News by SB Informer

Innovative Microenterprise Mentoring Project to Go Global With Spin-Off to Mercy Corps

 

SB Informer
Monday, July 31, 2006; 08:40 AM

MicroMentor, an innovative, online business mentoring project developed and operated in the U.S. through the Aspen Institute over the past five years, will expand globally as part of a spin-off to Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian relief and development agency. Transfer of the project will become official Oct. 1.

MicroMentor launched in 2001 to offer beginning entrepreneurs a chance to develop mentoring relationships via the Internet with experienced businesspeople who share their expertise on a wide range of subjects -- including product development, business planning and expansion, technology and marketing. Operated initially as a pilot project in California, MicroMentor captured such interest that it expanded nationally within two years.

Mercy Corps works to alleviate poverty by giving people the tools they need to build sustainable economies. The agency supports microenterprise development in both the United States and overseas, and views MicroMentor as a tool to marry its programming with an innovative technology that can deliver crucial expertise to emerging entrepreneurs wherever they are located.

The spin-off of MicroMentor to Mercy Corps "comes at an opportune time in the life of the project," said David Rand, who, as its director, helped take the California pilot national and positioned it more recently for greater expansion in the U.S. and abroad.

"Mercy Corps has the resources and infrastructure to help MicroMentor expand around the globe," Rand said. "Through the simple act of sharing business information via the Internet, we all envision nothing less than MicroMentor becoming a tool that enhances economic well-being for families everywhere. Everyone associated with MicroMentor is celebrating this move."

MicroMentor grew out of more than a decade of research conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based Aspen Institute's Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination (FIELD). That research underscored the need for advanced, one-on-one business advice, especially among "microentrepreneurs" -- those operating very small businesses capitalized with $35,000 or less.

In response, FIELD created MicroMentor to test an innovative method of providing microentrepreneurs with business advice based on a specific need -- not geographic proximity. MicroMentor neatly fit FIELD's interest in seeding an innovation that ultimately could become independent or turned over to another operating entity.

FIELD is a nonprofit research organization created to identify, develop and disseminate best practices in the microenterprise field, and to broadly educate policy makers, funders and others about microenterprise as an anti-poverty intervention.

Since its inception, MicroMentor has received grants and other supports from a broad range of funders, including: the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Friedman Family Fund, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Opportunities Program, the U.S. Small Business Administration's Program for Investment in Microenterprise, Citigroup Foundation and Hewlett-Packard Company, among others.

Mercy Corps, based in Portland, Ore., works in the U.S. and in 40 countries around the world to provide emergency relief services, build sustainable economies and promote civil society.

The first step in the transition of MicroMentor to Mercy Corps began in mid-July with the departure of Rand, who decided to the leave the project to pursue a life-long goal of living and working in Europe. In some ways, however, MicroMentor's move to Mercy Corps will represent a "homecoming." Responsibility for the program at Mercy Corps will rest with Karen Doyle Grossman, who worked for FIELD in the late 1990s and was instrumental in both conceptualizing the project and managing it in its earliest days.

For more information please contact Elaine L. Edgcomb, director of FIELD, at 732-452-0143, or visit http://www.fieldus.org or http://www.micromentor.org or http://www.aspeninstitute.org or http://www.mercycorps.org.

The Aspen Institute, founded in 1950, is an international nonprofit dedicated to fostering enlightened leadership and open- minded dialogue. Through seminars, policy programs, conferences and leadership development initiatives, the Institute and its international partners seek to promote nonpartisan inquiry and an appreciation for timeless values. The Institute is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has campuses in Aspen, Colo., and on the Wye River on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Its international network includes partner Aspen Institutes in Berlin, Rome, Lyon, Tokyo and New Delhi, and leadership programs in Africa and Central America.

Alexandra Klaren of the Aspen Institute, 202-736-3848