‘We are the monkey’: Refugee ex-clients charge WEDI with ‘exploitation’

Forced to work during COVID, then denied space in new $11.5 million building

Harvey Heinrich, left, with mother Than Than Nu Saw and father Maung Maung, who own 007 Chinese Food.

Exploitation. That’s what nine Buffalo Burmese clients call Westminster Economic Development Initiative’s use of their stories, faces, and labor to raise capital for its new West Side Bazaar, then denying them places in its new kitchens.

That’s just one way WEDI systematically exploited Burmese refugees while promising to help them achieve their dream of owning their own business, they said. 

The non-profit issued orders to tenants without discussion and forced them to swallow objections or be ejected from the program. That practice ignored federal guidelines for agencies serving traumatized customers like the refugees WEDI claimed to help. WEDI also spurned help from nationally-known experts in best practices for developing small-business incubators in low-income neighborhoods.

Saying WEDI made money while hurting the people it was supposed to help is a serious charge. Interviewed separately with interpreters, the former clients speaking for this story backed up claims with documents, emails, bank records, and text messages.

They said that before approaching this reporter, they tried to raise these issues and more with WEDI staff, but got nowhere, partly because WEDI had no employee who spoke their language, and rarely used interpretation services.

WEDI, presented detailed questions about their former clients’ allegations, did not answer any. “I will discuss them with the WEDI Board and our attorneys and will be back in touch next week as to what we are able and willing to disclose in response,” wrote Executive Director Carolynn Welch.

A story of three bazaars 

Three small-business incubator bazaars operated by WEDI are central to this story.

The West Side Bazaar was at 25 Grant St. until closed by fire in October 2022. WEDI opened Downtown Bazaar, 617 Main St., in March 2023, and sent fire victims there. The $11.5 million new West Side Bazaar opened in November 2023.

You’ll hear from Harvey Heinrich, son of 007 Chinese Food owners Maung Maung and mother Than Than Nu Saw. His mother and father were forced to work in the 25 Grant St. kitchen during COVID, or be kicked out of the program. Otherwise WEDI’s grant proposals would be weaker, they were told. 

Like the other tenants, 007 stayed at 25 Grant St. for WEDI’s promise of bigger kitchens and bigger crowds at the new building. 

None made it to the promised land.

“WEDI has an office, WEDI has grants, WEDI has the money,” said Heinrich. “You want to use your name, that’s fine. But WEDI used our names, and didn’t give us a penny.

“So basically, we are the monkey. They're like ‘Hey, monkey gonna suffer, give money.’ ”

You’ll hear from Khin San Oo, who started her first restaurant, Ramree Burmese, in the new West Side Bazaar. Her rent was supposed to include security, dishwashing, and adequate cold storage, but it didn’t. She quit after two and a half months. Among other issues, she was fined $50 for not taking out trash — on a day Buffalo was closed by snow. She begged for forgiveness — $50 was more than some day’s profits — but WEDI didn’t give her a break.

And you’ll hear from Htay Naing, who started Nine & Night at 25 Grant St. He mustered limited English whenever WEDI asked him to help coax wealthy donors into shelling out millions for the new building. After the fire, Naing talked to journalists to help raise money for the fire victims. 

Then Naing was kicked out of the program for refusing to move to Downtown Bazaar. He “never got one dollar” for all the help he gave WEDI raising money, he said.

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To understand how WEDI’s management practices compare to national standards, you’ll also hear from experts. Mihailo Temali, founder of Neighborhood Development Center in Minneapolis and the Build From Within Alliance, will explain best practices for growing community-based small business incubators. Plus Steve Tobocman, whose Global Detroit non-profit adopted the Minnesota model a decade ago for its neighborhood revitalization program, will tell you why that model is the best one yet.

To help explain why WEDI’s ex-tenants felt trapped in the system, you’ll hear from Amy Fleischauer. She’s a nationally-known expert at the University at Buffalo’s Institute on Trauma and Trauma-Informed Care who trains organizations serving clients who’ve suffered trauma. Agencies that don’t use trauma-informed care standards can re-traumatize the people they’re supposed to help.

“Very few people, I would imagine, wake up in the morning — especially for nonprofits — thinking, ‘Oh, I'm gonna hurt as many people as I can.’ Right? That's not a thing,” said Fleischauer. “And yet, even if it's unintentional, it can still be hurtful, and that's really what we're trying to help systems reconsider through our work.”

Heinrich celebrating high school graduation with parents in 25 Grant St.

Family who fled Burma felt trapped in West Side Bazaar

Harvey Heinrich was born in a village outside Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Burma’s capital. 

His father Maung Maung was forced into a labor camp at gunpoint, along with thousands of other Burmese minorities used as slave labor by the Burmese government. He escaped and fled to Malaysia, where he found work at a dim sum restaurant in Johor Bahru, a city bordering Singapore.

Since the government would force her to take his place in the camp, Maung’s wife, Than Than Nu Saw, left their village for Yangon, where her mother lived. Heinrich, their only child, was a year old.

For more than a decade, Maung’s only contact with his family in Yangon was by telephone calls placed to the neighborhood phone. For a fee, the phone provider would fetch a family member and get them on the line.

“He might call once in three months, or once in a year. Sometimes he just disappeared,” said Heinrich. “When we reunited our family in 2009, I was already a teenager. I don’t have those memories with my dad.”

At 13, Heinrich met his father, as if for the first time. He’d registered with the UNHCR and was working while the family’s refugee application process continued.

After arriving in Buffalo in 2013, the family moved to Riverside. Maung Maung worked as a dishwasher at the Original Pancake House in Williamsville. His shift ended at 11 p.m., and it took a long time to get home by Metro bus.

So Maung bought a bicycle, because pedaling to the University Station saved time. Without a way to check the schedules, Maung pedaled home to Riverside when he missed buses. Meanwhile, Than Than Nu Saw worked as a hotel cleaner in Niagara Falls, and Heinrich went to International Prep.

When his parents saved enough money to buy a car, life got easier. Then Maung Maung, tired of washing dishes, decided to put his decade of experience making dim sum to use and pursue starting his own restaurant. 

In 2014, his parents started the process of becoming a WEDI tenant. From the beginning, Heinrich thought WEDI could have put more into the relationship. Because no one at the non-profit spoke Burmese, he skipped classes to interpret for his parents when they met then-Executive Director Ben Bissell.

Bissell explained the process of becoming a restaurant owner, listing all the paperwork, licenses, and inspections they would need. Then he sent Heinrich and his parents on their way, leaving them to figure out how to navigate Buffalo City Hall on their own.

“They didn't help with anything,” Heinrich said. It took a year and a half, skipping more classes, to steer his parents’ paperwork through City Hall. (Bissell did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

007 Chinese Food opened in January 2016, with a $10,000 loan from WEDI. Unable to afford a commercial steamer, a handy WEDI volunteer helped Maung build one. Unable to secure a spot underneath the ventilation hoods on the kitchen side of the building, Maung had to compromise his menu.

“We were in the Bazaar because we had a dream to open a bigger restaurant,” said Heinrich. “But it was being crushed. Because some days it was so slow, we only made $30, $40 a day.”

The lack of marketing hurt, he said. “WEDI is supposed to do what they do. They ask for money. They ask for everything. And they didn't do their job, and people suffered because of that.”

Because his parents could not support the family by working at West Side Bazaar, Heinrich put his college education on hold and took on jobs to keep their restaurant afloat. He tutored, worked at a hospital, did community outreach programs, and waited tables at Saigon Bangkok.

During the COVID pandemic, tenants did not want to work in the 25 Grant St. space. WEDI told them to work in the space, or get kicked out of the incubator. With no good options, tenants complied. “So they could account for the grant money from the government,” Heinrich said. “Why?”

“So we go. Because we couldn't afford to lose the space, right? We don't have enough money to go someplace else. My mom is going to go back to vacuuming?”

His parents acquiesced, but did not forget how the people who were supposed to help them made them feel.

“We're not employees. We’re employers. You’re supposed to incubate us, not control us. WEDI was controlling us. They did not treat us as business owners. We’re their monkey.”

After the fire, WEDI told his parents and others whose businesses literally went up in flames they could not have any of the money donated to help them recover.

To be sure, a check written straight to their account would probably break IRS anti-discrimination rules. But WEDI, their landlord and lender, had other ways to ease their financial burden: Forgive rent for a period, renegotiate loan terms, or other means. That didn’t happen, Heinrich says.

Then WEDI said 007 wasn’t going to the new building. There was a low-cost space offered by a Hamburg landlord they should see. So 007 took the leap.

This spring, when 007 learned its rent at their new location might triple to $2,500, Heinrich emailed WEDI twice to ask if there was any assistance it could offer.

No one got back to him, he said.

Now 29, Heinrich is helping his parents run their restaurant, working, and going through the vetting process to become a U.S. Border Patrol agent. He’s been searching, without success, for a commercial kitchen where his parents can keep making dim sum, where his father can show the full range of his skills, and where 007 Chinese Food can reach its full potential.  

“We made it out,” he said. “But WEDI lied to their face.”

‘Four pillars’ model of neighborhood rebirth

In 2017, Mihailo Temali called the West Side Bazaar to offer WEDI the opportunity to take advantage of what his group had learned so far. Temali’s credentials include two decades of success in developing immigrant-centered business incubators to better low-income neighborhoods.  

In 1993, Temali, son of Yugoslav and Danish immigrants, founded the Neighborhood Development Center in his native Minneapolis. “Our work involved what we call the four pillars of working with low-income entrepreneurs of color,” he said.

First, business training, starting with developing a business plan. The NDC offers training in five community languages, in community settings.

Second: financing. “The folks we work with are all low-income, by how we set up the program. The argument is that if you have more income, you have other options on how to do this. We've brought the training right out into the neighborhood. “Financing includes business financing called high touch, high risk, because it's a lot of our startups.”

Third: technical assistance. “That's one-on-one, anything from a pro bono attorney. to someone helping you set up your POS system and social media and website, to mental health - that particular one came up during COVID - to help setting up your books or cleaning up your books. A wide range of stuff, we provide one-on-one help with.”

Fourth: real estate. “That can either be helping our entrepreneurs get into good leases in our targeted-low income neighborhoods and get build out support, build out financing and build out building permits, architectural design, whatever they need.”

NDC also owns and manages six business incubators with more than 100 small enterprises, about half operated by immigrants. 

NDC’s model, which “seeks to concentrate the power of micro-enterprise development within hubs of community revitalization,” includes providing culturally competent services to Hmong, Somali, Oromo and Spanish-speaking clients, and “forging partnerships with African American, Latino, African, Asian and other ethnic groups to facilitate entrepreneur recruitment and program delivery.”

Build From Within Alliance, a national network of similar organizations, serves as a source of information, strategies and advice for groups seeking to build similar efforts in the United States. Founded in 2015, it offers time-tested lessons to groups building mission capacity, currently including 18 incubator efforts across America.

That’s why Temali contacted WEDI then-Executive Director Ben Bissell twice to describe the model, its success, and how the Build From Within Alliance could help 25 Grant St. grow.

Temali never heard back. “They weren’t interested,” he said. “Pretty clearly not interested.”

People in Detroit thought differently.

In 2011, after 18 months of research into how American communities were tackling neighborhood revitalization, Steve Tobocman went to Minneapolis to see the Neighborhood Development Center’s work. As executive director of Global Detroit, a foundation-funded effort founded in 2010 to regrow Detroit neighborhoods, he was looking for an approach that worked.

The difference the “four pillars” method made was stark, Tobocman said. “It was like, ‘How do we do this in Detroit?’” 

Global Detroit put the model into practice in 2012 as ProsperUS Detroit, which offers lending, training, and business services to aspiring entrepreneurs.

“ProsperUs has invested a combined $5.2 million in microloans, professional services, and technical assistance to over 1,400 entrepreneurs, 98 oercent of them entrepreneurs of color,” ProsperUs’s 10-year impact report said. “And over the last few years we’ve hit our stride. We’ve tripled our budget and expanded our lending capital fivefold since 2020. We’ve launched a financial coaching program and found new ways to support entrepreneurs with customized and flexible help when and where they need it.”

Temali asked Global Detroit for a report analyzing why it worked in Detroit. “What made it happen is that your model is unique,” said Tobocman, summarizing its findings. “It has integrity in the sense that it is focused on people, and it is focused on doing this in communities that face these systemic barriers that low income communities of color face and low income immigrant communities face. So it's your model that's unique. It wasn't something in Detroit.” 

In Syracuse, community activists who wanted to start a small-business incubator connected with the Build From Within Alliance.

Salt City Market opened in January 2021, citing the West Side Bazaar as one of its inspirations.

The project was funded by Syracuse’s Allyn Family Foundation, which also pays the salary of Maarten Jacobs, its executive-director-on-loan.

The four-story building, with 24,000 square feet of grocery and public market, was designed for financial stability, Jacobs said. “We have apartments and office space that generate income to offset the very much intentionally depressed rates that we offer the food tenants downstairs, because it's meant to be an incubator-type space, for them to start up, grow, and prosper.”

The first floor holds a grocery, 10 restaurants, and a coffee shop that turns into a bar at night. Rents range from $900 to $1,600 a month. That includes utilities, janitorial services, dishwashing, trash disposal, pest control, cleaning of the hoods and Ansuls (fire protection systems), security, and other benefits.

Salt City Market is open seven days a week. Leases are for three years, with a 3 percent annual rent increase. Vendors can stay after three years, but must pay more rent.

Tenants are 70 percent immigrants. But Salt City Market only accepts vendors who have full mastery of the English language. “We don’t have the resources to offer interpretive services,” said Jacobs.

So far, it’s working.

“Our goal was always to make sure we had, on average, 1,000 people a day,” said Jacobs. “On a Monday, we do not get 1,000 people here. But on a Saturday, you might get 2,000, or if there's a Broadway show downtown. It's closer to 1,100 people a day on average, around 375,000 visitors a year.”

WEDI’s Downtown Bazaar and West Side Bazaar incubators are closed two days a week, including Sunday, a big shopping day. WEDI also charges tenants more rent for fewer services. 

WEDI has tenants on a month-to-month lease, meaning their rights to the space were more tenuous. With rent increases every six months, and the absence of a marketing campaign to draw customers, WEDI rents drained its tenants’ ability to gather a nest egg and leave, tenants said..

At West Side Bazaar, tenants have paid $2,000 a month. 

Many were not able to communicate well because WEDI’s program accepted non-English speakers without effective language support. They have two fewer days each week to make the rent. They do not get security, dishwashing service, waste management, or suitable refrigerated space and air conditioning.

WEDI is recruiting new tenants for the empty spaces.

‘Poverty pimps’ serve themselves, not clients

“There's a term people used to use,” Mihalo Temali said, after emphasizing that he was not commenting on WEDI, because he doesn’t know the details. “Poverty pimping. If your rhetoric is about what you're offering, what you're doing to support a community, but your actions are not that.”

“It’s a harsh term, because it means you've used your rhetoric for purposes of raising money that does not go to the people whose stories are used to raise money,” Temali continued. “Worse than just absurd, it’s exploitative.”

The worst thing “you can do in low-income communities of color is promise them stuff and then not deliver,” he said. “Because that's the story, that's their history, raised expectations and not follow-through.”

“Nobody's perfect,” he continued. “You can certainly find people around here that probably didn't think they got everything they hoped for, or expected, from our organization over the last 30 years. But I guarantee you, we've spent every minute of that time busting our ass to bring real, tangible value and support to the folks we said we were going to, and the folks we were engaged with.”

Fined for not emptying garbage in snowbound building

Khin San Oo was born on Ramree Island, off the western shore of Burma in the Bay of Bengal.

She left Burma in 2008, and arrived in the U.S. with her fiance in 2010. In Buffalo, her husband worked at Sun Cuisines. A talented home cook, she got her first restaurant cooking experience at a Thai restaurant in Niagara Falls.

She opened Ramree Burmese Restaurant in the West Side Bazaar on Nov. 1. Three and a half months later, she quit the facility. She’s still angry about the way she was treated by the non-profit’s staff while she lost more than $8,000 trying to get her first business started, she said, interviewed with interpreter Michael Han Tun.

None of the WEDI staffers telling her what to do spoke her language. She never saw a tenant handbook in Burmese. There were no interpreters at the mandatory tenant meetings, where most of the attendees only spoke Burmese, Oo said. So she got a friend with better English to attend several meetings, so the tenants could better understand what they were being told to do.

“They promised to provide security, dishwasher, cleaner,” said Oo. Then WEDI staff told tenants security was their problem, and that they would have to take turns washing all the dishes produced by all the restaurants.

When WEDI staff levied fines against four or five restaurant tenants for violating rules in the tenant handbook in January, she decided to leave. The fines came without counseling first, she said, echoing complaints from other former and current West Side Bazaar tenants.

Oo was fined a total of $150 for three garbage rule violations. Not taking out garbage on Jan. 16, 19, and 23, $50 per violation. 

That stung for several reasons. First, $50 was more profit than Oo made some days from the disappointing crowds at the new building. Second, the rules she broke had only been delivered to her in a language she didn’t understand.

Third, on Jan. 16, Buffalo was locked down by lake effect snow. No one could get to the building, unless they lived next door. Oo was still fined $50.

When Burmese restaurant tenants spotted WEDI Executive Director Carolynn Welch in the building, several gathered to talk to Welch about the fines, she said. Oo wanted to apologize, because she didn’t know the rules. She wanted to ask for forgiveness, because $150 would put her in the red. “She knew she made a mistake,” said Tun. “All she wanted was for them to help her.”

Welch was unmoved, and told the tenants they would have to pay their fines, Oo said.

So Oo quit. With her last day there Feb. 17, Oo told WEDI to take half of her $1,800 security deposit for February’s two weeks rent, and send her the remaining $900.

Instead, WEDI surprised Oo with the news that she would have to pay for the point-of-sale terminal she was leaving behind. 

It was a shock, because WEDI had told West Side Bazaar tenants the terminals were fee-free after an initial $200 per-tenant investment. A WEDI donor provided $1,000 to underwrite the rest of the cost, they were told.

When the new building opened, WEDI broke that promise, billing tenants over $80 a month for the terminal. 

Now, even after her tenancy ended, she had to keep paying for the terminal, WEDI told her.

Six months after leaving the West Side Bazaar, Oo still pays WEDI $89.60 per month, plus a $3 service charge, for a terminal WEDI described as paid for. She provided screenshots of her account, documenting the continuing withdrawals.

What is she angry about, specifically? Oo was asked.

“Unfair treatment,” said interpreter Tun. “They are supposed to provide support to her business. Instead of doing this, they’re trying to push her down. They try to bully her.”

After all Oo had done to run her restaurant by rules in another language, she was stung by how little WEDI executives seemed to care. The day she was fined, the WEDI staffer dropped the violation notice on her counter and walked away without a word, like it was no big deal. 

Oo flicked her wrist and rolled her eyes, mimicking the casualness. It still ticks her off.

Traumatized people rarely push back

When WEDI reneged, why didn’t the tenants kick and scream? Why didn’t they lawyer up, go public with WEDI’s trail of broken promises? Most native-born Americans would.

The answer begins with trauma, according to trauma expert Amy Fleischauer.

Most people bear some trauma, Fleischauer said  “At the core of most individuals’ trauma is a lack of safety, and a lack of choice. That they didn't have control over in their own lives: abuse, neglect, parental absenteeism.”

Fleischauer has decades of trauma treatment teaching experience, and testifies as a forensic expert in various courts.  She has a certificate in trauma counseling from the University of Buffalo, is certified by SAMHSA to conduct the How Being Trauma-Informed Improves Criminal Justice System Responses training. In 2010, she received the FBI Directors Community Leadership Award for her anti-human-trafficking efforts.

The culture you grow up in shapes how you react to trauma, its effects, and how you process that trauma, Fleischauer said. 

“A white, male raised in a traditional American culture may take an experience of trauma during which they were silenced and turn that experience into: I'm going to get justice. I'm going to hire a lawyer,” she said. “A refugee culture may turn an experience of trauma during which they were silenced and turn that into: I'm not going to fight because that keeps me alive.”

Blowing the whistle on poorly run government-funded programs isn’t an option for people who grew up in places where sticking up for your rights can get you and your family killed.

“If someone has witnessed violence or experienced violence when they spoke up — we could be talking about a refugee in a violent government overthrow, or a 7-year-old who tried to protect his mom and getting beaten by the abuser,” she said, the result is the same.

“In our brains, when we get triggered, we lose access to our prefrontal cortex,” she said. “It's really hard for our brains to process information effectively and accurately, because the focus moves to simply keeping ourselves alive and as safe as possible.”

“What allows people to be able to walk through their day in a way that is productive and good is the feeling of safety,” Fleischauer said. “Safety comes from predictability. It comes from the feeling that you have agency, that you have control over your choices. Even if unpredictable things happen, we still can fall back on, ‘I know where I'm going to sleep tonight. I know I'm going to be able to eat today.’ ”

Physical, emotional, psychological, and sometimes sexual safety, “was often taken from refugees.”

“So in the present day here, to not be able to even communicate in one's language, not be able to ask questions, to not be able to predict what will happen on Wednesday, is so triggering. That's just like basic, basic, basic stuff.”

Trauma changes human brains. Immigrants, especially refugees, are put in a particularly tough spot, and agencies funded to help them need to adjust how they approach clients, experts say.

In Fleischauer’s work talking to sexual assault survivors, some domestic violence or human trafficking survivors from non-English-speaking nations said they didn't need an interpreter, or spoke English fairly well. An interpreter was still provided for interviews, Fleishauer said, because “it was easier for their brain to discuss a trauma in their first language, because then the brain didn't have to do that extra work.”

There is no regulation that requires trauma-informed approaches from agencies funded by government agencies to work with traumatized populations, Fleischauer said.

Trauma-informed care training is essential for refugee-serving agencies, recent studies say. “Physiological responses to trauma and subsequent negative effects are considered universal human experiences, and yet interpretations and expressions of trauma responses often vary across cultures. In fact, a lack of culturally responsive and relevant care has been one of the primary obstacles to serving (im)migrant/refugee communities.”

That’s from “Working Towards Culturally Responsive Trauma-Informed Care in the Refugee Resettlement Process: Qualitative Inquiry with Refugee-Serving Professionals in the United States” published in Behavioral Sciences, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, in 2021.

“This study conducted individual interviews with 78 refugee service providers from five resettlement sites,” authors Hyojin Im and Laura E. T. Swan say in its abstract. “Despite the burgeoning interest and attempt to embrace TIC [trauma-informed care], our findings show that there is clear inconsistency and inexperience in TIC adaptation in resettlement programs. 

“This study highlights that TIC that is culturally responsive and relevant to refugee trauma and acculturation experiences is a vital way to address the chasms between refugee-specific programs and mainstream services including mental health care systems.”

Because of the lack of trauma-informed care training for agencies serving traumatized populations, SAMHSA, a federal agency focused on mental health, published “Practical Guide for Implementing a Trauma-Informed Approach,” a handbook for organizations working with traumatized populations. 

It lays out six guiding principles:

• Safety in physical settings and interpersonal interactions.

• Trustworthiness and transparency: Operations are conducted, and decisions are made with transparency, consistency, respect, and fairness, so as to build and maintain trust.

• Peer support: support from those with lived experiences of trauma or, in case of children with a history of trauma, their family members.

• Collaboration and mutuality: partnering, leveling of power differences between and among staff and clients.

• Empowerment: Individual strengths and experiences are recognized and built upon. 

• Cultural, historical, and gender issues: organization moves beyond the cultural stereotypes and biases.

WEDI failed on at least five out of six, with the cultural point a maybe, Burmese ex-tenants said. The disrespect they felt from WEDI staffers stings even more than lost money and fizzled dreams. 

“When organizations work with people who have likely experienced trauma, especially those from different countries, it's important to proactively consider how they best process information, what supports they may need to understand new systems, and especially how to build trust through transparency and consistency,” Fleischauer said. 

“The efforts here may take additional time in the beginning, but make the work more effective and efficient. Involving voices that represent these populations upfront in order to identify both barriers that leadership may not anticipate and solutions is one way to do this.”

“At the base level, all organizations that work with hurt people have the responsibility to proactively think about culture and trauma to minimize retraumatization and decrease barriers to success,” the trauma expert said. “Most organizations are not doing this kind of stuff on purpose. They're just not thinking.” 

“We believe that you want to do good. We believe that you want to help people. How can we do that better?”

Htay Naing, owner of Nine & Night Thai Cuisine, 414 Amherst St. in Black Rock.

‘Their promises all broke’

Htay Naing opened Nine & Night in the West Side Bazaar in 2016. He drew a steady stream of regulars, but was never able to save enough money to leave and open his own place before the fire.

Part of the financial problem was the rent, $1,200 when he started. By the end he was paying $1,845.

But he hung on, year after year, waiting for the new bazaar to give him enough kitchen space and customers to work his way out. “We hope everybody is going into the new bazaar,” he said. “They promise.”

Naing did his part to raise millions of dollars for WEDI’s capital campaign. “I have a lot of meetings with a lot of rich people who have to interview us for the West Side Bazaar,” said Naing. “So I have interview too, with rich people to donate for something like that.”

When WEDI suggested he do a semester-long popup at Buffalo State College, Naing accepted.

He was busy for four weeks, until student spending dried up. Then he lost money on the semester, because he still had to pay workers to staff the space. Plus he had agreed to pay WEDI 5 percent of his gross sales. Naing lost money, while the non-profit made money.

After the fire, WEDI told him he was going into the Downtown Bazaar. 

He said no. The rent was $1,845 to start, way too steep for a guy with a family and a mortgage. He countered WEDI’s proposal: How about I pay $1,000 instead, and bring Nine & Night to 617 Main St.?

They said no.

Same thing WEDI told him when he asked for any of the money donated to help him and his fellow fire victims. 

“Never I got it, not even one dime,” said Naing. “My friends told me they donated, but they never sharing,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how much WEDI got, but I got nothing.”

He asked. Answer: no money. 

For years, WEDI said that graduates of the program got a WEDI check — “graduation money” — to help them on their way. 

Not Naing. 

“When I open here, I don’t get it,” he said. “I asked twice. ‘You don’t get any.’ I don’t get even one dollar from WEDI.”

“At 25 Grant St. we were all waiting” for the new bazaar, he said, while customers asked about the new place. But that never happened either.

“Their promises all broke.”

#30#

Editor’s note: Three months ago, I started investigating why my previous perceptions of the Westminster Economic Development Initiative and its small-business incubators were so appallingly at odds with what witnesses were telling me.

Since then, my inquiries have included more than 75 interviews with current and former staff, board members, clients, and people who worked with WEDI. 

I was appalled to find that many immigrant cooks I’d spoken to for years had endured hazardous conditions, insults to their autonomy, and financial peril, but told me everything was going great when I asked. 

They were afraid to tell me, it turned out. Since they often saw me with WEDI leadership, they assumed I would take WEDI’s side to protect the organization.

I thought the Westminster Economic Development Initiative was helping immigrants and others without a lot of resources start their first businesses. When I asked them how it was going, with help from interpreters, the story was wrenchingly different.

Until I found interpreters willing to donate their time to my interviews with ex-tenants, I did not understand many parts of their experience. That was a lesson for me: facing a double barrier of fear and language, people who I thought would tell me if they were in crisis stayed mum.

Since then, working with the help of volunteer translators, I have had my first real in-depth interviews with Buffalo Burmese residents. I wish I’d done so sooner, but I’m working to make up for my prior lapses. 

If you can’t communicate in the only language you know, speaking from the heart about difficult subjects is hard to impossible, I have learned. I knew WEDI offered business guidance, but never thought to ask if it was in a language the students understood. 

On Monday, I sent a detailed list of questions to WEDI officials, based on their ex-clients’ statements. Some of the questions would take research to answer. Others were relatively simple matters. I noted that I would take any answers piecemeal, don’t wait until you have answers for them all.

After not hearing back, I sent a second email Wednesday night, informing WEDI that Thursday was the cutoff for comments to make this story.

Later Wednesday night, I received an email from Executive Director Carolynn Welch saying WEDI will send me public documents I requested, including the non-profit’s 2023 IRS Form 990, once completed next month. Welch said she would discuss my questions about client treatment with the WEDI board and attorneys to decide what WEDI was able and willing to disclose. 

I look forward to that. In the meantime, I renew my invitation for anyone who has worked for or with WEDI, or been involved in any of its programs, to contact me at andrew@fourbites.net and tell me how it went.

#30#