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Ford Partners With 3M, GE to Make Respirators, Ventilators

by Raul Santa | Mar 24, 2020 | Affiliate News

Ford announced Tuesday that it’s working with 3M and GE Healthcare to produce medical equipment and protective gear for healthcare workers to help address shortages in the fight against the coronavirus.

Healthcare workers around the country have expressed concern about difficulties in attaining enough critical supplies, such as masks, gloves and ventilators, to deal with the influx of patients suffering from the highly contagious virus.

Ford said it will work with 3M to produce a new kind of Powered Air-Purifying Respirator for healthcare workers. A PAPR has a clear mask that fits over the face. Air is drawn in through a tube connected to a pump that filters the air. The PAPR will be made using parts from both Ford and 3M, the automaker said, including fans used in the Ford F-150’s optional ventilated seats.

Ford said it is exploring the possibility of producing the device at one of its Michigan factories. 3M will also make the respirators at its own factory, Ford said.

Ford also announced that it’s working with GE Healthcare to increase production of ventilators, sophisticated air pumps needed by some critically ill coronavirus patients. It is not clear exactly how Ford will help GE to make more ventilators.

‘Working with 3M and GE, we have empowered our teams of engineers and designers to be scrappy and creative to quickly help scale up production of this vital equipment,’ Ford CEO Jim Hackett said in the company’s announcement. ‘We’ve been in regular dialogue with federal, state and local officials to understand the areas of greatest needs.’

The automaker also said it will work with the United Auto Workers Union to assemble clear plastic face shields that protect people from possibly infectious bodily fluids. The Ford-designed masks are being tested at Detroit-area hospitals. They could be used by healthcare workers, but also others, such as store clerks, who must regularly deal with the public.

Ford is also using 3D printers at its Advanced Manufacturing Center to create disposable air-filtering respirator masks. Once approved, Ford said, the company could initially 1,000 masks per month but hopes to increase production as quickly as possible.

Other major US automakers have also made similar announcements.

General Motors said last Friday that it was going to work with Ventec Life Systems to help increase its production of ventilators for hospital patients. On Monday, the two companies announced that Ventec ‘is now planning exponentially higher ventilator production as fast as possible’ as a result of the partnership.

GM said it is also looking into producing the devices at its Kokomo, Indiana, electronics assembly plant.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also said on Twitter that his company .

Last Saturday he tweeted that he had had ‘a long engineering discussion with Medtronic about state-of-the-art ventilators.’

Medtronic confirmed that it has had discussions with Musk.

Musk has not given any specific timetable for producing ventilators, though, and did not say what his companies and Medtronic might do together. Tesla spokespeople did not respond to requests for more information.

‘Medtronic will work with Tesla and others to try and solve this ventilator supply challenge,’ a Medtronic spokeperson told CNN Business in an email. The company also did not provide any information about how Musk’s companies could help in the production of more ventilators.

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters that Musk had donated 1,000 ventilators. Musk Tweeted later that those,

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles also announced Monday it would produce as many as 1 million protective face masks a week that it would donate to hospitals, police and emergency personnel dealing with coronavirus patients.

All four automakers announced last week that they would temporarily of cars and SUVs at their US factories in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.

Congratulations Raul Font from the Latino Community Development Agency

by Raul Santa | Feb 18, 2020 | Affiliate News

OKLAHOMA CITY –��The Journal Record��has released its list of the 2020 Oklahoma’s Most Admired CEOs & Financial Stewardship Award honorees.

The 24 Most Admired CEO honorees, as well as four financial stewardship award honorees, will be recognized April 27 at��The Journal Record’s 11th annual Oklahoma’s Most Admired CEOs & Financial Stewardship Awards event at the Skirvin Hilton Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City.

CEOs and CFOs will be recognized in three categories – public company, private company and nonprofit. An overall winner will be selected from each category and announced at this year’s event.��Four of this year’s honorees��will be inducted into the program’s Chain of Distinction, an honor reserved for three-time honorees. Those include��Stacy Eads, Vahid Farzaneh, Sean Kouplen and��Brad Poarch.

For the third year in a row, a Legacy Award will also be presented at the event to honor a president, CEO, chairperson or other prominent leader in business. The award recognizes lifetime achievement in leadership and honors individuals who are leaving a legacy through their work in Oklahoma.

All honorees will be profiled in a keepsake magazine that will serve as the program for the event and inserted into��The Journal Record��on April 28.

“It’s important we celebrate the achievements and outstanding leadership of the state’s leading CEOs,” said Russell Ray, editor of��The Journal Record. “In addition to being captains of our most important industries, they are leaders in the state’s philanthropic efforts and architects of economic development.”

This year’s event partners are Cox Business and UMB Bank. Cigna is the video partner.

What follows is a list of the 2020 CEO honorees.

Brenda Jones Barwick, Jones PR��

• Derek Blackshare, Blackshare Environmental Solutions
• Kyle Brownlee, Wymer Brownlee Wealth Strategies
• Richard Cook, Claims Management Resources
• Amy Downs, Allegiance Credit Union
• Stacy Eads Stacy, Eads LLC
• Vahid Farzaneh, Freestyle Creative
• Raul Font, Latino Community Development Agency
• Leigh Goodson, Tulsa Community College
• Dee Hays, Excellence Engineering LLC
• Lindsay Jordan, Write On Fundraising
• Sean Kouplen, Regent Bank
• Kitt Letcher, Better Business Bureau of Central Oklahoma
• Jennifer Lickteig, TBS Factoring
• John Lindsay, Helmerich & Payne
• Susan Lobsinger, Lobdock Impairment Detection
• Donna Miller, Purse Power Inc.
• David Nimmo, Chickasaw Nation Industries
• Brad Poarch, Cory’s AV
• Timila Rother, Crowe & Dunlevy
• Richie Splitt, Norman Regional Health System
• Pamela Timmons, Good Shepherd Clinic
• Matt Williamson, Clevyr Inc.
• Brian Wilson, Innovative Capital Management

The CFOs to be honored this year include:

• John Hart, Continental Resources
• Jeff Hendrix, 180 Medical
• Ken Hopkins, Norman Regional Health System
• Steve Lobsinger, Lobdock Impairment Detection

Welcome to the SER Family, Esperanza Inc.

by Raul Santa | Feb 13, 2020 | Affiliate News

Esperanza, Inc. (meaning “hope”), began in the early 1980s as a community project to improve the educational opportunities for Hispanics by motivating and recognizing academic achievement through scholarships. As Ohio’s only nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion and advancement of Hispanic educational achievement, its founders recognized the need to expand the services by adding programs to address more of the educational needs of the community. Esperanza awarded its first college scholarship in 1983. Since awarding just one college scholarship that first year, Esperanza has grown steadily to where it is now able to award over 100 college scholarships every year through the support of corporations, foundations, and individual donors.

Tejano Center for Community Concerns

by Raul Santa | Feb 13, 2020 | Affiliate News

Mission

The mission of the Tejano Center for Community Concerns is to develop education, social, health, and community institutions that empower families to transform their lives.

Vision

The Tejano Center for Community Concerns will continuously strive to be the premier nonprofit organization in the state of Texas.

History

The Tejano Center for Community Concerns (Tejano Center) was established in 1992 on Houston’s East End, a predominantly Hispanic populated area. By serving as an agent for change that empowered neighborhood residents, the Tejano Center’s goal was to improve lives and create a sustained network of support and opportunity within the community.

The early Tejano Center pioneers realized that the way to respond to community needs was to provide a comprehensive array of social, educational, economic, and housing services. Since its beginnings, the Tejano Center’s programs and services have progressively expanded in large part through strategic partnerships with such entities as the City of Houston, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Texas Education Agency, Baylor College of Medicine, the Harris County Juvenile Probation Office, and the National Council of La Raza. In 2002, becoming aware of similar needs in the greater Brownsville, Texas area, the Tejano Center expanded its programs into that South Texas area by adding a fourth campus to its Raul Yzaguirre Schools for Success.

An Immigrant Founder Uses Food to Lift Up Her Latino Community

by Raul Santa | Sep 19, 2019 | Affiliate News

Paty Funegra of La Cocina VA has raised $2 million to turn her community kitchen into an incubator, a café and a place of hope for struggling immigrants.

By Collen DeBiase – The Story Exchange

It’s a big moment: Paty Funegra is getting ready to����her kitchen out of the basement.

Funegra is the founder of��, a����that helps unemployed Latino immigrants find jobs in the food industry by teaching them����and language skills. For the past five years, she has run the culinary-training organization from the lower floor of Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington, Virgina. But now, she’s ready to scale — and recently raised $2 million to open the Zero Barriers Training & Entrepreneurship Center, which will include a state-of-the-art kitchen incubator, a community cafe, and, she hopes, the promise of a successful future for newly arrived immigrants.

An immigrant herself, the Peruvian-born Funegra says she feels it’s her responsibility to help the vulnerable — especially now. In the wake of the El Paso shootings, and amid anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, “we see a lot of fear in our communities,” she says.

“My position is to hands-on jump in and do something about it. Don’t fight back that rhetoric with words but with actions.”

Learning the Best Approach

It took Funegra a while to figure out how to best help immigrants.

She grew up in Lima during a turbulent time of violence, poverty and narcotics trafficking. In 2007, she moved to the U.S. after falling in love with an American (the relationship didn’t work out) and eventually took a job with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. While the bank finances economic development projects in Latin America, Funegra felt disconnected, being so far away. “I was never able to experience how families in Nicaragua, or in Brazil, or back in Peru, were being the beneficiaries of these investments,” she says. “So I started looking around, here in the D.C. region, for opportunities to get involved with my Latino community.”

Funegra became a volunteer at DC Central Kitchen, a 30-year-old community kitchen that helps unemployed adults learn restaurant-industry skills while also donating the meals that they cook to the homeless or hungry. “So I went there to chop carrots and onions,” she recalls, noticing that the kitchen mostly served the African-American community. That was her “a-ha” moment. She asked Executive Director Michael Curtin if she could replicate the community kitchen idea, but this time serving Latinos. “Mike was very generous, accepting right away,” she says with a laugh, but “he didn’t realize that I was serious about it.”

Not only was she serious, Funegra launched La Cocina VA a short six months later, while still working full-time. “I didn’t have $5,000 back then” to hire a lawyer, she says, so she took online courses on��. Then she needed to raise more money and find partners. “I remember I was skipping lunches and breakfast at work, just to go and knock on different doors.”

The missing piece — and it was a big one — was an inexpensive kitchen for hands-on preparation, plus classrooms for English classes. Fortunately, Funegra knocked on the door of Mount Olivet, which took an interest in her idea and donated the use of its basement. “This has been an amazing partner,” Funegra says. She quit her day job, drained her savings to print her first promotional materials, and began her new career.

Changing Lives Through Food

Since 2014, over 120 students have taken part in the fully-funded 16-week bilingual training program, in which they take classes on food prep, nutrition, sanitation and kitchen vocabulary. Graduates receive certification through Northern Virginia Community College. Some 85% have found jobs in the industry, and graduates’ average hourly wage is $14 per hour, nearly double the state’s minimum wage of $7.25, according to La Cocina’s 2018 annual report.

Funegra has signed up a number of corporate partners, including food giant Nestlé. “La Cocina VA is providing students the skills they need to succeed in a huge and important sector of the economy: food,” the company said��. With some 1.46 million people in the U.S.����in the food and beverage industry, Nestle added that it’s “thrilled to connect with trained talent.” Other partners include Hilton and Whole Foods.

Funegra says the majority of students are women immigrants from Central and South America, and many have been victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking. With La Cocina VA graduates now holding down jobs and making a collective $2.6 million in salaries, she hopes their success inspires other immigrants “to look at the future with hope and with light.”

The new center, which is scheduled to open this coming March, would triple the program’s current capacity, allowing 120 trainees to graduate each year. It will be located on the first floor of an affordable housing complex. The cafe is expected to generate revenue for La Cocina VA, while the incubator would help aspiring food entrepreneurs test out ideas. “We have dreamers that are dreaming about starting businesses, especially women from the Latino community,” Funegra says. “I am immensely proud that now, in the very near future, we will be able to support them to … create jobs and to contribute to the economy.”

Funegra believes her own experience as an immigrant has fueled La Cocina VA’s growth.�� “All those moments of challenges and obstacles, and barriers, and lack of clarity of the future, built the skills that I have now,” she says.