President Obama gets it. He understands that small businesses hold the key to the American economy. But the president has a demand problem. His latest proposals, such as making TARP money available for community banks to lend, and tax deductions and incentives for more hiring and better wages, will only work if the nation’s small
– Doing things they way they’ve always been done is a good way to become irrelevant and behind-the-times. Dan’s gift is in creating a big picture perspective that describes future trends.
Members of CAMEO and the Association of Financial Development Corporations took another positive step this week toward restoring the $10 million gutted from the Small Business Loan Guarantee Trust Fund in the budget process. While cuts to every state program need be considered in order to get through these historic budget deficits, certain programs that
– Data Collection Training from Women’s Initiative: Collecting Data in Critical Times for microbusiness trainers
– Britt Bravo of Big Vision Consulting on how to use blogs, podcasts and other social media to spread the word about your organization’s cause.
– Britt Bravo of Big Vision Consulting on how to plan a social media strategy for your microbusiness or microenterprise support agency.
– Presentation from Jeff Jones of MicroMentor on how to scale your mentoring services using MicroMentor.
CAMEO sent the letter attached below to Senators Boxer and Feinstein and Speaker Pelosi to urge more funding for the SBA Micro Enterprise programs than currently recommended by the Senate Appropriations Committee. We continue to see TARP as a potential funding source for our members’ work and will keep up our advocacy efforts in this vein.
I just returned from several days in Washington DC, promoting the need for investment in Micro-Enterprise Development, and by, extension in the infrastructure of nonprofit training, technical assistance and financing programs represented by our CAMEO members. Like so many of you, I share your righteous disbelief at the fact that the banks receiving so many