Opening Doors

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"Before, you go to clean, and people see you like, 'OK, she's my cleaner, poor you; you are doing cleaning,'" says Gutierrez of some of her clients' attitudes. "Now you are not like 'poor you,' " she says. "Now, they see you're more motivated -- that you believe in your business."

When it comes to insight on reaching the often elusive American Dream, there are likely few better positioned than Rojas, 58. Before joining Opening Doors, she started and sold three businesses -- a restaurant, a cigar store and a bridal shop. "I came here with no money, no English," says the Colombian native of arriving in this country in 1978 with her husband and two daughters. Now she boasts of a home in "the good part of town" and professional jobs for her grown children, as well as plenty of hands-on experience to guide her clients.

The nonprofit itself, in an unassuming Midtown Sacramento building, has a staff of six full-time workers and a handful of part-time and on-call employees, many of them bilingual in Spanish, Hmong or Russian, the languages of the area's main immigrant groups. An internship program with UC Davis also brings in a crew of students, mostly from the school's department of economics.

Opening Doors receives some 90 percent of its funding from federal sources and the rest from grants and donations. Some of that money comes from churches, although Rojas says the organization isn't affiliated with any particular religion. The nonprofit works with an annual budget of just over $1 million; much of that money is used for loans and assistance to refugees.  Mostly, however, it works with banks, credit unions and organizations like the Small Business Administration to package and facilitate the bulk of its loans, often provided through special programs immigrants wouldn't necessarily know about.

Originally started in the early '90s as a service to refugees (work it still does) by Maurine Huang, an anthropologist by training, the nonprofit began through her work within other aid organizations, most recently the Interfaith Service Bureau. "Despite its name, they (Interfaith Service staff) do not focus on providing direct service," says Huang, 62. "As we saw ourselves going more in that direction, we split off in 2003 to become independent," she explains, sipping from a mug emblazoned with the phrase "Some Leaders Are Born Women."

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