The little-known Oregon Self Employment Assistance Program helps the unemployed start their own businesses instead of looking for work.
The little-known Oregon Self Employment Assistance Program helps the unemployed start their own businesses instead of looking for work.
The founders of Urban Airship, a tech startup which now employs 28 people, credit the program with helping their business get off the ground.
“You don’t have to look for work, and whatever money you make in your business you get to keep,” said William (Pat) Sanderlin, who coordinates the program for the Oregon Employment Department. “That’s the carrot right there to keep it going.”
Participants must present a business plan. At Urban Airship, it was the first one they wrote — though the company took off so fast that it became obsolete almost immediately. “We executed on the business plan probably in the first hour and a half,” said co-founder and CEO Scott Kveton.
The program dates to the original North American Free Trade Agreement legislation, through a provision pushed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who was then a congressman. But only seven states opted to participate, and in Oregon only about 2,400 people have taken advantage of it since the program began in 1995.
Read more at OregonLive.com.
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