ASSETS (A Service for Self-Employment, Training and Support)
Howard Good, Executive Director
Johncey Mathew, Technical Assistance Manager
Yanimer Serrano, Recruitment & Training Manager
447 S. Prince St.
Lancaster, Pa. 17603
(717) 393-6089
(717) 290-7936 fax

Think of Lancaster, the capital of Pennsylvania “Dutch” country, and if you’re like me, you’ll likely picture luxuriant farms and oversize barns and Amish driving buggies down country lanes. The reality, however, is quite different: Lancaster, a town of 50,000 with a surprisingly urban aspect, adds to the local German heritage a yeasty, growing and rather low-income minority of African-Americans, along with enough recent Hispanic immigrants to support FOUR Spanish-language newspapers.

Into this picture in 1993 came the Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), a 40-year-old nonprofit that, to that point, had been working primarily in economic development in the Third World as a way to mobilize the enthusiasm of Christian business people who wanted to get involved in programs to build self-sufficiency among poor people around the world. In a decision that interestingly echoes World Hunger Year’s decision to start Reinvesting In America as a way to bring its established international efforts home, MEDA decided to establish an initiative in the U.S. similar to what it was doing in other countries. It chose Lancaster as its pilot program for the U.S. and Canada because of the local need and because, with a heavy concentration of Mennonites in the area, there was a strong MEDA chapter there; and specifically targeted the southeast quadrant of the city, with its heavily minority population and unemployment rates approaching 20 to 30 percent.

The philosophy, said Johncey Mathews, was simple: “A lot of people have skills they’ve learned from work, from school, that could possibly turn into a full-time business. Many of them have full-time jobs but at minimum wage, not earning enough to cover a family’s needs. Some of them could use a small business as a part-time supplement; others could start a full-time business. But while they have skills, they lack business knowledge, how to make a business plan, bookkeeping, marketing. We can’t teach them skills, but we CAN teach them how to become a better business person.”

So ASSETS, using volunteer instructors from the local business community, fashioned an organized, competent how-to-start-a-business curriculum covering four complementary areas: