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Federal Ups and Downs; Awards Won!

Save the Dates: 1) December 3, 2013 is the Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium in Los Angeles – Food, Glorious Food Biz. 2) Microlending Summit will be on January 9, 2014 in San Francisco.

  • Federal Ups and Downs
  • Ms. CAMEO Chalks Up Another Two Awards
  • The Goodies – This week’s highlight includes a CAMEO co-sponsored webinar series that will discuss the new healthcare law – the Affordable Care Act – and what it means for California small businesses. The webinars take place at 10:00am PDT on October 8 and 15. Feel free to forward to your clients.

Federal Ups and Downs

This week, all eyes are on Washington.

First the good news: Covered California opened for business on Tuesday. It’s a one-stop shop online health insurance marketplace where small businesses and the self-employed can buy health insurance. See the goodies for a webinar for you and your clients that will explain their options. We expect that the ability to obtain individual health insurance at reasonable prices might enable more people to become self-employed. Please pay attention to any uptick in clients. Also be on the look out for opportunities to market to this segment.

And the bad news: The Federal Government is closed. The big picture is that about 800,000 government workers are furloughed and won’t go back to work until Congress can co-operate – and that includes the Small Business Administration. The only people working at the SBA are those working on the Disaster Loan Program (see SBA’s full shutdown plan. Everyone else is at home. Hopefully, you don’t need help at SBA’s WBC office or the SBDC office. And hope you don’t need a loan guarantee. Hopefully, this ends soon.

Ms. CAMEO Chalks Up Another Two Awards

Award #1: Next Thursday, Claudia will be in DC to accept the Public Policy Award from Women Impacting Public Policy. Claudia won the award for leading CAMEO’s advocacy efforts in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. We work on behalf of our members to ensure the sustainability and growth of our micro-business development field, a large segment of which serve women. CAMEO serves as the large, unified voice that represents many small enterprises in the halls of power. WIPP President and CEO Barbara Kasoff said of the award:

We are in the midst of a large shift in economic history and rely on our WIPP leaders for their advice and their strong voices on behalf of women entrepreneurs.

Award #2: The online voting we did for Claudia about a month ago paid off. We just received notice that Claudia was named a Top 100 Champion in the 2013 Small Business Influencer Awards in the leader category. The Small Business Influencer Awards honor those who are influential to small businesses in North America, through the products, services, knowledge, information or support they provide to the small business market.

What a way to celebrate National Women’s Small Business Month during the month of October!

The Goodies

New opportunities for trainings, 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 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!

Healthcare Webinars: CAMEO co-sponsors and Small Business Majority and Small Business Administration are hosting a webinar series that will discuss the new healthcare law – the Affordable Care Act – and what it means for California small businesses. The webinars take place at 10:00am PDT on October 1, 8, 15. Feel free to forward to your clients.

White House Business Summit: Our friends at The American Sustainable Business Council, hosts The Business Summit for a Sustainable Economy in Washington, D.C. from October 22-24. CAMEO members are eligible for a discounted ticket to the summit with the code summit2013partner. Small meetings with Cabinet agencies, e.g. SBA, USDA, etc., will be held and policies to support our sector will be promoted. This group has growing influence in D.C. and influenced DOL to support entrepreneurship. Learn more and register for the business summit.

New Report: FIELD’s newest publication “Sustaining the Delivery of Business Development Services” offers strategies and practices for mobilizing funding for microenterprise training services. It shares insights on how large-scale training organizations pursue resource mobilization and cost recovery to sustain delivery of services over the long term. Read the report or listen to the webinar.

New Report: FIELD has a new case study, Scaling Business Development Services through Distance Learning, profiles the experiences and lessons WESST has learned in developing distance-learning services to assist entrepreneurs across New Mexico. You can also listen to a recorded webinar on WESST’s distance learning experience.

CAMEO Guest Blog: Read about the challenges and elements of success in implementing the MMS platform on the CFED blog.

New Report: We posted a very illuminating recent academic study that concludes that getting a loan contributes to start-up success. The authors determined that “start-ups receiving funding are dramatically more likely to survive, enjoy higher revenues and create more jobs.”