- DIY Activities Abound
- Happy Holidays
- Save the Date for the MicroLenders Forum on January 15, 2015 in San Francisco
- The Goodies – This week’s highlight includes nominations from the public for exceptional entrepreneurs and those that champion them for National Small Business Week. The deadline is January 5, 2015. Nominate a client!
DIY Activities Abound
The past week has been full of activity around the DIY economy.
On Wednesday, December 10, Claudia and I went to Sacramento to brief the California Legislative Women’s Caucus on the DIY, self-employment and what they can do to support economic opportunities for women through entrepreneurship. Thanks to Steve King from Emergent Research whose data makes a compeling case for this approach. As everyone knows, one of the tools in an entrepreneurial ecosystem is business assistance. To that end, one of our policy recommendations was a state match for the Women’s Business Centers.
Then yesterday, the CAMEO staff took a field trip to visit Larry Cope, the head of economic development in Tuolome County, at his office in Sonora (see photo). Read the blog post to find out why Larry’s work is the epitome of a DIY economy.
Our friends at BALLE hosted a webinar – Creating a Thriving Ecosystem: Business Alliances, Incubators & Accelerators – that you can now download. A bit more about the webinar:
Across the country, countless business networks are organizing local entrepreneurs to support new systems of economic development in their regions. Different models for this have emerged, including business alliances, incubators and accelerators, shared work spaces, community development corporations, social justice organizations, technical assistance providers, and collaborative initiatives. Choosing the right model requires careful assessment of the local environment and the tools and resources it will take to create a thriving network.
Happy Holidays
CAMEO wishes you a very happy and healthy holiday season. We will be closed December 24, 2014 until January 2, 2015. And if you still need to buy gifts, consider spending most of your money on locally-owned independent businesses, especially those that CAMEO members help. The following links will get you started.
- Working Solutions has quite a few unique vendors in their Holiday Gift Guide.
- OBDC offers up a map of all of the small businesses that they’ve helped.
- The Pacific Coast Ventures 2014 Holiday Gift Guide has discounts on clothing and sourdough bread.
- La Cocina sells gift boxes of yummy treats from $35-100.
- Legal Services for Entrepreneurs (LSE), a project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, published a comprehensive holiday guide filled with caterers, gifts and other holiday needs.
- Opportunity Fund has their Opportunity Funded Business Directory. This year they featured “You Smell” soaps and Coolhaus pint of the month club.
- Women’s Economic Ventures (WEV) has put their gift guide on their Facebook page.
The Goodies
New opportunities for training, conference information, funding, scholarships, and other information that have crossed our desks since the last Must Know. I have posted a running tab of current Industry Goodies on the CAMEO website that lists items that were in past emails. Check it out to make sure you’re not missing anything, like grants whose deadlines are still alive!
Take Action: Our friends at California Reinvestment Coalition are supporting a proposed rule change to the Military Lending Act that caps interest rates at 36 percent for a wide range of high-cost loans made to active-duty service members. The DoD is hearing from lenders that want to continue targeting service members with triple digit interest loans, so they need to hear from consumer, community and military groups that enough is enough. Please join CRC and hundreds of allies across the country in urging the DoD to secure consumer protections for our nation’s active duty military service members.
Award Nominations: National Small Business Week has been recognizing the special impact made by outstanding entrepreneurs and small business owners since 1963. During this week, the U.S. Small Business Administration honors small business owners and entrepreneurs for their outstanding achievements through various awards. SBA is currently seeking nominations from the public for exceptional entrepreneurs and those that champion them. The deadline is January 5, 2015.
Free Webinar: Cutting Edge Capital presents The Better Way to Crowdfund on January 14, 2015, 11:00am – 12:00pm PT. A Direct Public Offering (DPO) is a form of investment crowdfunding in which anyone can participate. DPOs do not need to wait for regulations under the JOBS Act—they are already legal. In this webinar you will learn about the crowdfunding tool that lets you raise investment capital from anyone and what are the three keys to a successful crowdfunding campaign.
For Your Clients: If you know of any business or entrepreneurial nonprofit that might be interested in raising money using a Direct Public Offering (this allows you to legally raise capital from both wealthy and non-wealthy investors and do public advertising), please let them know about Cutting Edge Capital’s DPO boot camp. The boot camp is virtual and can be done at your own pace at any location where you have access to a computer! It launches in late January.
2013 Annual Census: We have crunched the numbers for 2013 and the landscape of the micro sector is a mixed bag. Lending increased in 2013 by 30% over 2012. Our members made 2,049 loans, for a total volume of $26 million, exceeding pre-recession lending for the first time. But as a group, we have served fewer clients and businesses each year since 2010 and have supported fewer employees each year.