According to a release in Yahoo Finance, there are 1.8 million female entrepreneurs, earning revenue from $25o thousand to $750 thousand, annually. The Count Me In Program for Womens Independence that is designed to assist female owned businesses with their needs. The program, essentially, is about building small businesses in America. The Make Mine a Million $ Business Race (MP3) is an extended part of that program, sponsored by such corporations as Sam’s Club, American Express, FEDEX, OPEN, Dell, Jet Blue, and Readers’ Digest.
Count Me In assists women entrepreneurs by coaching them in everything from hiring new employees, utilizing new services and technology to ramping up their businesses. The MP3 program is hoping to help creat 500,000 new jobs for the American Economy. There is more to the program and the organization, I’m sure, but that is enough to get into at the moment. the fact is it is not only a good thing, it is a proactive element in a time when even the experts are scrambling to find answers to our being mired in economic catastrophe.
We should see more programs like this. We should not only see where corporations contribute to helping small business people get off the ground but where they help develop retraining programs that will transfer new skills to those who otherwise are nearly unemployable. Perhaps it is also time for a National Service, where kids college graduates and others can get serious tax or tuition credits for utilizing their skills in economically blighted areas. Perhaps, we can motivate our skilled younger generation to help rejuvenate businesses in the rust belt areas and such by developing new industries through the use of modern technologies and business techniques. It’s a win-win situation. The younger graduates get true on the job experience, and the economically blighted regions can reestablish themselves as industrial centers or sort.
Forget about Vista and the Peace Corps, with its more or less menial tasks. We have talented retired people as well as younger people who could make major contributions by developing businesses in sections of the country where people are unemployed at alarming rates. We have people out of work who are skilled executives, technology people, managers, who would be happy to be working, even at reduced salaries. This would be like a WPA program with teeth. A good preemployment screening would best assess the skills of any volunteers or paid staff members so they could be strategically deployed where they would do the most good. People can come from all types of professional backgrounds. IT people, business people, financial people, supply chain management executives, send them in to make new businesses out of these old factories and warehouses that are scatted throughout the country. Let them resuscitate the older industries. Granted, some will remain out of date, but others can be instituted. It is clear with the economic climate being what it is, it may be necessary to do more manufacturing of goods, not just services, within our own borders.
While Congress bandies about this bailout plan, perhaps it should take time out to include programs that empower people to make their own money. Becuase rather than merely bailing out certain regions, we will be establishing enduring busineses based on modern principles and technology.
