When investing in digital solutions, how do community lenders whose business models center on trusted, direct connections with small businesses preserve their human touch points?

Mastercard Strive USA recently convened a roundtable discussion on how to better support creative entrepreneurs, a small business segment that provides enormous value to local communities but faces unique and often steeper challenges compared to other types of small businesses.

Our Village United's ELEVATE program was one of the first incubators in the United States to focus on wellness support for entrepreneurs. It quickly became a model by developing classes led by experts on how entrepreneurs could face emotional challenges, like burnout and imposter syndrome. 

Two years after launch, Mastercard Strive USA is working with 34 small business-focused organizations and building a program that is already more than a sum of parts. As of September 2024, the program had unlocked over $44 billion in capital, reached nearly one million small businesses, and engaged more than 682 small business intermediaries.

The fifth Mastercard Strive USA Summit recently took place in Lawrence, Kansas in partnership with the Kansas Department of Commerce. The focus was on driving new small business-focused partnerships within Kansas as well as applying lessons learned from other regions to those collaborations.

Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) are mission-first financial institutions that have seen rapid growth in assets in the past five years, partly because CDFI investors are challenging a set of assumptions about how CDFIs operate that could have otherwise held back their success.

A two-year Mastercard Strive USA grant has paved the way for investment platform CNote to strengthen their organizational capacity, enabling them to scale operations, enhance their technology, and better serve the communities and institutions at the heart of their mission.

To create an equitable economy, grant makers should address the financial and training hurdles that cause so many entrepreneurs to fail. This article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy by Sandy Fernandez explains how.

A unique and first-time partnership between two mission-driven organizations, Next Street and Community Reinvestment Fund USA, is behind a new small business lending program in California that aims to connect small businesses with historic federal funding designed to help them grow and strengthen their financial resilience.

This conversation on the role of local government in helping small businesses succeed took place at the Mastercard Strive USA Summit in St. Louis, Missouri, between Tishaura O. Jones, mayor of St. Louis, and Salah Goss, senior vice president for social impact at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. 

Entrepreneurship is booming in North Carolina by many measures, but not all small businesses have equal access to opportunity. This article highlights key themes and moments from the fourth Mastercard Strive USA Summit held in Raleigh, North Carolina, where conversations centered on how to ensure that all entrepreneurs — in North Carolina and nationally — have access to the resources they need to succeed.

Inclusiv’s experience building trust in Puerto Rico, as well as its 50-year history working with Community Development Credit Unions (CDCUs) throughout the continental U.S., will likely serve as a critical backdrop as it moves forward with its recent $1.87 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund Clean Communities Investment Accelerator grant.

How can organizations that support small businesses take advantage of historic federal investments and new technologies in an increasingly diverse landscape? This was the major theme of the third Mastercard Strive USA Summit, which brought together national and local leaders from government, philanthropy, the private sector, and others in St. Louis, Missouri.

There is an increasingly diverse range of technical assistance models, making it challenging to provide the right information to the right entrepreneur at the right time. This article highlights where leading technical assistance providers are focusing to help more entrepreneurs succeed.

Building trust with local communities is hard. The key to driving inclusive growth starts with recognizing and valuing the trust local organizations have established with communities, and then building on that foundation to help them succeed and grow. This was the cross-cutting theme of the second Strive USA Summit in Washington, DC.

This conversation between Kevin D. Kim, Commissioner of the NYC Department of Small Business Services, and Shamina Singh, Founder & President of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, took place at the Mastercard Strive USA Summit in New York.

Unprecedented federal funding is flowing into the small business sector. By complementing these investments with the right technology and infrastructure, there is a historic opportunity to greatly improve and secure the success of more small businesses, a key cornerstone of the U.S. economy.

Participants at the first Mastercard Strive USA Summit spoke about how to access and leverage the once-in-a-generation investments being made by the federal government — from building new infrastructure, to accelerating the clean energy transition, to investing directly in small businesses.

Strive USA has launched a new event series geared towards creating more profound local impact in states and cities across the country. These convenings will complement and strengthen our work nationally by cultivating collaboration among local and national providers of capital, know-how, and digital tools. 

New technologies, a surge in federal funding, and strategic partnerships are driving rapid growth of the community development finance sector and bolstering resilience at a time of record small business creation — but there’s still a pressing need for further action to fully realize this critical moment.

Meet the 2023 Mastercard Strive USA Innovation Fund Winners. These four organizations were selected because their impact-focused solutions were uniquely primed for long-term, sustainable impact in the U.S.

One year after the launch of Strive USA, Mastercard’s U.S. small business initiative is now supporting small businesses in 43 states and working closely with 16 prominent organizations. Here we provide an update on our work and progress — and where we go next.