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Today’s Webinar – Serving Veterans? Micro Bills Passed! Credit Survey

In this Must Know

Are You Serving Veteran Entrepreneurs?

How does your organization support entrepreneurship among military families?

CAMEO’s WOVEN program – Women Veteran Entrepreneurship Network – offers year-round community events to foster new businesses. Veterans Day is an excellent time to promote your business development classes and special programs for veterans, military spouses and caregivers. Join us for tips on how to engage more military-connected business owners in time for Veteran’s Day and Veteran’s Small Business Week (November 5-9). Hint: don’t ask them if they are a veteran or not. Find out what to ask instead.

Register for our Serving Veteran Entrepreneurs webinar on Thursday, September 20, 2018, at 2:00 pm. We’ll also leave time for attendees to share best practices on what you are doing to serve veteran entrepreneurs.

  • Melanie Rae, CAMEO’s WOVEN Program Director and founder/author of Guided Business Plan
  • Alicia Ogozlay, WOVEN Member, US Air Force, owner, Exclusive Beauty
  • Melissa Washington, founder, Women Veterans Alliance
  • Mike McGrane, VP, Regional Lending Director, Veterans Launch

Entrepreneurship offers veterans increased opportunities to maximize their strengths and skills, to achieve their financial and career goals, and to customize their employment to accommodate their challenges. Microbusiness and self-employment are often the most appropriate option for returning veterans because of the technology available and the flexibility afforded.

Two Bills Signed by Governor – Waiting for One More

Governor Brown signed two bills that will help California micro-entrepreneurs!

AB 626 will allow the sale of meals prepared in home kitchens. For time eternal, one way many families earned extra money was by cooking and selling meals from their home kitchen. Enter a more complicated economy and this became problematic mainly because of health concerns. According to the C.O.O.K. Alliance under this bill, “microenterprise home kitchens will be allowed to sell up to $50,000 per year – these new operations are intended for incubators or ancillary income, not a substitute for commercial-scale operations.” They estimate start-up costs just shy of $900.

Under SB 946 sidewalk vending will no longer be criminalized anywhere in California. According to our friends in LA that worked on the bill – Public Counsel, LURN – “vendors with pending citations and prior convictions will have an opportunity to clear their record, and vendors will now have a path to legal vending. This means that tens of thousands of low-income entrepreneurs, workers, immigrants, and their families will be better protected from the harms of criminalization and will have better access to economic opportunity.”

We agree with our friends at Small Business Majority who said

We support any legislation that would help entrepreneurs thrive, and AB 626 [and SB 926] will do just that. We’re glad California recognized the part [these laws] will play in bolstering small business activity.

SB 1235, the small business truth-in-lending bill, still needs to be signed by the Governor. Please send a letter ASAP to Governor Brown asking him to sign SB 1235 (click for a template). Email to leg.unit@gov.ca.gov and cc hpickman (at) microbiz (dot) org. Please get your letters in now!

Federal Reserve Survey on Small Business Credit

Please send this email to your clients and have them participate in the survey – it’s been super useful in understanding small business credit needs.

CAMEO is partnering with the Federal Reserve to conduct a Small Business Credit Survey for both pre-start and existing businesses, and we’d like you to participate. This short survey will take approximately 9 minutes and will ask about business conditions, financing needs, and credit experiences. Summary results will be shared with you, and all responses are confidential.

The survey highlights the experiences of small businesses and provides critical information that service providers, policymakers, and lenders use to improve programs for small business owners.

Please click this link to complete the Federal Reserve Small Business Credit survey.

The survey closes December 8, 2018. Questions? Contact SFFedSmallBusiness@sf.frb.org.

The SBA recently released a report on small business lending based on data from banks. Suprise, surprise, The largest growth was in loans under $100,000, which grew by 7.0 percent from June 2015 to June 2016.

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!

CAMEO in the News: Read CAMEO’s op-ed with Small Business Majority – Another Voice: Truth-in-Lending bill would benefit California’s small businesses.

Disaster Prep Resources: Download Operation Hope’s Personal Disaster Preparedness Guide and FEMA’s Emergency Financial First Aid Kit (EFFAK).

For Your Clients: Samaschool’s 1-hour Gig Economy Essentials training is newly available on the web to anyone! It covers critical topics like freelancing vs. employment, where to find freelance work, and how to attract clients.

Advocacy Tool: Prosperity Now has an Advocacy Center where you can find information on your legislators and how they voted on issues that affect small business and the asset building community. 1. Visit their Advocacy Center. 2. Click the “My Legislators” button. (If you are new to the Advocacy Center, enter your contact information on the next page.) 3. Select the legislator from the drop-down menu (state and federal legislators are listed) and explore.

Grant Opportunity: NALCAB will provide grants of $45,000 (and organizational assistance and facilitate a community of practice) to up to 12 organizations for a grant period of 18 months to support best practice based services to advance family financial capability in low-and-moderate income Latino and immigrant communities. The purpose of this grant is to help organizations more fully integrate financial capability services into existing asset building programs, including small business development services. Applications due September 28, 2018. Click on the link for RFP.

Professional Development: Join NALCAB’s National Training and engage with a diverse group of network experts who believe that Juntos Somos Más/Together, We Are More. The training will be held October 1-4, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. NALCAB’s training serves as a platform to share and learn about innovative and culturally relevant best practices for application in the communities that they serve.

Professional Conference: The 34th OFN Conference – “CDFIs: Agents of Change” – takes place October 8-11, 2018 at the Marriott Marquis Chicago.

Professional Conference: Join CalNonprofits for their policy convention – Nonprofits Standing Up for California – on Thursday, October 18, 2018, in Los Angeles. The agenda includes a discussion on Census 2020 and a keynote by Vu Le, the creator of NonprofitAF.com.

Professional Development: CALED is partnering with the California Academy for Economic Development, Fresno State, and the University Business Center, to bring you the Introduction to Economic Development Certificate Program (click the link for the agenda and more information.) The class will be held October 22-25, 2018 in Fresno.

For Your Clients: Prospera hosts Second Annual Summit for Latina Entrepreneurs, Saturday, October 27, 2018, from 8:30 am – 6:30 pm. The focus of this year is to connect over 100 Latina entrepreneurs from across the Bay Area to each other and to leaders in the women’s economic empowerment space. Here is a link with all the information about the Summit, agenda, volunteer opportunities.

Professional Conference: Save the date for Asset Funder’s Network Annual Bay Area Asset Building Conference on November 1, 2018, in Oakland.

Professional Development: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) will host two workshops – Credit Risk and Operational Risk Workshop – at the Holiday Inn San Francisco-Golden Gateway, San Francisco on November 6-7, 2018 for directors of national community banks and federal savings associations supervised by the OCC.

For Your Clients: The U.S. Small Business Administration is now accepting nominations for its 2019 National Small Business Week Awards, including the annual Small Business Person of the Year. The deadline is January 9, 2019.

For Your Clients: Greenlining invites you to take the 2018 Survey of U.S. Latino Business Owners. Every year, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) surveys thousands of Latino business owners across the country to measure the critical impact Latino entrepreneurs have on the U.S. economy. Let your clients know that if they fill out a survey, they will have a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card (for completed surveys).

New Report: Accion and Opportunity Fund conducted a study to understand how small businesses perform after receiving capital from mission-based lenders. They tracked 500 clients to observe sustainability, sales, profit, and employment capability. Some of the highlights: the majority of small businesses that obtain loan funds from mission-based lenders remain in business 2-3 years after receiving capital; over 50% increased in sales and profits, and small business owners who received loan funds experienced increased feelings of competence and confidence. The findings present a case for the importance of mission-based lenders to the goal of creating financial inclusion for underserved entrepreneurs.

New Report: The new 2018 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report commissioned by American Express does a fantastic job of measuring successes. Four out of every 10 businesses in the United States is now women-owned. It also shows us the challenges. Women-owned businesses still see only 4.3% of total revenues and 8% of all employment.

New Report: Emergent Research released “MBO Partners State of Independence in America,” a study which offers insights into the growth of the independent workforce.

New Resource: The California Reinvestment Coalition has released a guide for banks on how to better serve immigrant communities.

New Resource: Credit Builders Alliance released Achieving Credit Strength: A Toolkit for Supporting Returning Citizen Entrepreneurs.