Kim Horan set up a meeting with Pia Chock from the Small Business Development Center about possibly partnering with them for business consulting/mentoring of for our loan recipients. The SBDC is federally funded resource that allows clients to meet with their mentors as often as they need and it would provide its services for free.
Also joining us was Len Fukushima from Merrill Lynch. Len had a nbunch of really interesting ideas to consider:
— go to banks and credit unions around town, ask for $5,000 to fund a micro-loan, and in return they get to place one person on the Loan Selection Committee to ensure accountability
— go to the respective Chambers of Commerce (Filipino, Chinese, Japanese) and ask them for free membership for the loan recipients
— centralized bookkeeping system: standardize the process by having a link from the central website to Quickbooks or other accounting software; each borrower would have her/his own password and account; the SBDC mentor could help with inputting the data (sales, receipts, etc.)
Ultimately, as Len and Pia pointed out, there needs to be accountability built into this program. How does the mentoring work after the loan is given out? How do encourage borrowers to work together with their peer groups to enable success? And when things go wrong, we need to be able to ask "Who is to Blame?" And then we need to know how to fix the problems and educate the people so that we can continue moving forward.
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