Las Vegas skyline with houses

Mission and History

The Mission of the African Development Center is to grow businesses, build wealth, and increase reinvestment for all, especially in the African communities of Nevada.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL: Rights Under Title VI

Our Work

Through workshops and consultations on financial literacy, business development, and home ownership, ADC provides culturally competent services to Nevada’s African community.

 

ADC is a leader in micro-lending to small businesses, outperforming even the largest banking institutions in the state of Minnesota. ADC has been recognized a few times as the number One small business lender of the City of Minneapolis. With the help of 8 dedicated full-time employees, and our Executive and Finance Committees and Board of Trustees, ADC provides services in 6 languages to communities throughout Minnesota.

ADC is dedicated to the economic empowerment and success of African immigrants. Nevada is home to more than one hundred fifty thousand African immigrants, many of whom face language, cultural, and religious barriers. ADC actively works to reduce these barriers and create a path for African immigrants to achieve financial success.

History

Nevada, like the nation, is struggling to deal with the economic pressures and opportunities of immigration. ADC’s role in this big picture is to create answers on the opportunity side. Our work has corroborated studies showing that increasing the rates of self-employment and homeownership among “new Americans” contributes to the revitalization of neglected neighborhoods and links mainstream businesses with the state’s significant ethnic economy.

Africans began to come to Nevada over the past generation as refugees fleeing civil strife in Somalia, Liberia and the Sudan. Other even larger African populations that have recently arrived include Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Eritreans. Nevada offers immigrants an established African population, a strong economy, a good quality of life, educational opportunities, and unskilled jobs that don’t require fluency or literacy in English. 

In an era of budget cuts at every level of government, mainstream community development corporations lack the funds to expand their services to meet the complex needs of African immigrants. 

ADC was created to fill these gaps, and we have achieved spectacular early success. Both in providing services and building capacity, our hard-working staff and diverse board have transformed ADC from a one-person, half-time operation to a highly-networked corporation serving Nevada with innovative financial products and services.