CIELO trains and supports prospective entrepreneurs and is piloting programs that focus on launching childcare and food businesses, including innovative partnerships with local leaders.
When Iosefa Joey Alofaituli walks through the Oak View neighborhood in Huntington Beach, he doesn’t see the so-called “Slater Slums,” as some still call the area. Many associate the high-density community of apartment complexes, which has housed generations of Latino families, with crime and blight. But Alofaituli instead sees a tight-knit community burgeoning with opportunity — one that reminds him of the large extended family he grew up in.
Alofaituli is the executive director and co-founder of CIELO, a grassroots nonprofit that seeks to help Orange County’s more overlooked residents become self-sufficient through entrepreneurship. His own life experiences, including a childhood spent being shuffled between several different households, led him to the role.
“At the core is always understanding your customer, and in our case, it’s understanding our underserved and under-resourced communities of color,” Alofaituli says. “Entrepreneurship is the American dream. It is a proven pathway toward economic mobility. Yet no one is focused on that population.”
Oak View’s relative affordability in a region facing ever-increasing rent prices means that multiple families might share a two-bedroom apartment. The square-mile stretch of squat stucco buildings, just three miles from the beach, also is known for its odor — thanks to its proximity to a huge garbage dump.
But everywhere you look, signs of reinvestment and interest in the area are clear. At Oak View Elementary School, across the street from the dump, swarms of seagulls used to leave countless white deposits on the playground as they circled toward their stinky feast. Thanks to community activists, conditions in the neighborhood came under scrutiny. The dump was enclosed following public outcry, and its owners helped improve the school playground, which also is home to a wildly popular, egalitarian youth soccer league.
Alofaituli — whose work in Oak View dates back prior to CIELO — wants to address the area’s specific issues in ways that are meaningful to its residents. On his visits to Oak View, he might stop to chat with children in cleats or a woman selling blankets in front of her apartment. Alofaituli, who has an infectious smile and an even more infectious enthusiasm for community building, sees Oak View as a microcosm of other such communities throughout the county.
CIELO got its start by helping Oak View residents polish their resumes and get jobs. “That was great because it was empowering, but at the end of the day there was a ceiling, because these weren’t pathways to high-earning or living-wage jobs,” says Alofaituli, who was struck by Oak View’s entrepreneurial spirit during one of his neighborhood walks.
“People are hustling to get by,” he says. “They’re selling tamales in front of the school; they’re selling Avon in their homes; they’re doing yard sales.”
The most visible form of entrepreneurship in Oak View is its assortment of food vendors — one of the small business models CIELO is most focused on. Under a brightly colored rainbow umbrella, a street seller on the neighborhood’s outskirts might offer fruta picada like spears of watermelon and jícama, or cups of icy mangonada. Food trucks like Tacos El Rey sling up lengua tacos and chicharrón. Residents without cars, or who are conscious of high gas prices, shop at produce and tortilla trucks sprinkled along the sun-drenched sidewalks.
Alofaituli identifies as a Southern California native. Born in Hawaii to a Filipina mother and a Samoan father, he moved to the region when he was 3 years old. After his parents divorced, his family lived with several different relatives. Alofaituli attended several schools and learned to adapt quickly to change.
Alofaituli says his constant moves from home to home and his experiences with his large extended family, which includes 50 first cousins, gave him a front-row seat into different types of family dynamics, both positive and negative. “I could see the instability within different homes, and how that manifested into different outcomes. … All of that led to this awareness, I’d say, of different cultures and environments,” he says.
He especially looked up to an uncle and aunt who instilled their values in their children as well as their extended family.
“They created an environment where they had stability and their children were educated,” Alofaituli says. “My auntie and uncle sort of drove home the importance of hard work and education. I was able to see the difference in that path … It’s part of my upbringing, part of my ethos, part of my soul, my culture.”
When Alofaituli’s family finally settled in the South Bay, he threw himself into high school activities. He excelled as a scholar-athlete and was offered a place by the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as defensive captain of his football team and won the Ivy League championship. He attributes much of his leadership ability to the experience.
After college, Alofaituli took corporate jobs in California and New York.
“But after five years, I realized that the money wasn’t fulfilling, even though it allowed me to experience things and contribute to my family,” he says. “I just felt a huge void. So, I went from living in this posh loft apartment in Union Square one month, and then the next month I was living in a wooden shack as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Caribbean.”
Alofaituli’s two-year stint at a blighted Dominican Republic fishing and mining community was one of his most formative.
“It was from that experience of working with poor residents of a small village that I learned what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. He decided to leverage his talents and skills to serve others. But he had to learn an important concept.
“The first year, I failed at a bunch of projects because I went in thinking that I had the answers,” Alofaituli says. All his ideas fell flat because he was trying to tell people what they wanted or needed. “It was my first lesson in community organizing, but also in business … In order for people to buy into any initiative or vision that you have, they have to be part of the process. The solutions and answers shouldn’t come from the top down.”
Where others might have given up, Alofaituli pivoted. The key to his success, he learned, was empathy.
“After being humbled for the first few months, I learned that I had to sit and have coffee with all of the different residents and different generations,” he says. He listened to their strengths, challenges and opportunities, then helped them successfully generate income by creating jewelry using local stone.
When he returned to the United States, Alofaituli realized he wanted to do the same type of work domestically. He and his new mentor, Jack Shaw, the founder of the Oak View Renewal Partnership, examined aspects of the neighborhood such as its public safety, education, housing and employment. This effort, similar to Alofaituli’s Peace Corps experience, blossomed into CIELO.
Over the course of more than five years, they worked with partners to develop and outsource programs and opportunities for the neighborhood, including a mobile health clinic, an after-school youth sports program, and a community policing program. All were tailored to the needs and wants of the community.
“This really flipped the whole nonprofit model upside-down in my mind,” Alofaituli says.
Usually, nonprofits introduce programs as-is, he says, regardless of whether they’re the best fit for a community’s needs. But Alofaituli’s concept was the reverse. “You start with the customers, and you build these products or services for them,” he says.
CIELO trains and supports prospective entrepreneurs and is piloting programs that focus on launching childcare and food businesses, including innovative partnerships with local leaders. In the works are a program to help entrepreneurs secure grants and loans and a web-based platform to match entrepreneurs with volunteer mentors.
In almost six years, CIELO has expanded into the rest of the county and served thousands of people.
Alofaituli can cite endless success stories, including that of Omar and Teresa Ruiz. Omar worked for a wood-finishing company and his wife Teresa cleaned houses. While they were making ends meet, they found they could never get ahead. Omar wanted to start a small business. The couple was referred to CIELO, which helped them learn the ropes of entrepreneurship, including marketing, licensing and permitting. Both eventually were able to leave their jobs to focus on their new wood-finishing venture.
“They didn’t know the first thing about how to start a business, even though they had the desire,” Alofaituli says. “In their words, we were a trusted partner that they could ask these questions to and get help from, and that’s really the embodiment of what we do. We are that trusted business partner to folks who have for a long time been forgotten. We have lots of incubators and accelerators in our county, but largely they’re focused on high-tech or high-growth technology businesses. No one’s really focused on what we call service-based businesses, from childcare to landscaping.”
Alofaituli briefly left CIELO to pursue other opportunities but returned last year.
“Since then, it’s a different climate, nationally and regionally, around this work,” he says. “Minority-owned businesses were important, but they weren’t on the forefront of everyone’s mind. As a result of the pandemic, there’s a lot of people looking specifically at small businesses owned by people of color, because we had this convergence of financial urgency and racial injustice really sort of coming to the forefront.”
Oak View’s renewal continues to pay dividends. Several people who have worked with Alofaituli in the neighborhood have gone on to make a difference in the larger community, including Virginia Clara, who became the community liaison for the Huntington Beach Police Department, and Oscar Rodriguez, a neighborhood activist who first became known for his work with Oak View’s youth soccer league, which was founded by his father.
“There’s this whole generation that is promising,” Alofaituli says. “And they are the future. The future of Orange County is brown.”
