An entrepreneur with a social conscience, Andrea Silbert, relates the journey that inspired her to found the Center for Women and Enterprise, a nonprofit center supporting women-owned businesses.Women-owned business enterprises ; Women executives

Andrea Silbert

English

Research Papers in Economics

I
service and were career doctors with
the Veterans Health Administration.
From an early age, I discovered a love
for social issues and politics,devouring
the newspaper daily and getting
involved wherever I was able.
In college, this interest in social
issues combined reac-
tively with a newfound
passion for entrepre-
neurship. What began
as a campus job in the
advertising branch of a
student-run company
catapulted me into a
major leadership role
by my senior year,
working over 20 hours
a week as the president
of  Harvard Student
Agencies. I loved it.
Running a business
was complex and ful-
filling, and starting my
own seemed like it
would be an exciting
challenge. After grad-
uation, I took a job 
on Wall Street to
strengthen my under-
standing of finance—
knowledge I knew I
would need as an
entrepreneur.
Wall Street gave
me invaluable skills,
but the ultimate focus
on the bottom line
didn’t fulfill my ideals.
My interest in public
service remained
strong, and I searched
for a way to combine
my entrepreneurial
vision with a service-
oriented cause. I
decided to take a job in Costa Rica,
and the eye-opening experience
exposed me for the first time to the
plight of women in poverty. I went
back to school and returned to Latin
America equipped with a pair of 
break-up. If we can give all women solid
financial and business knowledge, we
can break down the barriers to econom-
ic self-sufficiency and success.
In reality,my reasons for founding
CWE are scattered throughout my
life. I grew up in Brookline, Mass-
achusetts, with images of civic duty all
around me. The community was
active, and neighborhood families
were always passionately involved in
one public interest issue or another.
My parents were dedicated to public
want my children to grow up
thinking that a CEO can be a woman.
In some ways, the reason I started the
Center for Women & Enterprise
(CWE) is as simple as that. I believe
that women-owned businesses are an
important tool for change. Female
leaders in the corpo-
rate world challenge us
to see beyond society’s
traditional gender roles,
while, on a small scale,
owning a business can
give a woman the power
to improve her life.
While men have headed
organizations for cen-
turies, only recently
have large numbers of
women assumed this
role. As more women
begin to run businesses,
they will need tools,
training, technical assis-
tance, and access to
markets and capital.It is
CWE’s mission to pro-
vide this support.
CWE is a non-
profit organization
that helps women start
and grow businesses,
but more broadly, it
seeks to address the
growing feminization
of poverty. Women,
and their children, are
disproportionately
represented among the
world’s poor. World-
wide, women have less
access to advanced
education, training,
and livable wages, yet
they are more likely to be raising chil-
dren on a single in- come. Divorce is a
leading cause of poverty for U.S.
women and children because often
mothers do not have the job skills need-
ed to support their families after a 
&Banking Communities 21
Entrepreneur
The
Andrea Silbert
Social
of a
The Center for Women & Enterprise
Path
first personSpring 2004 22
masters’ degrees, ready to focus on
women and poverty.
A fellowship took me to Brazil,
where I worked at The Passage House,
a nonprofit organization with a mis-
sion to improve the lives of homeless
“street” girls. My job was to help pro-
vide the girls with marketable skills,
such as tailoring and catering, and cre-
ate small businesses that generated
income and allowed them to leave the
poverty of the streets. It was the
toughest job I have ever had. I saw too
many women living on the very 
margins of society. Throughout the
experience, however, I began to see
small businesses as viable solutions to
address poverty both abroad and in the
United States. If we could help the
poorest of women in Brazil, why
couldn’t encouraging American
women to start businesses have the
same uplifting effects?
With this is mind, I returned
home in 1994 and took a job helping
prospective entrepreneurs apply for
small business loans at the nonprofit
Nuestra Comunidad Development
Corporation in Roxbury, Mass-
achusetts. I soon realized that
American women needed more than
loans and capital. In Brazil’s informal
economy, a woman could start her
business by getting a loan, buying a
pushcart, and selling her goods on the
street. She didn’t have to negotiate
complex regulations or face markets
crowded with competition. But back
in the United States, women entrepre-
neurs needed to be much more 
sophisticated to survive the highly
competitive and regulated market.
Education and training were crucial.
With this realization, I developed
a vision for my first entrepreneurial
venture: a comprehensive nonprofit
center serving women in all stages of
business growth.Early grants from the
U.S. Small Business Administration
and Bank of Boston funded our 
start-up and allowed us to hire a few
dedicated staff members. We officially
launched the Center for Women &
Enterprise in 1995, and I had found a
career as a social entrepreneur.
We started with one office in
Boston and a budget of $350,000, and
we grew from there. We created the
Community Entrepreneurs Program
to train women who wanted to start
businesses to achieve economic self-
sufficiency. For established entrepre-
neurs, we organized networking
opportunities and created advanced
training programs focused on access-
ing capital and penetrating markets.
We built a team of volunteer consult-
ants to provide one-on-one business
counseling to our clients, while
extending them free legal advice
through an innovative partnership
with the Boston law firm of Testa,
Hurwitz & Thibeault. I co-developed
a national venture capital forum,
Springboard Enterprises, Inc., to
showcase women’s fast-growth 
technology businesses. CWE also
joined forces with the Women’s
Business Enterprise National Council
to certify New England’s women-
owned businesses for corporate and
government contracts.
Today, CWE has locations in
Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts,
and Providence, Rhode Island, and
serves over 1,800 women a year. Over
40 percent are low income, and nearly
a third are single parents. Their busi-
nesses range from small start-ups that
provide wages for their low-income
owners to multi million dollar corpo-
rations.CWE has labored to develop a
set of services that will fully meet 
their diverse needs over the lives of
their businesses.
Becky Curboy first came to CWE
when she was given the chance to lease
a driving range. Divorced, on welfare,
and with a rusty set of job skills after
years as a stay-at-home mom, Becky
knew she couldn’t raise her four chil-
dren on a minimum wage job, but
decent earnings had been elusive.
Running her own business was a
promising route to self-sufficiency.
CWE taught Becky the practical skills
and business know-how she needed to
successfully launch the Royal Springs
Family Golf Center. Now, fully sup-
porting her family on income from the
Andrea Silbert, Chief Executive Officer of the
Center for Women & Enterprise.
Group instruction at the Center for Women &
Enterprise.
If we can give women
financial and business
knowledge,we can
break down the 
barriers between
women and economic
self-sufficiency 
and success.&Banking Communities 23
business, Becky returns often to CWE
for advanced services and training.
Most recently, CWE helped her to
secure a loan to buy the property she
had previously leased.
Clients like Becky not only high-
light the success of entrepreneurial
training but also serve as inspiration to
me. I am moved by the determination
and dedication of individual women to
succeed regardless of their economic
disadvantages.Our clients also contin-
ually remind me that entrepreneurial
education is a powerful tool for social
and economic change. I believe that
grassroots business development is
important to New England’s future.
New paths to economic well being are
needed for the region’s low income
workers, and fostering new enterprises
can address this need and help the
region’s economy thrive.
All of my years of life, work, and
study have finally meshed with my
goals and ideals, coming together in
this career of social entrepreneurship.
And my journey continues. After
almost nine years at the helm of
CWE, I’ve decided to retire as CEO
in April and take on new challenges in
the realm of family and small business
social policy.The organization is at its
strongest ever financially and pro-
grammatically, making it a natural
time for a transition. CWE will con-
tinue to grow and is already heading in
many new directions, launching initia-
tives to train displaced workers, spark
college women’s interest in entrepre-
neurship, and reach women in
Spanish-speaking communities. Hav-
ing watched our organization grow, I
feel a true sense of pride in all that
CWE has achieved. I will never forget
the committed women, supporters,
volunteers, and staff who have made,
and will continue to make, CWE’s
success possible.
Andrea Silbert is Chief Executive
Officer of the Center for Women &
Enterprise. You can learn more about
CWE by visiting www.cweonline.org.
Training session at the Center for Women & Enterprise in Boston, Massachusetts.
The vision:
a comprehensive
nonprofit center 
serving women in 
all stages of
business growth.

The path of a social entrepreneur

http://www.bostonfed.org/commdev/c&b/2004/spring/Path.pdf

The path of a social entrepreneur

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