Poor Families Can Go Solar Too, In California At Least
by Zachary Shahan September 23, 2010
Clean Technica
"Sustainability" is often thought of as an environmental buzz word, but when you delve into actual sustainability theory, you quickly find the idea that it's really about a proper balance between environmental needs, economic needs, and social equity. A program in San Diego I just found out about looks like it nails this balance.
The program is called MASH, or Multifamily Affordable Solar Housing, and it is using $108 million—a small portion of the $3.2 billion California Solar Initiative—to help put solar panels on low-income homes.
The MASH program's first solar installation was recently completed on Hacienda Townhomes, an affordable downtown housing complex owned and managed by the San Diego Community Housing Corporation. Some residents living there earn only $27,500 a year for a family of four.
This one project's environmental and economic benefits are substantial. The Hacienda Townhomes installation of 96 photovoltaic panels will create 34,726 kilowatt-hours of energy, cut electricity bills and, over 25 years, reduce CO2 emissions by 595 tons, "the equivalent of planting 23,812 trees or driving a small car over 2 million miles." The project created 5 temporary jobs and "justified" 3 permanent jobs.
Up to this point, the California Solar Initiative (CSI) has been taken advantage of primarily by wealthy California residents and has been criticized by those concerned about social equity. In reference to Governor Schwarzenegger's goal of creating 1 million solar homes in California, Mindy Spatt of the Utility Reform Network, a California consumer groups, said that CSI is more like "1 million solar homes for millionaires." MASH helps to address that issue. (Though, it seems to me that the portion of that CSI pie going towards MASH should be a little larger. As it is now, subtracting Hacienda Townhomes' 52 low-income units, that's 999,948 homes for millionaires.)
While solar for the rich may be more viable, the financial savings of solar for the poor are far more meaningful.
Omega Hatch, 23, is one of the residents of Hacienda Townhomes that has benefited from the new solar panels—she saw her August electricity bill fall from an average of $90 to $56. And she is extremely grateful for that. "Thank God," she told Greenwire, "because I could use the money elsewhere. I have a 7-year-old, he's about to go back to school. Any penny helps me get what I need to do for him."
In addition to this being a great boon for the low-income families that live in Hacienda Townhomes, it also happened to be the 10,000th solar installation in the San Diego Gas & Electric service area. Go San Diego!
I don't think I'm the only one who thinks we should have more such programs helping those most in need cut their electricity bills, clean their environments, and protect the global climate (I hope not). If you think a program like MASH should be implemented nationwide, don't forget to let your representatives in government know by signing the petition on the Clean Technica website.
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Speaking of Faith; A Different Kind of Capitalism
Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, spoke with Krista Tippett, host of the Public Radio show, Speaking of Faith (SOF), about "A different kind of capitalism". The Acumen Fellows Reading List and more useful resources can be found on SOF's website.
A collection of readings Jacqueline Novogratz recommends to foster empathy, self-awareness and a business mindset in the Acumen Fellows, who come from around the world. It includes economists as well as novelists, activists and thinkers from an eclectic range of perspectives.
A collection of readings Jacqueline Novogratz recommends to foster empathy, self-awareness and a business mindset in the Acumen Fellows, who come from around the world. It includes economists as well as novelists, activists and thinkers from an eclectic range of perspectives.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Social Entrepreneurship; The Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) Model
Social Entrepreneurship; The Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) Model
Revisiting the "Bottom of the Pyramid"
A few years back, CK Prahalad’s conceptualisation of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” woke up a large number of corporates and entrepreneurs to the huge business potential that lay dormant in the lower strata of the masses. CKP’s thesis was that 4bn people on earth subsist on less than $2/day, and therefore, collectively and globally constitute a $13 trillion market!
With all noble intentions, CKP argued that this masses at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) should be viewed not as victims or a burden, but as value-driven consumers. If large corporations design and customise their offerings for this huge segment of consumers, it can change their life-style, and enhance the quality of day-to-day living for them.
CKP’s proposal, however, suffers from three underlying biases that permeate much of the contemporary management literature. The purpose of this note is not to diminish the value of the concept of BOP, but to surface these biases and reinterpret the concept, so that real the “fortune” that is embedded in the BOP can be leveraged:
Bias 1: Masses are primarily consumers, and not producers. And therefore, their life becomes “better”, if they get to consume more, and not if they produce more. This assumption, while partially correct, misses out on the entrepreneurial potential that lies in BOP. For instance, it neglects facts such as the exports from Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum in Mumbai, exceeded the total international earnings of a company like Ranbaxy in 2004.
This is allthemore more relevant in context of India where the “unorganised sector” accounts for 93% of the country’s economically active workforce. More than just being consumers, this workforce (consisting of hawkers, construction workers, domestic helps, road-side mechanics, scrap workers, etc.) account for 60% of net domestic product, 68% of national income, 31% of agricultural exports, and 41% of manfactuing exports.
The real “fortune” of BOP lies not merely in serving these low-income markets, but in organising and unleashing the under-utilised entrepreneurial potential of its inhabitants. For instance, Sri Mahila Grih Udyog (more popularly known for Lijjat Papad) mobilised the grassroot entrepreneurship of women into organising them into a Rs. 312crore business. Similarly, Aavishkar India Micro Venture Capital Fund provides venture capital to rural entrepreneurs to leverage rural innovations and appropriate technologies.
Bias 2: The quantum of profits is more important than its source. Like most contemporary management concepts, BOP primarily focuses on how corporates can create and exploit markets to reap large profits (though to be fair, along with “growth” and “profit”, CKP also added “incalculable contributions to humankind” as a benefit of focusing on BOP).
The concept of BOP, however, does not essentially discriminate among the sources from which the profits are generated. It would treat the profits from selling a Rs.5 bottle of aerated drink, or a Re.1 shampoo sachet as identical to the profits generated from making medicines or education available to this segment.
Like much of contemporary management literature, BOP also does not distinguish between the motives of “profit-making” and “being profitable”. Profit-making motive tilts the prioities away from the society to the owners of capital. It follows the dictum of the economist Milton Friedman: “there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…”
Being profitable, on the other hand, is an imperative for the sustainability of any entrepreneurial venture. As Prof Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank (the largest bank of Bangaldesh which services almost 3mn “poorest of the poor” across more than 40,000 villages) once mentioned: “Volume of profit is not important in Grameen in money-making sense, but important as an indicator of efficiency. We would like to make more profit so that we can reduce interest rate - and pass on the benefits to the borrowers.”
Bias 3: Wealth-creation is same as making profits. Lastly, the BOP concept takes a very narrow view of wealth-creation. It neglects the fact that a society’s “wealth” is not just the income-levels of its members, but also the the sustainability of its community relations and environment. By focusing on profit making, BOP reduces the concept of wealth to just money, and the rest – i.e., the community and the environment - become mere resources which need to be "exploited".
To make BOP a viable concept for social change, there is a need to reinterpret the meaning of wealth. Take for instance, the Yasaswini health insurance scheme, pioneered by Narayan Hrudayalaya in Bangalore, which provides complete health cover (from common cold to brain surgury to 1.7mn farmers at a cost of Rs.5/month). The scheme is self-funding, but the “wealth” it creates is not money, but a healthy community of economically active people.
Revisiting the "Bottom of the Pyramid"
A few years back, CK Prahalad’s conceptualisation of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” woke up a large number of corporates and entrepreneurs to the huge business potential that lay dormant in the lower strata of the masses. CKP’s thesis was that 4bn people on earth subsist on less than $2/day, and therefore, collectively and globally constitute a $13 trillion market!
With all noble intentions, CKP argued that this masses at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) should be viewed not as victims or a burden, but as value-driven consumers. If large corporations design and customise their offerings for this huge segment of consumers, it can change their life-style, and enhance the quality of day-to-day living for them.
CKP’s proposal, however, suffers from three underlying biases that permeate much of the contemporary management literature. The purpose of this note is not to diminish the value of the concept of BOP, but to surface these biases and reinterpret the concept, so that real the “fortune” that is embedded in the BOP can be leveraged:
Bias 1: Masses are primarily consumers, and not producers. And therefore, their life becomes “better”, if they get to consume more, and not if they produce more. This assumption, while partially correct, misses out on the entrepreneurial potential that lies in BOP. For instance, it neglects facts such as the exports from Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum in Mumbai, exceeded the total international earnings of a company like Ranbaxy in 2004.
This is allthemore more relevant in context of India where the “unorganised sector” accounts for 93% of the country’s economically active workforce. More than just being consumers, this workforce (consisting of hawkers, construction workers, domestic helps, road-side mechanics, scrap workers, etc.) account for 60% of net domestic product, 68% of national income, 31% of agricultural exports, and 41% of manfactuing exports.
The real “fortune” of BOP lies not merely in serving these low-income markets, but in organising and unleashing the under-utilised entrepreneurial potential of its inhabitants. For instance, Sri Mahila Grih Udyog (more popularly known for Lijjat Papad) mobilised the grassroot entrepreneurship of women into organising them into a Rs. 312crore business. Similarly, Aavishkar India Micro Venture Capital Fund provides venture capital to rural entrepreneurs to leverage rural innovations and appropriate technologies.
Bias 2: The quantum of profits is more important than its source. Like most contemporary management concepts, BOP primarily focuses on how corporates can create and exploit markets to reap large profits (though to be fair, along with “growth” and “profit”, CKP also added “incalculable contributions to humankind” as a benefit of focusing on BOP).
The concept of BOP, however, does not essentially discriminate among the sources from which the profits are generated. It would treat the profits from selling a Rs.5 bottle of aerated drink, or a Re.1 shampoo sachet as identical to the profits generated from making medicines or education available to this segment.
Like much of contemporary management literature, BOP also does not distinguish between the motives of “profit-making” and “being profitable”. Profit-making motive tilts the prioities away from the society to the owners of capital. It follows the dictum of the economist Milton Friedman: “there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…”
Being profitable, on the other hand, is an imperative for the sustainability of any entrepreneurial venture. As Prof Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank (the largest bank of Bangaldesh which services almost 3mn “poorest of the poor” across more than 40,000 villages) once mentioned: “Volume of profit is not important in Grameen in money-making sense, but important as an indicator of efficiency. We would like to make more profit so that we can reduce interest rate - and pass on the benefits to the borrowers.”
Bias 3: Wealth-creation is same as making profits. Lastly, the BOP concept takes a very narrow view of wealth-creation. It neglects the fact that a society’s “wealth” is not just the income-levels of its members, but also the the sustainability of its community relations and environment. By focusing on profit making, BOP reduces the concept of wealth to just money, and the rest – i.e., the community and the environment - become mere resources which need to be "exploited".
To make BOP a viable concept for social change, there is a need to reinterpret the meaning of wealth. Take for instance, the Yasaswini health insurance scheme, pioneered by Narayan Hrudayalaya in Bangalore, which provides complete health cover (from common cold to brain surgury to 1.7mn farmers at a cost of Rs.5/month). The scheme is self-funding, but the “wealth” it creates is not money, but a healthy community of economically active people.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs
America can reduce poverty by enabling underground businesses
by Kai Wright, from The American Prospect
Excerpted from Utne Reader here;
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
Loretta Harrison is a born hustler.
“I been making and selling things since I was about 8 years old,” says the 45-year-old unemployed mom. She buys wholesale in Manhattan—balloons, socks, scarves, you name it—then loads up a pushcart and sells at retail prices on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. She’s peddled Icees off the back of a tricycle, teamed up with her teenage son to hawk bottled water for a dollar at stoplights, and organized “passion parties” where she brings together groups of women to gab about sex and buy erotic toys. “I love sales,” she says. “For me to have something that somebody else wants and for them to go in their pocket and bring out hard-earned money to get what I have is just—it’s like a high to me.”
Harrison hasn’t worked a traditional full-time job in nearly 14 years, since her eldest son, Malcolm, had a series of seizures in the second grade that resulted in brain damage. “After that, you know, he was a paranoid schizophrenic,” she says. “He’d think he didn’t have enough sugar in his cereal, and he’d run away and tell people we were bothering him. Punch out the windows and stuff.” So she quit her job delivering mail in the neighborhood to take care of him and her then-newborn daughter. “That whole year,” she says, “my Ready Teddy bags were the only thing that kept me going.”
Ready Teddy is Harrison’s pride and joy. It’s a crocheted teddy bear–and-tote combo that she’s been making since 1992. In the past, she’s sold the bags in a Brooklyn craft store for $35 a pop but now moves them herself for $20. “When I had people selling for me, I would charge them $15. They’d sell it for $20 and take out $5,” she explains, rattling off pricing and staffing schemes that have never been written down, let alone put into a business plan.
In fact, Harrison can’t so much as give a ballpark estimate of how much money she’s made or lost year to year on all of her little businesses. She figures that between her sales and her wage jobs—as a supermarket cashier, a newspaper carrier, a crossing guard—her income has probably peaked at $25,000 in a year. “As far as keeping records and whatnot—Loretta’s not so good at keeping records,” she jokes. “Especially when you get the money and you end up having to spend the money to live.”
Whether and how Harrison can actually live off her sales schemes are larger questions than she knows—and ones that may be getting more attention in coming years, as policy makers grope for solutions to the joblessness that’s strangling cities. Unemployment was at 10 percent at the end of 2009. More families went hungry in 2008 than at any time on record—an estimated 17 million households—and the poverty rate reached higher than it has been in more than a decade.
The conventional debate over how to help families who find themselves counted among those doleful statistics focuses on the social safety net—do we boost supports like welfare, provide low-skill job training, or just force folks to try harder to find work? The assumption lurking behind all of these answers is that poor people are broken and need to be fixed, or at least propped up. But a rarely noticed industry of small-business advocates and lenders say the problem is the other way around. What we need, they argue, is an economy that values the remarkable entrepreneurial instincts that people like Harrison already have. Their research suggests that with relatively small investments for training and with loans of as little as $500, small side hustles like Harrison’s could get neighborhoods like Jamaica churning with enterprise.
Microenterprise, as it’s called, has long been associated with the developing world. The Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus pioneered the idea back in 1976 with a $27 loan to a group of Bangladeshi businesswomen following a famine. A global industry has since parceled out billions of dollars in microloans, and Yunus has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. But while the idea owes its fame to the developing world, it has also been slowly building in America since the mid-1980s—it’s just been ignored by an economic and political culture obsessed with the pursuit of large, rapid growth.
Now, with the U.S. economy in disarray, domestic microenterprise advocates believe this is finally their moment in the sun. Both Grameen and the celebrated peer-to-peer lending tool Kiva.org have announced new U.S. ventures since the recession began. And after years of hostility from Bush-era Washington, micro enterprise development has won the support of both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
The effort is thus far relatively tiny: The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO), a trade group, estimates that $100 million to $150 million is invested annually in U.S. microenterprise development. But industry researchers argue that Harrison is among an estimated 10 million low- to moderate-income people who could turn their ideas and hustles into thriving, job-creating businesses—and rescue inner-city economies in the process.
America’s roughly 6 million small businesses—defined as firms with fewer than 500 workers—employ about half the nation’s private-sector workforce. Another 21.7 million people ran their own businesses without employees in 2007. Politicians of all stripes love to laud these folks. In the American political narrative, small-business owners do everything from creating jobs to building communities. And they’re the people for whom Congress is still trying to pry open traditional credit markets. As President Barack Obama proclaimed in May 2009, “The entrepreneurial spirit lies at the core of our nation’s economy and identity.” Microenterprise-development advocates say politicians and bankers shouldn’t view people like Harrison any differently.
Microenterprise is defined, officially, as any business with fewer than five employees that takes less than $35,000 to get off the ground. According to the Aspen Institute’s Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination (FIELD), the vast majority of these ventures are both owned and staffed by an individual or a family. The AEO estimates that more than 24 million such businesses exist in the United States.
The idea of building upon tiny, family- run businesses has never caught on in U.S. economic-development circles. But according to Aspen’s most recent count, at least 500 organizations around the country either lend money or provide training to people who are trying to use small business to thwart poverty. The field started off providing capital largely to residents in black neighborhoods (particularly to black women) who had been walled off from banks for decades; it has since grown and splintered into both money lending and business training. Fifty-eight percent of the clients of today’s microenterprise-development groups are people of color, according to FIELD, and about 60 percent are women.
The changes driven by microenterprise programs are incremental but nonetheless meaningful. In 2008 Aspen surveyed about 1,400 clients served by micro enterprise-development groups. Over half of those who were living below the poverty line when they joined the programs had risen above it within a year. Average household income went from just under $30,000 to $36,000.
The programs have demonstrated a clear ability to help clients build sustainable businesses. In Aspen’s 2008 survey, nearly two-thirds of people who didn’t have businesses when they entered a program successfully got one started. Those new businesses split about evenly between full-time and part-time ventures; the full-time ones generated median revenues of $40,000 in 2007. That’s not Wall Street money, but it’s enough to move a family out of poverty-wage labor. And the biggest programs show even more potential. ACCION USA—the nation’s largest microlender—spokesperson Laura Kozien says, “For every microloan that ACCION approves, 2.7 jobs are created in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods.”
Tasha Stoudymire started working in department-store photo studios in high school when she took her newborn son for a portrait and ended up applying for a job. Over 11 years, she scraped her way up from $5.15 an hour to $16.70 an hour. “I couldn’t stand it,” she says of the sacrifice demanded by earning that money. “My son said to me, ‘Mama, you work more than you stay home. You go to work and you come home and sleep and shower.’ That hurt me.”
After a series of family and medical issues kept her away from the job, Stoudymire was let go. Now, at age 30, she has a new plan: opening a combination day-care and child-portrait business out of her Queens home. Skills aren’t the hard part. She just has to figure out how to make it all work as a proper business.
One night in the late fall, Stoudymire and a dozen other mothers and grandmothers attended a child-care business-development class conducted by the Business Outreach Center Network, a group that offers training and small loans to mostly immigrant clients. The women listened raptly as a trainer walked them through the impressive array of expertise they already have. “The word just—let’s eliminate that,” the trainer chided one woman, a gray-haired grandmother with a small, informal day care who introduced herself too humbly. “You’re not ‘just’ a child-care provider. You’re a child-care provider.”
Over the next two hours the women traded hard-won child-rearing and babysitting wisdom. Throughout, the trainer nudged the women toward a business owner’s mind-set, noting their legal responsibilities, marketing advantages, and money-saving opportunities. “Start looking at things in your house right now that could be used. Take off your adult cap and think as a child. What’s a toy?” She put a shoebox face down, propped the lid on its edge like a ramp, and sent a toy car sailing downward. “You don’t have to buy this! You’ve all got on shoes.”
Stoudymire and her classmates will go through 22 sessions like this, learn how to acquire free start-up supplies, and qualify to apply for a $1,000 grant. Since 2003, the BOC Network has put almost 800 New York City women through this training and given them more than $170,000 in grants. By BOC’s tally, the businesses those women later built created more than 275 jobs.
At the previous week’s orientation, Stoudymire burst into tears of joy as she listened to the talk about the market advantage of providers who understand kids’ developmental challenges and can help navigate city bureaucracy. She had that feeling all innovators get, that conviction that they know something nobody else does. And she embraced an emotion few have found in the recent economic downturn, declaring, “I’m excited.”
Excerpted from The American Prospect (Jan.-Feb. 2010), a perennial Utne Reader staff favorite for its smart, authoritative political reporting. A 2010 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for political coverage and general excellence.www.prospect.org
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
by Kai Wright, from The American Prospect
Excerpted from Utne Reader here;
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
Loretta Harrison is a born hustler.
“I been making and selling things since I was about 8 years old,” says the 45-year-old unemployed mom. She buys wholesale in Manhattan—balloons, socks, scarves, you name it—then loads up a pushcart and sells at retail prices on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. She’s peddled Icees off the back of a tricycle, teamed up with her teenage son to hawk bottled water for a dollar at stoplights, and organized “passion parties” where she brings together groups of women to gab about sex and buy erotic toys. “I love sales,” she says. “For me to have something that somebody else wants and for them to go in their pocket and bring out hard-earned money to get what I have is just—it’s like a high to me.”
Harrison hasn’t worked a traditional full-time job in nearly 14 years, since her eldest son, Malcolm, had a series of seizures in the second grade that resulted in brain damage. “After that, you know, he was a paranoid schizophrenic,” she says. “He’d think he didn’t have enough sugar in his cereal, and he’d run away and tell people we were bothering him. Punch out the windows and stuff.” So she quit her job delivering mail in the neighborhood to take care of him and her then-newborn daughter. “That whole year,” she says, “my Ready Teddy bags were the only thing that kept me going.”
Ready Teddy is Harrison’s pride and joy. It’s a crocheted teddy bear–and-tote combo that she’s been making since 1992. In the past, she’s sold the bags in a Brooklyn craft store for $35 a pop but now moves them herself for $20. “When I had people selling for me, I would charge them $15. They’d sell it for $20 and take out $5,” she explains, rattling off pricing and staffing schemes that have never been written down, let alone put into a business plan.
In fact, Harrison can’t so much as give a ballpark estimate of how much money she’s made or lost year to year on all of her little businesses. She figures that between her sales and her wage jobs—as a supermarket cashier, a newspaper carrier, a crossing guard—her income has probably peaked at $25,000 in a year. “As far as keeping records and whatnot—Loretta’s not so good at keeping records,” she jokes. “Especially when you get the money and you end up having to spend the money to live.”
Whether and how Harrison can actually live off her sales schemes are larger questions than she knows—and ones that may be getting more attention in coming years, as policy makers grope for solutions to the joblessness that’s strangling cities. Unemployment was at 10 percent at the end of 2009. More families went hungry in 2008 than at any time on record—an estimated 17 million households—and the poverty rate reached higher than it has been in more than a decade.
The conventional debate over how to help families who find themselves counted among those doleful statistics focuses on the social safety net—do we boost supports like welfare, provide low-skill job training, or just force folks to try harder to find work? The assumption lurking behind all of these answers is that poor people are broken and need to be fixed, or at least propped up. But a rarely noticed industry of small-business advocates and lenders say the problem is the other way around. What we need, they argue, is an economy that values the remarkable entrepreneurial instincts that people like Harrison already have. Their research suggests that with relatively small investments for training and with loans of as little as $500, small side hustles like Harrison’s could get neighborhoods like Jamaica churning with enterprise.
Microenterprise, as it’s called, has long been associated with the developing world. The Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus pioneered the idea back in 1976 with a $27 loan to a group of Bangladeshi businesswomen following a famine. A global industry has since parceled out billions of dollars in microloans, and Yunus has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. But while the idea owes its fame to the developing world, it has also been slowly building in America since the mid-1980s—it’s just been ignored by an economic and political culture obsessed with the pursuit of large, rapid growth.
Now, with the U.S. economy in disarray, domestic microenterprise advocates believe this is finally their moment in the sun. Both Grameen and the celebrated peer-to-peer lending tool Kiva.org have announced new U.S. ventures since the recession began. And after years of hostility from Bush-era Washington, micro enterprise development has won the support of both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
The effort is thus far relatively tiny: The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO), a trade group, estimates that $100 million to $150 million is invested annually in U.S. microenterprise development. But industry researchers argue that Harrison is among an estimated 10 million low- to moderate-income people who could turn their ideas and hustles into thriving, job-creating businesses—and rescue inner-city economies in the process.
America’s roughly 6 million small businesses—defined as firms with fewer than 500 workers—employ about half the nation’s private-sector workforce. Another 21.7 million people ran their own businesses without employees in 2007. Politicians of all stripes love to laud these folks. In the American political narrative, small-business owners do everything from creating jobs to building communities. And they’re the people for whom Congress is still trying to pry open traditional credit markets. As President Barack Obama proclaimed in May 2009, “The entrepreneurial spirit lies at the core of our nation’s economy and identity.” Microenterprise-development advocates say politicians and bankers shouldn’t view people like Harrison any differently.
Microenterprise is defined, officially, as any business with fewer than five employees that takes less than $35,000 to get off the ground. According to the Aspen Institute’s Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination (FIELD), the vast majority of these ventures are both owned and staffed by an individual or a family. The AEO estimates that more than 24 million such businesses exist in the United States.
The idea of building upon tiny, family- run businesses has never caught on in U.S. economic-development circles. But according to Aspen’s most recent count, at least 500 organizations around the country either lend money or provide training to people who are trying to use small business to thwart poverty. The field started off providing capital largely to residents in black neighborhoods (particularly to black women) who had been walled off from banks for decades; it has since grown and splintered into both money lending and business training. Fifty-eight percent of the clients of today’s microenterprise-development groups are people of color, according to FIELD, and about 60 percent are women.
The changes driven by microenterprise programs are incremental but nonetheless meaningful. In 2008 Aspen surveyed about 1,400 clients served by micro enterprise-development groups. Over half of those who were living below the poverty line when they joined the programs had risen above it within a year. Average household income went from just under $30,000 to $36,000.
The programs have demonstrated a clear ability to help clients build sustainable businesses. In Aspen’s 2008 survey, nearly two-thirds of people who didn’t have businesses when they entered a program successfully got one started. Those new businesses split about evenly between full-time and part-time ventures; the full-time ones generated median revenues of $40,000 in 2007. That’s not Wall Street money, but it’s enough to move a family out of poverty-wage labor. And the biggest programs show even more potential. ACCION USA—the nation’s largest microlender—spokesperson Laura Kozien says, “For every microloan that ACCION approves, 2.7 jobs are created in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods.”
Tasha Stoudymire started working in department-store photo studios in high school when she took her newborn son for a portrait and ended up applying for a job. Over 11 years, she scraped her way up from $5.15 an hour to $16.70 an hour. “I couldn’t stand it,” she says of the sacrifice demanded by earning that money. “My son said to me, ‘Mama, you work more than you stay home. You go to work and you come home and sleep and shower.’ That hurt me.”
After a series of family and medical issues kept her away from the job, Stoudymire was let go. Now, at age 30, she has a new plan: opening a combination day-care and child-portrait business out of her Queens home. Skills aren’t the hard part. She just has to figure out how to make it all work as a proper business.
One night in the late fall, Stoudymire and a dozen other mothers and grandmothers attended a child-care business-development class conducted by the Business Outreach Center Network, a group that offers training and small loans to mostly immigrant clients. The women listened raptly as a trainer walked them through the impressive array of expertise they already have. “The word just—let’s eliminate that,” the trainer chided one woman, a gray-haired grandmother with a small, informal day care who introduced herself too humbly. “You’re not ‘just’ a child-care provider. You’re a child-care provider.”
Over the next two hours the women traded hard-won child-rearing and babysitting wisdom. Throughout, the trainer nudged the women toward a business owner’s mind-set, noting their legal responsibilities, marketing advantages, and money-saving opportunities. “Start looking at things in your house right now that could be used. Take off your adult cap and think as a child. What’s a toy?” She put a shoebox face down, propped the lid on its edge like a ramp, and sent a toy car sailing downward. “You don’t have to buy this! You’ve all got on shoes.”
Stoudymire and her classmates will go through 22 sessions like this, learn how to acquire free start-up supplies, and qualify to apply for a $1,000 grant. Since 2003, the BOC Network has put almost 800 New York City women through this training and given them more than $170,000 in grants. By BOC’s tally, the businesses those women later built created more than 275 jobs.
At the previous week’s orientation, Stoudymire burst into tears of joy as she listened to the talk about the market advantage of providers who understand kids’ developmental challenges and can help navigate city bureaucracy. She had that feeling all innovators get, that conviction that they know something nobody else does. And she embraced an emotion few have found in the recent economic downturn, declaring, “I’m excited.”
Excerpted from The American Prospect (Jan.-Feb. 2010), a perennial Utne Reader staff favorite for its smart, authoritative political reporting. A 2010 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for political coverage and general excellence.www.prospect.org
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Smart City Radio
Smart City is a weekly, hour-long public radio talk show that takes an in-depth look at urban life, the people, places, ideas and trends shaping cities. Host Carol Coletta talks with national and international public policy experts, elected officials, economists, business leaders, artists, developers, planners and others for a penetrating discussion of urban issues. You can find a list of radio stations that air Smart City here
The guests on today's show offered ideas about building sustainability in areas of economic distress and poverty.
Katy Locker, Dave Egner and Prathima Manohar
Detroit is in the news again with Time Magazine launching a bureau of sorts from the city. But to get a real local's perspective we'll talk with Katy Locker and David Egner of the Hudson Webber Foundation. Hudson Webber provides grants to improve the quality
The guests on today's show offered ideas about building sustainability in areas of economic distress and poverty.
Katy Locker, Dave Egner and Prathima Manohar
Detroit is in the news again with Time Magazine launching a bureau of sorts from the city. But to get a real local's perspective we'll talk with Katy Locker and David Egner of the Hudson Webber Foundation. Hudson Webber provides grants to improve the quality
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