How Andrea Jung, Lisa Mensah And Women Over 50 Are Safeguarding Small Businesses

Small businesses are the lifeblood of the American economy: They employ 47% of the U.S. workforce and, in normal years, account for two thirds of new jobs.

Of course, a global pandemic and social distancing orders have meant the past 12 months have been anything but normal for these businesses. The Kauffman Foundation estimates a quarter have closed at least temporarily, and a recent Census Bureau survey found that 53% of all small business owners don’t expect to return to pre-Covid levels of activity for at least six months.

The statistics are grim, but through entrepreneurial resilience and a cadre of advocates raising money and helping to distribute funding to businesses in need, small businesses are surviving. And so, as part of our regular segment on Morning Joe highlighting women over the age of 50 who are changing the world, Forbes and “Know Your Value” want to shine a light on the women who are helping to safeguard the nation’s small businesses. They are:

Jovita Carranza, 71: Until January, Carranza served as the head of the Small Business Administration, and was therefore also the highest-ranking Latina in President Trump’s cabinet. When she was sworn into the position in January 2020, it was not her first stint at the agency—she was the SBA deputy administrator under President George W. Bush—but it was, arguably, the most important time in history to helm the organization. Under Carranza’s guidance last year, the SBA provided small businesses with some $700 billion in relief across the Paycheck Protection Program and disaster loan program; 70% of the PPP loans it distributed went to businesses with fewer than ten employees.

“In the 67-year history of the SBA, we had never gone through this administrative processing,” she told Forbes in September.

Before joining the SBA (for the first time) in 2006, Carranza had a three-decade career at UPS. She started working on its loading docks, in a part-time night-shift gig handling boxes. She slowly worked her way up the organization, eventually culminating as the president of UPS’ Latin America and Caribbean divisions. In 2017, Trump appointed her to be the Treasurer of the U.S., a role that made her a principal advisor to Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“I started working at the age of 12,” Carranza says, referencing a job cleaning the shelves of a local mom-and-pop shop in her Chicago hometown, “so small businesses have been really essential in my upbringing and lifestyle.”

Lisa Mensah, 59: The daughter of a Ghanian immigrant and an Iowa farm worker, Mensah’s first job was as a strawberry picker on different farms in her native Oregon. It’s an origin story that explains much of her career, which has taken her from commercial lending at Citibank to serving as the undersecretary for rural development in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she managed a $215 billion loan portfolio. She has been the president and CEO of the Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), the nation's leading network of community development financial institutions (CDFIs), since 2017.

At the onset of the pandemic, Mensah was quick to act: In March, she spearheaded an OFN partnership with Google to launch a $125 million relief fund. In November, Mensah also announced a $1 billion Finance Justice Fund, a socially responsible fund aimed at reducing racial injustice and poverty in the U.S. 

“There’s a proverb from Ghana that my dad always shared,” Mensah has said. “‘Money scattered in a dark place brings light.’ I’ve always been attracted to bringing that kind of light.”

Suzanne Clark, 53: In February, Clark was named as the next CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is the world’s largest business federation (it represents more than 3 million businesses). When she officially takes over the role on March 11, she will be the first woman to lead the organization in its 1o9-year history.

Clark, who has been the Chamber’s president since 2019 and before that had been an executive vice president and its chief operating officer, has used her position of power to lobby for provisions within the CARES act and launch the #SaveSmallBusiness fund, which has distributed 1,246 grants to small business owners across the nation to help keep their doors open. 

“Already, too many small businesses have shuttered, and millions more are teetering on the brink of permanent closure,” Clark said in April. “These small businesses touch every family and every block of every town across America. And they need our help right now.”

Andrea Jung, 62: As the CEO of Avon from 1999 to 2012, Jung was a perennial listee on the Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. Now the president and CEO of Grameen, she wields her influence in a different sphere: microfinance.

In May, Jung launched the Grameen America Economic Relief and Recovery Fund, with the goal of raising $72 million to provide capital to the low-income female entrepreneurs the organization serves. In December, the organization announced a $17.5 million fund that will have a five-year life and, as loans are repaid, get redeployed. Grameen expects to deploy $200 million over the course of the fund.

Jung—who is also on the board of directors at Apple, Wayfair, Unilever and Just Capital—understands on a personal level the power of what Grameen does. Her grandmother, a low-income Chinese immigrant in Toronto, once received a loan that enabled her to open a hair salon and earn enough money to send her son—Jung’s father—to college. He, in turn, was able to provide Jung with piano and Mandarin lessons and, eventually, an undergraduate education at Princeton University. “I saw myself firsthand growing up with the power of a woman who could actually change our family trajectory, up and out of poverty,” she said in 2018.

Melissa Bradley, 53: Bradley has one of the lower profiles among the women in this group, but she also wears the most hats: She is the founder and managing partner at 1863 Ventures, a business development program; she is an an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business; and she is the founder of Ureeka, a venture-backed small business platform that provides capital and coaching to underrepresented entrepreneurs.

Over the last year, Ureeka has paired with Facebook, Salesforce and other corporate partners to provide these entrepreneurs with more than $100 million in grants. But the coaching aspect of Ureeka’s program, Bradley says, is still just as crucial as it was before the pandemic.

“Some of the biggest problems we’ve seen in all of this is having offline businesses pivot to online. And I don’t know about you, but I’m barely managing Twitter and Instagram,” she said in September. “And so we were able to say, ‘You got a grant, but you also got some coaching. You also got someone on one assistance.”

That assistance seems to be paying off: Within a recent group of 1,000 entrepreneurs who went through Ureeka’s coaching, 80% saw a 50% jump in revenue.