Thursday, February 2, 2012

Microenterprise and Self-Employment Should be Included in Job Act! Your Thoughts?

By: Anonymous Guest Blogger

We are all in support of job creation. We all want the new Jobs Act to succeed and to help the economy recover. The act outlines the guidelines for how states must use federal funds to provide job training to their unemployed citizens. However, this training is only for existing jobs, and not for microenterprise training. At Women’s Initiative, we invest substantially in partnerships with other agencies and organizations who share our mission. Therefore we are attempting to partner with local Workforce Investment Boards to provide self-employment training to unemployed workers. Despite the success of our training program, we are not succeeding in such partnership attempts, because the law does not include funding for self-employment training.

Job training to support self-employment provides more numerous opportunities for job creation. The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO) conducted a study which found that if one in three microenterprises hired just one employee, the U.S. economy would reach full employment. The Microenterprise sector can play a powerful role in helping the American economy emerge into recovery and create jobs through small businesses. Please share your thoughts. What would you like to see in the new jobs act with regard to self-employment?

Click here for more information on the AEO’s study and the resulting “One in Three Alliance”: http://www.microenterpriseworks.org/

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