b'FROM THE ARCHIVES tremendous, and she was eager to get started. But she realized that her speciality was in growingPlanting, Nurturing, and Growing coffee, not small business ventures. So she sought out the help of Operation HOPE small business One Dream at a Time coach Julisette from HOPE Inside Banco Popular Trujillo AltoFajardo Northeast Region, Puerto Rico. Adriana began attending the small business Adriana Rodriguez-Rivera is a nurturer, cultivator, and entrepreneur at heart. This 23-year-old, workshop in June 2021 through a partnership with stay-at-home mom has spent her adult life nurturing everything she comes in contact with andan organization named Regrow, which has a focus has a knack for making it work. She began showing signs of promise as an entrepreneur in college,on agribusiness. Through the training classes,when she would cook plates of Mediterranean food and sell them to her classmates, in street fairs,Adriana and her husband both learned how to and at farmers markets. She did the hard work of balancing earning money to pay for school formally launch and structure a business, find local with focusing on her studies to become an agronomist and saw the fruit of her labor when she resources to help finance and grow the business, graduated with her degree. Armed with both knowledge and passionand technical skills needed to sustain the operation.for plants and helping things grow, she began working for a non-Now, Adriana is poised for success. She has planted profit that worked directly with local coffee farms. While she enjoyedthe seeds of aspiration into the fertile ground of her work and found it extremely meaningful, she decided to pause herpreparation, has watered them with hard work, work and pivot towards nurturing another love in her life: her and is now patiently waiting to see the fruits of her now 8-month-old son. labor. As the agribusiness begins to grow, she has Although Adriana found joy and meaning in being a stay-at-home begun operating a small Mediterranean food kiosk mother, her desire to plant and grow her own business never faded.on the weekends to generate cash flow to help her Now, her focus wasnt just on building a business for herself, but forAdriana businesses grow. Shes excited to use the skills and her family as well. During her time at home, Adriana began visioningRodriguez-Rivera principles shes learned from Julisette and cross- through what potential businesses could look like for her family andand Rafael Moralesapply them to all of her small business dreams.their unique skillsets. Since both she and her husband were trained agronomists who specialized in coffee, she determined that they HOPE Blog: October 15, 2021would be well-suited to grow specialty coffee bushes to sell to Puerto Rican coffee growers. In addition to the coffee plant business,Adriana set her eyes on one of her earlier entrepreneurial endeavorscooking Mediterranean food. She set her sights on opening a restaurant that made the dishes from organic produce that they would growand then sell the surplus. The dreams and plans Adriana had were 18 19'