Dena Jo Squyres, like a typical 16 year-old girl, enjoys hanging out with her friends, shopping and playing softball. But Dena — a student at the Cherokee Nation’s Sequoyah High School in Oklahoma — can add entrepreneur, saver and spokeswoman to her list of after-school activities.

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CFED and the National Fund for Enterprise Development (NFED), CFED's Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) support corporation, provide underwriting and technical support to statewide affiliate nonprofits which take as their goal consolidating and linking entrepreneur and micro business development services into coordinated statewide systems. Where statewide systems have become established, they become a permanent infrastructure that can serve entrepreneurs and start-up businesses statewide. The institutional form of these statewide functions and systems varies from state to state; NFED refers to them collectively as Statewide Microenterprise Intermediaries (SMIs).

Since 2006, NFED's main activity has been to explore the use of the tax code to serve micro and small businesses through the Self-Employment Tax Initiative (SETI).  Developing the full potential of local entrepreneurs and their start-up businesses is emerging as an important federal and state policy, and we invite you to explore SETI's activities at the above link.