In Cleveland, refugees are revitalizing neighborhoods while building new lives & businesses for themselves. For instance, more than 2,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese live in the Cleveland area, with another 2,000 in Akron.
While it is not easy to move to a new country and a new city full of different cultures, languages and traditions, people like Pradhan not only make it work, they become some of Cleveland’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Note from Storm: This is a common phenomenon in many cities, where its often the newcomers who are the primary catalysts of neighborhood or downtown regeneration. Sometimes they’re immigrants, other times refugees. Often, they’re simply folks from another part of the same state or country, who look at a place and see its potential. This is as opposed to long-time locals, who often remember all the previous failed attempts to bring it back to life, and have given up on it.