A profitable path

With minority business awards, a Texas Rotary club lifts the fortunes of enterprises with heart, itself included

By Mary Beth Gahan Photography by Raul Rodriguez

As a child, Rosa Maria Berdeja couldn’t imagine she would go to college, much less become a successful attorney. Growing up in the 1980s in the Texas border town of Brownsville, she was told by her mother that she could drop out of high school as soon as it was legally possible, as long as she got a job to help pay bills. That’s what her five older siblings did, and she assumed she would too. But when Berdeja was 14, her mother moved to Florida with her new husband, leaving the teen essentially homeless in Texas. School was the one place she knew she could get two free meals each day. Of the nine children in her family, she was the only one to earn a high school diploma. “It wasn’t that I wanted to get an education to better myself. I didn’t know that was possible,” Berdeja says. “The only reason I didn’t drop out was because we were poor.”

At 18, she moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, nearly 500 miles north, because she heard there were more job opportunities there. She started working as a receptionist in a small law firm and made extra money by convincing the attorney to let her take on the cleaning too. Over time, she was promoted to paralegal. “I was good at it,” she says. “The more I would do, the more I realized I could do.”

After she got a job at a bigger law firm that required paralegals to have a bachelor’s degree, she enrolled in college, attending classes on nights and weekends. Once she earned the degree, she figured that was the end of school for her. But one night while working late, an associate attorney needed her help to fill out a package shipping label. As inconsequential as the interaction might seem, it carried a life-changing revelation for Berdeja. “That’s when I knew I could be a lawyer,” she says with a smile. “I thought, ‘If you’ve gotten this far without learning how to ship a package, I’m going to excel.’”

While in law school at Texas Wesleyan University, Berdeja did pro bono work to help obtain visas for people who had been victims of violent crimes. “It was so touching to be able to take something horrible and get something positive out of it,” she says. “I realized this [immigration law] is where I could do the most good.”

More than a decade after passing the bar exam, Berdeja was doing just that, having established her own immigration law practice in Fort Worth. She helped people become U.S. citizens, advised them on how to get visas for family members, and provided legal aid to those facing deportation. Friends suggested she join Rotary to network with other business leaders, but she brushed them off, believing the weekly meetings would be too much of a commitment.

Then, in 2023, the Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber of Commerce nominated Berdeja’s firm for the Rotary Club of Fort Worth’s Minority Business Awards, a program that recognizes outstanding businesses in the community owned by minorities. To her surprise, her firm won second place. “It was a huge honor for a number of reasons,” Berdeja says. “A lot of times, lawyers are not seen as business owners, even though you have to know how to practice law and how to run a business.”

The honor came with a three-minute professional promotional video for her business and a complimentary one-year membership to the club. “When I won this free membership for a year, I thought, ‘Oh, yay, I get free lunch every Friday.’ Even now, I can afford to buy food, but I still have that mentality of: ‘Free meal? I’m not going to pass that up,’” Berdeja says.

Since then, she has found the club to be much more than a weekly meal.

Showing the value of Rotary

The Fort Worth Rotary Club was chartered in 1913. At an organizing meeting, a visiting Rotarian informed the attendees about the purpose of Rotary, then less than a decade old. “He told of its social advantages and said it was not an organization for the exchange of trade favors, but a club where business talks and experiences are to be told,” reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

By 1990, the Fort Worth club was one of the largest in the world, with more than 700 members. But from then on, as with many other service clubs in the U.S. during that time, membership declined. Three decades later, the number had dropped to around 200. “We knew we needed to do something to reverse this trend or eventually we could be extinct, irrelevant, or both,” says Carlo Capua, the club’s 2020-21 president.

The problem wasn’t a lack of potential members. At the same time the club was shrinking, the city was experiencing a population boom. Between 2010 and 2020, Fort Worth grew by 24 percent and topped 900,000 people.

Capua, now Fort Worth’s chief of strategy and innovation, began thinking about ways to show the value of Rotary to the broader community. He told Chris Jordan, who was on the club’s board at the time, that the club should be a place where people could discuss difficult and even controversial subjects. “He said, ‘We’re not relevant as a club. We need to have conversations that people aren’t eager to have,’” Jordan remembers.

In the summer of 2020, Capua set up a series called Courageous Conversations, which included panel discussions about politics, religion, and race — topics that Rotary clubs often avoid because of Rotary International’s status as a nonpartisan, secular organization. The idea was not to advocate for any particular views but to engage and inform people about issues important to them and to model respectful civic discourse at a time when that seemed to be in short supply.

The club invited speakers from local organizations and partnered with groups like the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens to help shape the conversations. One event brought together a rabbi, an imam, and a Baptist preacher — “kind of like the start of a joke,” Jordan quips — for a discussion about the place of organized religion in society.

“We really had some edgy conversations, but the one that got the most traction was on increasing business in the minority community,” Jordan says. That talk included former leaders of Fort Worth’s Black and Hispanic chambers of commerce and was moderated by Courtney Lewis, a bank executive who served the following year as the club’s first Black female president.

Capua and other members had become interested in the topic after studies showed that the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately hurt businesses with owners from minority groups. The Rotarians wanted to support those small business owners in Fort Worth and “quickly realized that none were members of our club,” he says. In fact, there were few people of color in the club at all. That year, when the police killing of George Floyd spurred nationwide protests and put a spotlight on race relations in the U.S., more than 90 percent of the club’s members were white, while less than half of Fort Worth residents were.

Around the same time, Jordan read a book that offered practical ways for Americans to respond to racial inequities, suggesting, for instance, that people break out of their social networks and get to know people of other races. It helped Jordan understand that businesses owned by minorities often lack access to networking to succeed at the level of businesses owned by white people. “Bingo. I got it at that point. Rotary offers relationships; that’s really what we’re about,” Jordan says. “My company won awards over the years, and it did a lot for market share and business.”

Awards benefit winners and the club

Jordan, who founded a company that designs and installs audio and video systems, approached the other board members with the idea of an award for businesses owned by people from minority groups that comes with an invitation to join the club. The plan was unanimously approved.

The club first presented the Minority Business Awards in 2021 and has annually since. Nominations are open to the public, with business owners allowed to enter themselves. The only requirements are that the business is within the Fort Worth city limits and qualifies as a minority business enterprise as defined by the National Minority Supplier Development Council. That means it must be at least 51 percent owned and operated by one or more individuals who are Asian, Black, Hispanic, or Native American.

To get the word out, members reach out to the area’s chambers of commerce for minority groups and secure local media coverage. Once the nominations come in, the club assigns a Rotarian advocate to each business. The advocates help the business owners through the application process and bring them to Rotary meetings to start connecting with members. Next, a committee uses a point system to winnow the nominated businesses to six ranked winners announced at an awards luncheon in April.

“The criteria for the award mirror Rotary’s Four-Way Test,” Jordan says. “We wanted a values-based award instead of sales, growth, or number of employees. We wanted to highlight minority-owned companies who had a heart for the community, demonstrating Service Above Self.”

The prizes have varied over the years. Now, the first-place winner gets a free one-year membership to the club, and the group covers Rotary dues for six months for the next four finalists. The owners of the top three businesses receive $15,000 scholarships toward an MBA from the University of Texas at Arlington, as well as professional marketing videos, which are shown during the luncheon. And the mayor of Fort Worth presents plaques.

Four years after the first awards were given out, the benefits for recipients are clear. When their free membership period is up, many of them decide to stay on as fully invested members of the club. They can see the positive results of networking with like-minded people, and some even pursue club leadership positions. “All the award winners, they got all that publicity within the club itself. Now they’re becoming part of the natural network that exists,” Jordan says. “Not only have winners stayed in the club, they’ve led committees.”

Building new bonds

Award winner Jeff Postell, whose business took fifth place in 2021, started in the construction industry when he dropped out of college at 19. He had enrolled at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, to study biology, but he says he spent more time hunting and fishing. Within a year, he was on academic probation.

His first construction job involved kneeling on ceramic tile and using a toothbrush-sized wire brush to scrub grout lines. Through the years, he worked his way up to supervisor and project manager roles and went back to college for degrees in construction engineering and business management.

Now, he’s the owner of Post L Group, a contracting business in Fort Worth. He also runs a nonprofit, Building Pathways, that gives young people from disadvantaged communities opportunities in the construction industry and guides them through the start of their careers. “I think people are concerned about the bottom line and growth in their business, but not the growth of humans and these communities,” Postell says. “Construction is the quickest way for neighborhoods to flip themselves and for people to make money over the poverty line.”

When Postell’s company won the Minority Business Award and he started attending Rotary meetings, he realized the club’s mission aligned with his nonprofit’s purpose. “Rotary, to me, is one of the best organizations in Fort Worth,” Postell says. “I love our mission. It’s a breath of fresh air every Friday for me.”

After joining the club, Postell found common ground with a fellow Black member, Richard L. Knight, who was vice president of Knight Waste Services. The two men became fast friends, Postell says, often going on bike rides together. They bonded over their shared experience as fathers, and Knight introduced Postell to potential clients. “We had these great conversations. We both had big hearts for our communities and wanted to hire local people from neighborhoods so they could grow their capacity,” he says.

Knight was an ardent supporter of the awards program and for a time served as its chair. After he passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack in May 2024, the award was renamed the Richard L. Knight Minority Business Award.

That honor inspired Postell to step up. This year, he contributed $15,000 to become a presenting sponsor for the awards, which gave him a seat on the judging panel and a speaking slot at the luncheon. “God put it on my heart at that moment that I wanted to sponsor this first event after his death. I wanted to make sure I do things with him in mind. His name being tied to Rotary with this award is a big deal for me,” Postell says.

Paying it forward

In late January, Berdeja was at the historic Fort Worth ballroom where the club regularly gathers, eagerly waiting for a meeting to start. The club had taken a break over the holidays and then had to cancel a meeting because of a rare winter storm. “Friday is my favorite day of the week because I get to see all my friends,” she says. “I just can’t imagine not going every week.”

Berdeja believes that the learning and networking opportunities that the club provides have made her a better leader and business owner, which, in turn, has led to more referrals for her law firm. She recently joined the program committee to find out how the club gets its top-tier speakers, like Mike Maddux, the pitching coach for the Texas Rangers, and Joseph Martin, a retired four-star general who served as the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff.

Having become a stronger leader, Berdeja is paying it forward, serving on the board of a foundation that supports the Young Women’s Leadership Academy of Fort Worth and promoting the value of education. “I never thought education was the key to my success,” she says. “Years later, I’m so glad I went to school because my life would have been so much different had I not.”

Less than two years after winning the award, Berdeja was the one standing at the podium to introduce a new member she’d proposed and helped through the process. And the crowd she spoke to looked different than it did a few years ago, when Jordan floated the idea of the Minority Business Awards. Back then, there were only 13 people of color in the club. Now there are 53. The club also reversed the decline in membership as a whole, and today it boasts about 250 members.

That’s thanks in no small part to Berdeja and the other award alumni who promote Rotary, bring guests to meetings, and persuade them to join. “Every Rotarian goes full Rotary. It becomes their identity,” Berdeja says. “Everyone’s like, ‘Here comes Rosie, inviting us to Rotary again.’”

This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.