A Brief History of Microenterprise Development in the United States
In the United States, the microenterprise development field and its trade association, The Association of Enterprise Opportunity AEO, have defined microenterprise as “any business with five or fewer employees, less than $35,000 in loan capital, and which generally don’t have access to conventional loan programs”…
Many so-called “micro-businesses” in the US don’t have any employees, other than the owners themselves. If this describes your business, then you’ve come to the right place!
On this Website we’ve done our best to find the resources and organizations that focus their services on entrepreneurs like you. In most cases, in order to qualify for a microenterprise grant, you’ll need to be considered low-to-moderate income according to current government standards.
If you are a minority, recent immigrant, a woman, disabled or have other special challenges that reduce your ability to access traditional credit (and other services), you’ll also find resources on this page to help you find a microenterprise grant, small business loan or other resources to help you start – or expand – your business.
According to Wikipedia, the microenterprise field has a twenty-year history in the United States. While the term “microenterprise” was in common use internationally by the late 1970s, it came into domestic use about a decade later.
Traditionally, the business sector had been categorized into three groups: large, medium, and small. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a small business as having up to 500 employees. In 1991, the SBA recognized microenterprise as a separate or distinct category of business.
During the 1990s, microenterprise grew quickly in the U.S. It started with a number of small non-profit organizations, especially those that focused on women’s and children’s issues and social justice. These organizations began testing models that had met with success in development countries. They tweaked the programs as needed to make them work for entrepreneurs in the U.S. and continued achieving positive results.
Today you’ll find microenterprise credit providers in every state. There’s also a national trade organization, (the AEO), many state-level associations and financing intermediaries, and there are several research and policy organizations.
Of those, The Aspen Institute and FIELD (Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination) have collected ‘in the field’ data on these organizations since 1992.
The first directory, published back in 1992, listed 108 organizations that identified themselves as working in the field.
By 2002 this number had grown to 650 organizations. Of these, 554 were organizations that provided direct services and 96 were support organizations that offered funding, training and technical assistance to the practitioner organizations.
Today, you’ll find many different types of assistance.
