Capitalizing Ability

by Patti Lind, Executive Director, The Abilities Fund

Having worked in microenterprise for the last twenty years, I have witnessed the amazing growth of an industry that literally changes lives.  Business ownership has been and remains one of the cornerstones of the American Dream; the microenterprise movement has shored it up in a way that is both respectful to the individual and effective in the marketplace.  The magic of micro has worked in ostensibly every sector of the population that is economically disenfranchised – and it has worked in a big way.  I think back to when I first became involved in micro and my task was to provide training and technical assistance for promising women entrepreneurs in Iowa as well as open banking relationships on their behalf.  In my little corner of the world, it worked.  From women who described themselves as being the single head of the household to those who had successfully raised a family and were now looking to raise themselves up, the notion of owning a business was empowering.   It gave them hope, purpose, and, with a lot of hard work, an income.  It worked then, it works now, and the number of women in business ownership continues to grow exponentially in Iowa.  Apply that same scenario to the national marketplace and you’ve got an industry that justifies itself.

By the mid nineties, the disability community caught on.  Of course, self employment among people with disabilities was neither a new subject nor strategy to economic empowerment.  However, at that point in time, we took the lessons learned from the micro movement and applied them to the disability community - all the time customizing and crafting an approach that was right for us.  We intertwined things like assistive technology and Social Security work incentives to planning for business start-up.  We began imagining that people with disabilities could find resources in the same places that other disadvantaged populations did and we worked on accessibility of those resources.  On the other side of the fence, we started seeing a number of microenterprise organizations include people with disabilities in their eligibility guidelines  and, in turn, begin to achieve scale in service delivery.  A perfect example is Lane MicroBusiness in Eugene, Oregon who attributes a significant share of their service delivery to the disability community located in rural and urban settings.  Funders of microenterprise began recognizing people with disabilities as a “missed market” worthy of attention.  Suffice it to say – the disability and microenterprise train began to move.  The questions of the moment are “where is it today, what track is it on, and what exactly is the destination?”

The systemic acceptance of self employment as being viable for people with disabilities is a wonderful thing.  It ensures the disability community a seat at the economic development table occupied by other minority populations.  It joins the physical and psychological realities of life to economic disparity realizing that, all too often, one is linked to the other, and utilizes the experience of others to break it down.  Importantly, it has forced a broadening of services among public service providers while, at the same time, challenging them to understand how to effectively facilitate self employment as a vocational goal.  Whether it is tagged as business ownership, self employment, or entrepreneurship, it has been and continues to be good for us.  But, is it working as well as it could?

As micro has emerged into the disability world, variations on the theme have occurred.  A pronounced vision of a “business model” has collided with a “rehabilitation model.”  The business model is centered on business development when it is both personally viable for the individual and feasible from a business perspective.  It assumes that an individual will, some how and some way, invest in their own future.  Conversely, the rehabilitation model presents a sort of entitlement to business ownership based upon the disability factor all the while assuming that public support for the business is appropriate because of disability.  These models have taken us to a real crossroads as we look to the future.  Self employment is never an entitlement to any population nor is the availability of funding.  Self employment doesn’t work because you are part of a population.  Rather, it works when a self motivated individual comes up with a business idea that is viable in the marketplace.  It has nothing to do with physical ability anymore than it does the color of skin.  It won’t work for everyone and it certainly doesn’t work 100% within any one population.  Self employment does apply to those who own a business idea and are willing to risk their time, talent, and ego to learn whether or not it can work. 

This is evident in the business community as well.  For years I have questioned the assumption that all Small Business Development Centers should be able to serve individuals with disabilities with business start-up services.  Questions related to physical and material accessibility along with a lack of understanding of disability-specific benefits plague many SBDCs – and for good reason.  While some of them do a great job in this area, many are not ready.  But with challenge comes innovation, as evidenced in Washington State.  I recently chatted with an old friend regarding the launch of a new microenterprise program called StartZone that is located in Highline Community College and considered an adjunct to the SBDC located on campus.  Working together, the two programs provide a seamless continuum of business support services to a broader range of potential clients than either could serve alone.  The two programs cross-market and provide “case staffing” to ensure that all applicants are appropriately placed with one or both service providers.  Among others, StartZone serves people with disabilities and, although the SBDC is not limited in who they will serve, they are limited in their experience.  This model seems to be a beautiful way to blend experience and capacity while focusing on the needs of the individual.  It is this kind of innovation that will make the SBDC system work nationwide for the disability community. 

All in all, I’m not nearly as concerned about the availability of good technical assistance as I am with access to credit.  The disability community is on the verge of over-investing in training and technical assistance while minimizing the access to credit piece.  There are so many good training curricula available online, in hard copy, through one-on-one technical assistance, and in libraries across America, I could never begin to know them all or identify the best.  But measure the availability of credit against the availability of technical assistance and you will see a very lopsided set of resources.  Bottom line: it is one thing to encourage someone to think about and plan for business start-up, but if you can’t capitalize it, the dream will die.  If we don’t start working as hard on the availability of capital as we do on technical assistance, we’ll have to rely on government assistance.  Doesn’t that fly directly in the face of self direction and independence?  Important side note: the microenterprise industry went through the same experience and, by the early nineties, began taking a holistic approach to micro – training people and funding them as well.  Look at our model and mentor, Nobel Laureate Dr.  Mohammed Yunus, and his work with poverty stricken villagers in Bangladesh.  Dr. Yunus paired technical assistance with access to capital and, to date, has assisted hundreds of thousands of the most unlikely entrepreneurs out of poverty and into self sufficiency.  Yes, there are huge differences in circumstances in Bangladesh vs. the U.S., but, in fact, unemployment and poverty among people with disabilities in his homeland is off the charts.  Dr. Yunus still has a lot of work to do – and so do we.  We need to begin relying on our ability to innovate and provide solutions to our own problems – like the lack of capital directed to good business ideas. Without doing so, we will continue to be reliant on public aid.  Let’s set our sights on the day when public and private entities invest as much in the availability of credit as they do in planning for success.

This can all work for the disability community.  We’re relatively young into the micro movement and have wonderful mentors to look to for lessons learned and experience gained.  Our problems have, for the most part, been their problems in the past and they’ve moved through them.  We will do the same if we insist on innovation in every aspect of our thinking about self employment.  The challenge will be: Can we do it fast enough?  In between today and the future, how many dreams and good business ideas will go uncapitalized?

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Patti Lind is the co-founder and Executive Director of The Abilities Fund, the first nationwide nonprofit community developer and financial institution focused exclusively on expanding entrepreneurial opportunities, including access to capital, for people with disabilities.