Our Purpose

This project is part of King County Communities of Opportunity's grant project that looked at the resilience of the Pueblo's Originarios Coalition during the pandemic. After 78 interviews, representing 3 different communities, this project was created in response to the Kichwa-Otavalo Community. The Kichwa-Otavalo Community primarily consists of small business owners who travel to fairs to sell their products or play traditional Andean music at festivals. While this community are experts with the work they do in person, the pandemic highlighted a tech skill gap on the integration of technology into their work.

Furthermore, the integration of e-commerce with the Metaverse highlights the skill gap needed to stay profitable in the open market of today. The question that remains is, how will small businesses that cannot afford to participate in such spaces be affected? More specifically, immigrant parents that focused on surviving and did not have the time or tools to gain the relevant technical knowledge.

There is a lot of information about e-commerce online and loads of website builders. However, there lies the problem, there are too many options. For this generation using a search engine is second nature. However, after a years work with different BIPOC communities, it has become clear that gathering resources online is not easy for everyone and most business owners have a limited amount of time already. To start addressing this, this project focuses on making it easier for the Kichwa community and BIPOC business owners alike to expand their business onto an online platform, by creating an easy to navigate hub spot where e-commerce related information is accessible in Spanish & English.