Bloomberg
Announces Economic Stimulus Initiatives for NYC, with Entrepreneurs at the
Center of the Campaign
By Joan R. Magee
Mayor Bloomberg announced various initiatives today to help kickstart the slumping New York City economy. One such program is FastTrac, an entrepreneurial training program from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Carl Schramm, Kaufmann Foundation president and CEO revealed a $1 million push to offer a program called FastTrac to those in New York who’ve been displaced by the financial crisis. The company’s new program will distill a typically six-week training program into two weeks. For 15 years, nearly 300,000 budding entrepreneurs have worked with them.
One such entrepreneur is Amanda Jones, who owns Brooklyn Fudge, a confectionary company that employed her grandmother’s fudge recipe to distinguish her from the pack. Jones said that she makes a couple thousand dollars in profits each month as the owner, and has leads to take her brand global. Jones said that the instructors at FastTrac have withstood recessions before, and will be able to impart knowledge and build esteem of beginner entrepreneurs.
“My anticipation is that there’ll be a lot of ex-Wall Streeters,” says Schramm. “Many have a substantial amount of knowledge, but need to learn how to start a business in the most basic sense. A lot are clueless about how firms get started. If you had to price a product at Lehman, you had someone who handled that.”
Consequently, FastTrac is offering those basic skills, and offers tutelage on the opportunities and pitfalls of running one’s own business, including those in the aching fashion industry.
This isn’t the first time they’ve worked with Wall Street in the wake of crisis or disaster.
After September 11, the Kaufmann Foundation offered FastTrac for free to those affected by the World Trade Center attacks. Schramm said that six months after 9/11, the economy bounced back basically to normal, but anticipates this slump to last longer and force more people into business for themselves. It could also lead to a paradigm shift in the industry.
“Fifteen years ago people said that it was the end of community banks, but now look at what’s happening,” says Schramm. “I think that we could easily go back to independent stock brokers linked by common markets rather than the giant brokerage firms.”
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