By Katia Hetter
Wednesday, April 26, 2000
Newsday
When Nell Merlino and Iris Burnett began to discuss their latest venture after attending a White House women's economic summit in 1997, they gathered a few female friends and colleagues to lend support.
Three years later, Oxygen Media president Geraldine Laybourne, AMC Networks president Kate McEnroe, iVillage co-founder Nancy Evans, Foolmart.com CEO Jill Kianka and National Council of Negro Women president Jane Smith, showed up yesterday at a Manhattan news conference to launch an online microloan program for female entrepreneurs.
Starting May 11, the five women promise a surge of money, grassroots support and online advertising to direct people to the Count Me In for Women's Financial Independence Web site, www.count-me-in.org. The English language site is already up and the Spanish version will launch at the end of May.
"This is the millennium underground railroad for women who have no place to turn to raise money for a business," said Marianne Spraggins, senior managing director at Smith Whiley & Co. and the first African-American woman named managing director at a Wall Street investment firm.
While women own some nine million businesses employing 27 million people in the United States, they still face obstacles: They often lack a credit history because their mortgage and credit cards are in their spouse's name, or their work history shows gaps from taking time off to raise children.
Merlino, who created Take Our Daughters to Work Day for the Ms. Foundation for Women, hopes that minimum donations of $5 will raise $25 million in the Count Me In fund's first year and will inspire women across the economic spectrum to contribute.
"This allows for the widest diversity of women to support their sisters nationwide," said philanthropist Barbara Lee.
Applications for the loans, which will range from $500 to $10,000, will be available by the end of May, said Burnett, president of Count Me In. Burnett served as a senior vice president at USA Networks and previously served as chief of staff at the United States Information Agency. The first loans will be announced during the week of July 4.
Count Me In will use a non-traditional credit scoring system to rate the risk of would-be loan recipients and will test it over two years to see which questions predict repayment, according to Kathryn Keeler, a veteran microloan fund creator who designed the system.
The loans will be repaid in 12 to 36 months with fixed rates of 2 percent to 4 percent over prime.
Sponsors already include the American Express Foundation, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, BP Amoco Corp., Reebok International and the Rockefeller Family Foundation. Count Me In Advisory Board members include Caroline's Comedy Club founder Caroline Hirsch, Working Women Network CEO Kay Koplovitz, AMC's McEnroe and FoolMart's Kianka.
