The two-day Spanish immersion program starts with a typical Dominican breakfast. Co-creator Sixcia Devine is Dominican, after all, as are many others in Providence.
Then the students attend workshops with three Spanish instructors who say functional phrases in Spanish for the students to then act out and repeat until they understand at least a conversational form of the language.
Between workshops, the students take 10- to 15-minute breaks to practice the phrases they learn with Spanish-speaking artists and business owners. Intermittently they hear opera sung in Spanish and witness dance presentations.
The goal is to immerse the students – mostly people looking to do business with Latino business owners and consumers, including some who already do – into the Spanish language and culture within the confines of a weekend.
Devine said she and her husband, John Devine, created the program because they saw a need in the community for something like it.
Devine works with small business owners on a daily basis. She is the Providence regional director for the R.I. Small Business Development Center at Johnson & Wales University in addition to running HDSC LLC, which facilitates the SpeakNow! Immersion program.
“I’ve had a lot of people looking to break into the Latino market,” she said. “The same questions kept on coming up … People want to know how to meet [Latino business owners and consumers].”
The first program, which took place this month, was attended by seven people, mostly from the health care, banking and food industries. One student, for example, works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He sells fruit to the Latino bodegas and wanted a better understanding of the language and culture, Devine said.
“We looked around at programs and noticed there was no immersion program around,” said John Devine, CEO of HDSC LLC. “We noticed all the classes that were offered are focused on teaching people the language with a focus on fluency … and none had a heavy emphasis on culture.”
John Devine said learning about Latino culture can help students avoid misunderstandings. In the Dominican Republic, for example, business people might set up a time to meet around 1 p.m., but arriving 15 to 20 minutes late is acceptable, Sixcia Devine said.
Students also learn the importance of building a personal rapport. It is culturally acceptable to meet and not talk about business right away, she said. Getting to know each other on a personal level is an important part of business transactions.
The weekend costs $950 per student and runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday and a Sunday. It includes four optional follow-up sessions that involve an instructor taking the students out into the Latino community one-by-one to practice their Spanish.
“There are going to be more [immersion weekends] throughout the year,” he said. “We’re trying to get it up to one per month.”
Eventually, John and Sixcia Devine would like to tailor the program to specific industries so, for example, retailers could learn phrases related to that industry. But for now, the immersion program will be general in nature. The next one is slated for September.
Meanwhile, the company will focus on its monthly SpeakNow! Networking events that evolved from the immersion program, Sixcia Devine said.
HDSC LLC started the immersion program two years ago, but the couple took a year off for the birth of their first child, John Daniel. Four months ago they began organizing the networking events, which invite English-speaking and Spanish-speaking business people together to start making connections.
Sixcia Devine said the purpose of the networking events is to give both populations the opportunity to grow their businesses. But it is also meant to give students who attend the immersion program a place to practice.
Since February the program has grown from about 20 people per event to about 50.
“It shows no sign of stopping,” John Devine said. The networking events are open to anyone wanting to attend.
