MyPrint is a Micro-enterprise development opportunity. We believe that Micro-enterprise development in the United States is a critical tool for community economic development designed to improve the characteristics of poverty and welfare programs, strengthen families and reduce recidivism rates. MyPrint believes one of the most promising opportunities to generate jobs is to encourage self-employment. Our business strategy follows a simple approach: Developing Micro-enterprise business opportunities for low-income individuals and making use of the Individual Development Account (IDA) program. In this way, we participate in incentives for National and community Micro-enterprise programs while contributing to community development as a corporate citizen.

The basis for any long-term solution to poverty rests in the capacity of people to raise their own incomes. In the United States and in other countries, Micro-enterprise development has been recognized as a promising approach for helping poor people to better their lives. The Clinton Administration sees Micro-enterprise development, and concomitant efforts to provide financial services to Micro-entrepreneurs, as important components of its community economic development strategy here at home and a priority in its foreign assistance strategy abroad.

The basic premise of Micro-enterprise development is that the best and most plentiful resource for fighting poverty is the energy of low-income people themselves. In the past, social policy has sometimes disregarded, and thus failed to harness, this energy; all too often, anti-poverty programs have treated recipients as passive, thus reinforcing dependency. The Clinton administration and MyPrint believes that giving people the tools and opportunities they need to increase their incomes themselves is the strongest approach, an approach that affirms the values of hard work and free enterprise while also helping to develop local communities.

The simple idea of bringing low-income people's capacities to bear on overcoming poverty, which Micro-enterprise demonstrates so clearly, resonates through many of President Clinton's policies: in education, training, social services, and in foreign assistance. This idea underlies the President's expansion of Head Start, his education initiatives, the Individual Development Account program, and expansion of the earned-income tax credit -- to help families choose work over welfare, and to make work pay.  By enabling low-income people in the United States to enter the economic mainstream, we reduce the social cost of poverty, increase national productivity and improve social conditions for all of us.

As The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund points out,

       “We cannot escape from the fact that you do not service people out of poverty. At its core, the ability to exit poverty is a question of employment, asset accumulation, and wealth creation.