Partner America®, the small business initiative announced at the annual winter meeting in Washington, has sponsored several events in recent months that have been covered by the US Mayor. Most recently, Partner America® traveled to New York and Florida for three small business roundtables hosted by Pembroke Pines Mayor Alex G. Fekete (Sept. 28, 2000) Albany Mayor Gerald D. Jennings (October 3, 2000) and Lauderhill Mayor Richard J. Kaplan (Oct. 18, 2000).

The attendance ranged from 25-50 local small business leaders at each event and included representatives of various federal, state and local small business programs and resources. The roundtables serve to identify the key issues that are most important to their local small business leaders and then the conferences are developed around those issues with panels of experts to address them. The conferences, hosted by the Mayor, are free and open to the public and will likely be scheduled in the first quarter of 2001.

The issues identified at these three roundtables were consistent with themes raised in other communities such as procurement opportunities, federal small business assistance programs, labor and workforce development issues, mentoring, and e-commerce.

Future mayoral hosted small business events are planned for Providence, RI (November 2); Richmond, VA (Nov. 8); Rome, NY (Nov. 20); Yonkers, NY (Dec. 5) Sarasota, FL (Dec.14) with several others in the works. To schedule a Partner America® small business event in your community, please contact Jennifer Johnson, Managing Director, Partner America® (877) 778-6726.