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This toolkit provides practical insights that community development financial institutions (CDFIs) can use to expand their impact and support small business job quality and growth.
It combines innovative insights from community organizing, academic research, and a new pilot program to identify strategies and potential interventions for CDFIs that work with small businesses to support them with employment law compliance. CDFIs seeking to strengthen their support for small business owners on employment law compliance will find that the toolkit builds on deep research of the key sectors and networks in which small businesses operate, with the goal to identify moments and interventions that can set up businesses towards success.
Small Business Labor Standards Pilot Coordinator and Senior Strategist, Workplace Justice Lab
Hana Shepherd
Associate Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University; Senior Affiliated Researcher, Workplace Justice Lab.
Andrew Wolf
Assistant Professor of Industrial Relations, Cornell University; Affiliated Researcher, Workplace Justice Lab
Zuhur Ahmed
Research Associate, Workplace Justice Lab
Contributors
For further information, or to learn more about our work connecting compliance, job quality, and small business success, please contact the team leads for this project:
Shared Success, a project of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program, shows how building better jobs can simultaneously uplift workers while also driving small business success.
About the Economic Opportunities Program
The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy.
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Video — Shared Success, a project of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program, is grounded in the understanding that building better jobs and building stronger businesses go hand in hand.
This infographic shares statistics on impact of the Economic Opportunities Program’s Shared Success demonstration. Dive into a detailed breakdown of the diverse businesses and entrepreneurs involved in this work.
This brief shares key lessons and takeaways that could be used to implement internal job quality practices to strengthen CDFIs and other small business support organizations.
Supporting small business owners in understanding and acting on workers’ perspectives is a promising practice for simultaneously advancing job quality and small business development organizations’ missions to promote economic resilience.
Comprehensive findings from qualitative and quantitative research on participating small business owners and workers conducted at the end of the demonstration will be released in spring 2026.
This endline evaluation of the Shared Success demonstration aims to understand the impact of the work of the 11 community lenders who integrated job quality programming into their small business support services.
