Foundation for Puerto Rico Plans Support Structure for Small Business and Entrepreneurs as It Marks 15 Years

Foundation for Puerto Rico (FPR) plans to become a more concrete and enduring source of guidance for the island’s small businesses and entrepreneurs, offering support in areas where available resources fall short, as the nonprofit marks 15 years of economic development work rooted in the Visitor Economy.

Jon Borschow, FPR’s founder, chairman and CEO, refers to it as a process of accompanying small businesses and entrepreneurs along their journey.

“What we’ve found after 15 years in operation is that small businesses and local entrepreneurs actually need something that is called in Spanish acompañamiento. Small businesses generally have a very strong leader who is pushing an idea, but are lacking some of the complementary functions, or the power to get an idea off the ground. We want to create something that is eventually continuous and ongoing, a place where they can be helped,” Borschow told Caribbean Business in an exclusive interview.

Together, FPR’s programs show the pieces it already operates and is building on, from business incubation to community planning to destination management.

Borschow founded FPR in 2011 with one vision in mind: that Puerto Rico needed new approaches to economic development and that, by combining private-sector expertise, public policy, research and community participation, the island could build a solid foundation for renewed economic growth.

To mark the anniversary, FPR is holding a series of events that celebrate the entrepreneurs, community initiatives and emerging industries it has helped shape over the past 15 years. Among its most recent efforts, and a look into the future of the organization, is a regional development framework for the island as a whole that FPR is trying out in the east.

A tourism-anchored plan for the Eastern Region

That effort is the Eastern Region Strategic Vision, a framework covering 15 municipalities, from Canóvanas and Loíza to Yabucoa, Vieques and Culebra. Anchored on tourism but incorporating a range of industries and development sectors, the initiative has four main priorities: transportation and mobility, developing tourist attractions, human capital preparation and improved governance collaboration in the area.

In an Eastern Region Strategic Vision overview, FPR reported that the region welcomed more than two million visitors in 2024, generating approximately $1.2 billion in direct visitor spending

 The organization sees room to grow that value by encouraging longer stays and greater local spending, which would increase the industry’s benefit to the region’s communities.

The region is meant to be only the first stage. FPR has presented the East as the starting point of a regional plan to decentralize visitor spending and spread it across the entire island, with the aim of building a framework that can be repeated in every other region. The first event of the anniversary series put the East’s entrepreneurs at the center.

El Este Económico anniversary series

Last week, FPR kicked off the series with El Este Económico: Historias de Desarrollo que Transforman (The Economic East: Development Stories That Transform), which brought together five initiatives across gastronomy, tourism, agritourism, maritime activity and renewable energy in the eastern region.

Presenters followed the PechaKucha format, in which each has six minutes and 40 seconds to present 20 slides, at 20 seconds per slide. The format allows for a brisk, interactive session in which ideas, feedback and information are exchanged, with the goal of giving entrepreneurs real, actionable steps to keep advancing their projects.

It also gave Borschow a live example of the approach he describes. “What you saw today is a microcosm of how that acompañamiento is taking place purely in this dialogue,” Borschow said.

The session was moderated by Angiemille Latorre of SeriouslyCreative, a longtime FPR collaborator and partner who first introduced the PechaKucha style in Puerto Rico in 2011.

One of the presenters was Bori Local Tours, a local tourism company that offers experiences showcasing the island’s culture, attractions and communities through a sustainable model. The presentation was led by its founder, Luis Peña, a former NASA engineer and content creator who left his full-time job to pursue a career in domestic tourism on the island.

Peña’s story reflects the recent upsurge in tourism on the island, or what FPR calls the visitor economy. The organization uses the term because its analysis extends beyond hotels and traditional tourist attractions to include visitor spending across restaurants, transportation, retail, local experiences and the businesses that supply these services, which it says offers a more accurate measure of visitor spending on the island as a whole.

Boosting tourism from Discover to the VEP

Using its Visitor Economy Performance (VEP) model, FPR reports that the island draws about 6 million visitors a year, spending more than $8 billion, and projects 8 million visitors and about $12 billion in spending by 2030, as CB has previously reported here and here.

The VEP places direct leisure and hospitality employment at more than 100,000 jobs, and up to 115,000 once visitor-dependent work in transportation, retail, tours and culture is counted.

Built on behavioral data and local prices rather than departure-gate counts, the model also puts average daily spending per visitor at $264 in 2024 and $280 in 2025, higher than other counts.

In its VEP report, FPR argues that tourism should be treated as an economic development strategy rather than solely as an industry measured by hotel occupancy and visitor arrivals.

FPR’s work in the sector predates the VEP model. In 2016, Borschow introduced a framework known as 2+2=7: add two million visitors in five years and extend the average stay by two days to generate an additional $7 billion in spending and more than 70,000 jobs. FPR says the island has since surpassed those goals.

In 2017, FPR also spearheaded the establishment of Discover Puerto Rico, the island’s official destination marketing organization (DMO). After concluding that tourism marketing was too exposed to the political and electoral cycle, FPR brought together representatives from the private sector, government and nonprofit organizations to advocate for a new tourism marketing structure.

These efforts contributed to the passage of Act 17 of 2017, approved March 30, 2017, which established the legal framework for Discover as an independent, nonprofit DMO. The entity now leads the island’s destination marketing, credited with the historic numbers and trendline.

Fifteen years of milestones

A more recent step is the Community Innovation Hub, which FPR launched in April 2025 for the same 15 eastern municipalities. Partly funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Business Development Grant program, it aims to strengthen sustainable tourism and economic development in the region, targeting issues including infrastructure, workforce capacity, business operations and the management of community assets.

The past 15 years have been full of milestones. In 2014, FPR established Campus Puerto Rico, an initiative to position the island as a destination for higher education that has brought more than 400 students from the U.S. and Latin America. After Hurricane María, it launched the Bottom Up Destination Recovery initiative to create a community-based tourism development model, first piloted in Orocovis.

More recently, FPR has taken a lead role in the Whole Community Resilience Planning Program, a federally funded initiative of the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, and launched Emprende360°, a 12-month incubation program for aspiring entrepreneurs whose first cohort began in December 2019.

Together, those programs show the pieces FPR already operates, from business incubation to community planning to destination management.

What Borschow describes is a way to make that guidance continuous, so that an entrepreneur with a strong idea and limited support has a place to turn.