Wanted: capital for women.

• Author: Murkowski, Carol
• Position: Womensfund provides capital for small businesses run by women

Ambition and energy may be assets, but they rarely fill out a credit report to a banker's satisfaction. So how do women break out of poverty and into business? In Alaska, part of the answer may lie in Womensfund, an innovative program willing to take chances on small businesses run by women.

Womensfund is designed to find micro and small loans for small businesses owned by women. Incorporated last year, the non-profit agency aims to help women become economically self-sufficient. Project director Carol Mikos says the final result strengthens local economies, as low-income women move from welfare lines to profit lines.

"The key is to get women out of crisis and into a stable economy. Once they're in that stable economy, they tend to stay there," Mikos says.

Too often, a lack of education, credit history and assets combine with the "glass ceiling" of gender prejudice to deny financing to female entrepreneurs. "But now the banking world is changing," says international business consultant Kathryn Keeley. "There's a surge across the country to find alternative ways of financing."

Womensfund, Alaska's reflection of that surge, is based on a program developed by Keeley 16 years ago in Minneapolis, Minn. Keeley founded Chart/WEDCO (Women's Economic Development Corp.), a non-profit businesswomen who couldn't find traditional financing.

Chart/WEDCO used private money to make small loans to women starting or operating small businesses. Loans from $10 to $10,000 were used to help buy business cards, fabric, vacuums -- whatever was needed to put women to work. A welfare mother bought a computer to start a mailing label service out of her living room; a middle-aged woman bought the supplies needed to transfer her experience from years of cleaning up after her family into a profitable janitorial service. They are recipients of 2 out of more than 3,000 loans made by the program since its inception.

The program went beyond most commercial loan arrangements. It provided information ranging from product marketing, to what questions to ask a lawyer or accountant, to how to dress for a commercial loan interview. To overcome federal requirements that keep welfare recipients from owning assets, Chart/WEDCO sometimes put business assets in its own name until businesswomen were free of welfare. When traditional loan financing couldn't be found, Chart/WEDCO made its own loans, taking products or services as collateral.

"I've taken kids' bikes as collateral, and I...