Published June 2005

SBA’s technical services
opened to nonprofits

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

For years, small-business owners needing help in getting their enterprises off the ground — or keeping them soaring over the long term — have sought help offered through the U.S. Small Business Administration and its resource partners in the form of low-cost or no-cost business workshops and one-on-one counseling.

Now, that help is being extended to nonprofit secular and faith-based organizations thanks to the creation of an SBA Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, part of President Bush’s larger vision to support the efforts of grass-roots organizations to improve their communities.

“By working more closely with faith-based and other organizations, we can advance the president’s goal of bringing jobs and hope to economically distressed communities all across our nation,” said SBA Administrator Hector Barreto in announcing the new center in February.

As part of the initiative, the SBA’s technical assistance grant recipients such as Small Business Development Centers, Women’s Business Centers and the Service Corps of Retired Executives, or SCORE, are being encouraged to extend their counseling and workshop services to nonprofit organizations, said Julie McFarlane, lead business development specialist for the SBA’s Seattle District Office.

According to the SBA, the agency’s rules have been changed to ensure that grant recipients can provide technical assistance to nonprofit organizations that focus a significant portion of their activities on aiding small businesses.

“What we’re finding out is that nonprofits have a lot of the same issues that for-profits do: basic issues of business planning, marketing strategies, hiring and firing,” said McFarlane, who is responsible for marketing and outreach as well as program development and promotion.

“The other thing that we’ve really been doing is making contact with faith-based and community organizations to see if we could work with them to provide entrepreneurial (help) for their clients,” she said.

Across the country, the new initiative has led to:

• SBA’s Illinois District Office providing a faith-based business school with a wide range of services to help graduates establish successful small businesses.
• SBA’s Cleveland District Office working with the Urban League to develop a supplemental equity fund for SBA loans.
• SBA’s North Florida District Office helping the faith-based FreshMinistries start a small-business incubator.

Closer to home, the Seattle District Office has worked with the YWCA in Seattle to put together a class on entrepreneurship for clients interested in starting their own business, McFarlane said.

And in March, the SBA and other federal agencies involved in the president’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives program held an informational forum in Olympia to highlight programs and grants available to community programs.

“It was great. We had about 80 or 90 (community) organizations represented there,” McFarlane said. “... We’re planning on doing another one of those in Yakima and maybe Mount Vernon later this summer, possibly.”

Although the Seattle District Office has been offering assistance to nonprofit community organizations for just the past few months, the SBA’s Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives has been a year in the making, following President Bush’s issuing of Executive Order 13342 in June 2004, which called for the establishment of such a center within the agency.

The SBA is one of 10 federal agencies operating a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Others include the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor, Agriculture, Commerce and Veterans Affairs, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For more information on the SBA’s Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, call the Seattle District Office at 206-553-7310 or go online to www.sba.gov/fbci.

Back to the top/June 2005 Main Menu