Three Afghan refugees who have settled and opened businesses in St. Louis won $15,000 entrepreneurship grants from the International Institute of St. Louis' Afghan outreach program, a project spearheaded by Schlichter Bogard law firm partner Jerry Schlichter.
"As a whole St. Louis community, we need to build our population, which has been in decline. We need to diversify our people. We have a smaller number of foreign-born people here than in most of our cities. And you coming here is an economic opportunity for us," Schlichter said at a ceremony for the winners Friday.
Winners are chosen after submitting business plans and participating in a pitch meeting; they have to be Afghans who moved to the United States after August 2021 and want to start a business in a field in which they have experience.
Freshta Zary, a former school principal in Afghanistan, started the Zeeb Cloth clothing brand in St. Louis for men, women and children, is the first woman to win the grant competition, now in its fourth round since 2022. She likes St. Louis for its low cost of living and doing business compared to others.
Besides clothes, Zary also sells jewelry and sandals. She's selling out of her home and online but would like to open a brick-and-mortar store. She said there is strong local demand for her merchandise and that she is running a 30% profit margin.
Grant winner Khalid Naseeri, who spent more than 10 years working as an electrician with the U.S. Army before emigrating in 2021, founded his own company, Smart Electric, in St. Louis after working with a local electric contractor, Ground Electric, where he learned the distinctions between voltage and wiring in the U.S. and Afghanistan.
"My boss is a master electrician; he taught me from zero," Naseeri said of his work at Ground Electric. "I got some lessons online. I pushed myself to learn. I got a code book, and I learned (building) codes."
And Ferdous Sakhiza won a grant for the landscaping businesses he launched in St. Louis after doing landscaping for more than 13 years in Afghanistan. He also formerly worked for Galaxy Maintenance in Valley Park, where he became a supervisor before starting his own business, which now subcontracts for them.
"We had a nice life back home, but one night we lost everything: our residence, our house, our family. In 2021, we lost everything, and we came here and started a new life," Sakhiza said.
Sakhiza plans to use the money to buy equipment and to hire another new employee on top of the two he currently has on staff, which will help him keep the landscaping business open over the lean winter months through offering snow-removal services. Over the next three months, he said he's aiming to hire five more people.
Around 100,000 Afghan refugees have settled in the United States, many of whom came after the 2021 Taliban offensive ended the U.S.'s 20-year war in that country. Nineteen thousand have settled in the Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, California, metropolitan areas, alongside 13,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 8,000 in Greater Los Angeles and 7,000 in the New York metropolitan area, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The International Institute of St. Louis has settled around 1,200 in and around St. Louis.
The Afghan Support Program is raising funds to double the grant amount to $30,000 for the next round of entrepreneurs.
"A lot of immigrants start businesses, but you need a foundation to do that," Schlichter said. "That's what these grants provide. We wanted to be able to say that, from the beginning, you can build lives here and start businesses."
Schlichter said International Institute-sponsored things like the Afghan Chamber of Commerce, the Afghan Community Center, an affordable housing fund for refugees and The Afghan Journal newspaper, which published its 19th issue this month in Pashto, Dari and English, are the cornerstones around the strategy of building the community up in St. Louis.
"The one objective I had in doing this was to work with the International Institute to develop a program where we could say to anybody in America: come to St. Louis, make your home here, build your lives here — and in your case, building businesses here, too — because we're going to be here for you in a way no other city is."
Most of the refugee settlement has been in the South Grand neighborhood, where the community and economic centers are. Moji Sidiqi, the International Institute's director for multicultural affairs and Afghan outreach, said the goal is to build up the community in the city of St. Louis itself. The mayor's office established an Office of New Americans a year ago, and Sidiqi said having a central advocate for immigrant and refugee entrepreneurship is helpful.
Sidiqi's team at the International Institute has also gone to 17 cities to promote St. Louis to refugees, and Sidiqi said word of mouth is spreading.
"Unless you know someone, like a relative, family or a friend, who lives in a particular city and they're encouraging you to move into that region, you usually get planted, or the state decides where you go, depending on the capacity of each resettlement agency," Sidiqi said of refugees.
"We have had over 400 people choose to move to the region that have come into our doors," she said, not counting others who moved here but have not connected with the International Institute.
