OEE focus to include literacy

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is refocusing what used to be called the Office of Business and Community Initiatives to better emphasize financial literacy and focus more on under-served markets such as inner-city business owners.
Now called the “Office of Entrepreneurship Education” (OEE), a division of the Office of Entrepreneurial Development, the federal office in Washington, D.C. was given a new name to “better brand and clarify what the office does,” said Holly Schick, deputy associate administrator of the SBA headquartered in the nation’s capital.
“It was a general business decision,” Schick said of the name change. “The name ‘Office of Business and Community Initiative’ has been around since 2000. … By renaming and re-branding, we have a better focus on what the core of that office really is,” Schick said. “Its focus really is entrepreneurship and education.”
Working with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the President’s Council on Financial Literacy, and other partners yet to be identified, “we will be outlining strategy over the next several months” to better define the goals of the OEE “to see where the SBA can best fill the gaps” in business education and support, she said. “We know there’s a lot more that could be done.”
One key change that already has taken place is the relocation of the SBA training network – an online education and training venue that offers more than 25 free courses to business owners – to the OEE. “It was a separate, stand-alone program,” Schick said of the training network. By moving it under the umbrella of the OEE, “we hope to get some good synergies,” she said. The SBA Web site currently draws approximately 48,500 hits every day. An estimated 34,000 clients use the training network each month.
Also on the SBA Web site (www.sba.gov), Schick noted, are a business plan template that can be downloaded and assessment tools to help business owners decide what courses they need to take online. After completing online courses, business owners are referred to their regional SBA district offices for follow-up and to SBA partners such as the Centers for Women & Enterprise and the Small Business Development Centers across the country.
Although Schick said it is not clear yet how the reorganization of OEE will affect individual states, it is certainly possible that district offices like the one in Providence will see more clients if more business owners take advantage of the online offerings. As a federal clearinghouse for information related to small-business development, the OEE is a “better and more powerful portal” than the former community initiatives site, Schick noted, and so more likely to draw new users.
The re-launch “will help small business ownership and strengthen SBA’s focus on improving the economies of under-served markets through small-business ownership,” said SBA Acting Administrator Jovita Carranza. “It will also help us move forward President Bush’s agenda to increase financial literacy, which is critical to advancing America’s economy.”
Schick explained that the added emphasis on financial literacy is intended to help small- business owners “understand the financial dynamics it takes to own and operate” a commercial enterprise.
“Financial literacy is critical to the success of any small business,” said Mark S. Hayward, director of the SBA Rhode Island District office. “The SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship Education will provide a convenient opportunity for Rhode Island entrepreneurs to obtain the financial knowledge that they need to start, grow and succeed in their enterprises.”
The new OEE will place special emphasis on the agency’s youth-entrepreneurship activities to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs. “Entrepreneurship education has become one of the strongest vehicles to deliver financial literacy at the high school and college levels,” the SBA said.
Schick noted that assisting under-served communities was a top priority of the former SBA Administrator Steven Preston, who left the agency to become head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) earlier this year. She defined the under-served as young entrepreneurs, business owners who are over 50 years old and those who run businesses in inner cities.
Federal officials suggest that helping the under-served and promoting financial literacy is one way to save blighted areas. “It is precisely a generation of minority entrepreneurs, rooted in an understanding of financial literacy, the language of money and free enterprise and capitalism, that will best move a community from under-served to adequately served,” said John Hope Bryant, vice chairman of the financial literacy council.
Schick stressed that the former office of community initiatives did work with the under-served and on financial literacy, but efforts are under way to emphasize them more than in the past.
In addition to the treasury department and the financial literacy council, the SBA is now in the process of identifying “who the key players should be” to work with the agency on finalizing plans for the OEE. “We’re at the very beginning of the process,” Schick said. “We’re very excited about the opportunities this opens up. We will bring together our partners and many others to strategize on what the SBA should do.” &#8226