California's rural microenterprise programs face special challenges in the areas of funding and service delivery. CAMEO recently posed the following questions to some of its rural members. Their responses are paraphrased below. Many thanks to Susan Berry of Health and Environment in Lakeport, Tom Dille of Sierra Economic Development District in Auburn, Sheilah Rogers of West Company in Ukiah, Nancy Swift of Jefferson Economic Development Center in Mt. Shasta, and Christine Weiss of Rural Strategies for their insights and advice.

We know that in rural areas clients often have more difficulty getting to business classes or meeting with consultants. How have you overcome service delivery challenges for your clients?

We use strategies such as home delivery of technical assistance by using phone, mail, email, website and fax, so that clients don't have to leave their business location to get services.

We are a micro-lending program. We use the circuit rider counseling of the local SBDC to encourage applications in remote areas. We may ask the SBDC to meet with clients when problems arise or make additional trips to assist them. We haven't yet found a means to deliver true rural "classroom" training.

We have teamed up with a local school district's adult education program. We think this can be a means of service delivery wherever adult education programs exist.

We calculate their assistance for in-kind match.

We use roving counselors. It's costly, but it's the way we know to be most effective.

We share the cost with our local SBDC. We also partner with them for our trainings, and our partnership enables us to access other state resources for our clients.

We partner with our local community college. They have videoconference capability; we're going to experiment with this by teaching a business development class in one location and broadcasting to two others.

Our microenterprise program is linked to CalWORKs. We work closely with county DSS staff on meeting common service delivery challenges (including transportation and child care issues).

We rotate our trainings in different locations. Any one county doesn't always have a regular presence, but it does receive our services at some point within a two-year period.

In each county we identify an organization, group, or place that has some capacity so we can deliver services to the county through it. We bring our microenterprise experience to these existing entities and they help market and build relationships for us. This strengthens their capacity as a resource in their community.

Many rural programs deliver their training in the form of workshops rather than training sessions held two or three times a week. Transportation and time are both factors, since many programs are located miles away from the people who want them.

One of the main differences between rural and urban programs is that urban programs assume that customers will come to the training they have set up, and rural programs set up the training depending on what the customers can do.

Rural programs generally have fewer clients and therefore have difficulty demonstrating as high an impact as urban-based programs. Have you experienced difficulty competing with urban programs for funding? If so, how have you managed to overcome this?

Yes. There are no corporate headquarters here and small foundations often fund only in urban areas. We are top-heavy in public funds…not recommended because they are expensive, with lots of reporting requirements.

We have had good relationships with major banks and two national foundations.
We are conducting research on planned giving, donor campaigns, alumni associations, and social entrepreneurship. We could use help analyzing the prospects.

Yes, this is an ongoing issue. Our agency gets most funding from federal sources. We are pursuing CAMEO's VISTA program to help us get the outreach in place for fundraising and program awareness.

The big banks want visibility and they don't see it in any rural environment. Small banks in our area say they make small loans, so they haven't helped to fund our microloan program. We have to show them that we make deals that they would never make, and will grow our clients to become their clients.

Yes. The population base is the main problem. We can't show the same kind of numbers an urban program can.

Yes. One of the fundamental problems is that the gravity of rural issues isn't understood well. Rural issues don't generally make the national news.
Sometimes grants are made to serve specific ethnic populations. In our area, Native Americans constitute 10 percent of the population. Ten percent of a small number to begin with further dilutes the pool that can potentially be served by the grant.
We have applied for grants regionally, partnering with other agencies to make the numbers bigger.

CRA money is not available to us. The big banks are located in urban areas, and local banks tend to satisfy their CRA requirements by serving on boards instead of giving money.

A couple of programs I know about have tapped Community Action Program money (CAPs) and are working with rural areas to diversify their programs.
What seems to work best for rural programs is to look for partnerships with more urban programs that are mandated to reach rural people, but don't have the experience to work with them.

The practitioners we surveyed indicated that these challenges are ongoing. To provide a forum for ideas and resources to meet these challenges, CAMEO will facilitate teleconferenced peer exchange on "The Challenge of Rural Service Delivery." To participate, please contact the CAMEO office by email at cameo@microbiz.org or by telephone at 510-238-8360.