2018.

SBDCN provides business counseling, business education in training, and technical assistance in developing information tools that support startups and existing business expansion.