The Womens Business Center is an original research project of Services Cooperative Association. In the early 80's SCA Research, acting upon suggestions from its women business owner membership, commenced a study of gender basis for business starts and discovered that women were starting small businesses at twice the rate of men in the SCA service area. SCA Research then confirmed the ratios nationwide, began to design a development methodology specifically for women owned businesses and reported its findings to the government.

So much for the good news. Regretfully, the Womens Business Center name was shamelessly pirated by the United States Small Business Administration to designate a welfare-based program for women. For the record, we have no reservation about any program that assists women. However, we've asked that the U.S. SBA stop using this name and, failing that, acknowledge our intellectual property rights of the name, first use of the name and the concept of empowering women, through education and training, without public funding, to become business owners.

We deplore that the government permitted a program that requires on-going public funding of the SBA centers - including the Small Business Development Centers - and so callously created direct competition between tax funded programs and private sector programs - operated by small business owner tax payers - that were being initiated across the nation in response to fulfilling a need in the marketplace.

This Womens Business Center provides a "hand-up" to women seeking to improve their economic situation and not a "hand-out" to any who would continually abuse a support system by saying "the only way it can be done is with tax funding."

It is our opinion that any economic development project, including the SBA program, having no time-line for self-sufficiency, is ultimately doomed to failure with it's only measure of empty success as having provided short term employment to those administering it, who will perpetuate it.

We think it a travesty of government to create public/private conflict and to foster tax funded programs at the expense of privately funded programs.

We're proud of our independence, that we're entirely self-sufficient and that we're not hampered by a bureaucracy, the cancer of a government sponsored dependence on public funding or the creation of a welfare state.

The government has put the proposed expansion of its Women's Business Centers into new locations on hold. Why? The money for expansion is having to be diverted to the initial centers that have not gained self-sufficiency as proposed. Why? Because they can't grow companies. They can only grow staff salaries.

Click here for the Inc. article on future funding of the Women's Business Centers

We believe that to teach self-sufficiency, you must be able to demonstrate it. We salute all the private empowerment projects, everywhere, who support women's initiatives without public funding.

"The secret to happiness is not what you can get for yourself, rather what you can do for others." - Dr. Dixie Melillo

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