City College’s Scheinfeld Center began hosting the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) for Santa Barbara County on January 1st, and has since been making significant progress in aiding local businesses.

As the satellite center for the Economic Development Collaborative of Ventura County (EDC-VC), Santa Barbara’s SBDC provides training in entrepreneurship, internship opportunities and personal consultations, all free of cost. The SBDC is open to city college students and the community at large, and aims to promote economic impact and development locally by helping businesses create jobs, access capital, and expand into manufacturing and international business.

Melissa Moreno, as director of the Scheinfeld Center and the satellite SBDC in Santa Barbara County, is responsible for hiring the extensive specialized staff of consultants. According to Moreno, “people are hearing about this from word of mouth, and they almost can’t believe that it’s true.”

Ray Bowman is an instructor at SBCC, and is also the SBDC Director for the Ventura and Santa Barbara County region. Of at least 20 clients accumulated by the Center since January 1, Bowman stated that, “quite a few students take advantage of our programs and I would say about half of the students have up and running businesses.”

Bowman claims that their success is based “not only on how many companies we see, but also the economic impact we have on those businesses.”

“We would like to do more training workshops out where businesses are doing business,” Bowman stated.

Moreno and Bowman hope that in the coming months, the Santa Barbara SBDC will be able to pull in community members for entrepreneurial lectures and conduct workshops in community areas like banks.

According to Bowman, the Santa Barbara SBDC is exceeding all expectations so far. They have doubled their expected quota for the first month and are firmly on track for February as well.

As a successful new branch of the support services available to Santa Barbara’s small business, SB County’s SBDC will continue to offer its interactive services to the community in the hopes of creating positive economic change.