Three winners of the inaugural Emerge Ethnic Entrepreneurial Business Plan Competition were chosen, recently, from over 200 entrants. Among the winners was Alvina Grosu, an immigrant living in Ireland for the past six years, who in July 2006 founded Culturewise Ireland, a training company that specialises in cultural diversity awareness.

‘This competition has set out to identify and acclaim the new ethnic entrepreneurial role models, across a variety of sectors, who have spawned new ideas, taken risks and who continue to make such a valid contribution to Ireland’s growing innovation culture,’ said Patricia Callan, Chairperson of the Emerge Development Partnership and Director of the Small Firms Association.

Alvina Grosu has a PhD in psychology and a background in university lecturing. She was encouraged by her experience on an Emerge training programme, and decided to exploit her expertise in psychology by setting up Culturewise Ireland. The Cork-based company provides cultural diversity awareness workshops and intercultural competence development training. Alvina’s clients so far have included Bank of Ireland and the HSE.

The other two winners of the Emerge competition were Shree Foods, a provider of ethnic Indian snack food run by Anand Narayanan, and Vonnineth Acob of the Philippines’ childcare centre: the Jolly Bee Kids Kingdom. All three winners go on to represent Ireland at the International XLX entrepreneurial competition held in Prague this month.

Making the announcement of the winners, Patricia Callan noted how successful ethnic entrepreneurs had been with minimal government investment (through Emerge), and how sustained progress will require ‘a commitment by Government, in line with the recommendation in the Small Business Forum Report, to commit to providing mainstream funding from the beginning of 2008, to roll-out the training modules and best practice to potential ethnic minority entrepreneurs in all parts of the country’.

For the past three years, Emerge has worked at promoting ethnic minority entrepreneurship in Ireland. The programme has directly assisted 207 participants who have attended training at pre-enterprise, start-up and growth levels. The organisation is a partnership of enterprise support organisations, public bodies, local development bodies, business representative bodies and a representative of ethnic minority entrepreneurs (Metro Eireann).