Economic Mobility Center:

    providing bundled microbusiness services for women with children

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The Economic Mobility Center is a “one stop shop” for economic mobility where women entrepreneurs have access to Coaching, Capital and Community. Public-private partnerships, collaboration, equity, and empowerment are at the core of the collaborative’s guiding principles.

The model is built on the Annie E. Casey’s Center for Working Families’ (CWF) bundled service concept, including:

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1.            Workforce & Career Development

2.            Income & Work Supports

3.            Financial Services & Asset Building

4.            Infrastructure & Systems

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Based on the success of the Center for Transforming Lives’ (CTL) microenterprise program, CTL’s model has expanded the bundled services to include a fifth component:

5.            Small Business Creation and Expansion

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With equitable access to capital and business resources, entrepreneurship is a pathway to exit poverty. Thus, The Economic Mobility Centers are sited for neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, addressing gender and racial disparities for underserved entrepreneurs. Onsite drop-in childcare allows entrepreneurs to work and attend workshops and meetings without needing special childcare arrangements

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• 25% of Tarrant County working families are financially unstable because of limited income and assets
   

• Families need roughly six weeks of take-home income in liquid assets to weather a simultaneous income dip and expenditure spike. Sixty-five percent of families lack a sufficient cash buffer to do so (JPMorgan Chase, Weathering Volatility 2.0, 2019)

 

• Areas with low incomes tend to have fewer and smaller businesses, and demographic groups with lower self-employment tend to be concentrated in areas with low incomes. (SBA Office of Advocacy, Entrepreneurship in Low-Income Areas, September 2017)

 

• Low-income areas have fewer businesses than other areas. Low-income areas are home to 2 out of every 9 workers, but only 2 out of every 11 self-employed workers, and only 2 out of every 30 businesses with employees (SBA Office of Advocacy)