Elaine Edgcomb

Elaine Edgcomb has been Director of the Aspen Institute Microenterprise Fund for Innovation, Effectiveness, Learning and Dissemination (FIELD) since 1998. She co-authored, with Joyce Klein, Opening Opportunities, Building Ownership: Fulfilling the Promise of Microenterprise in the U.S. (2005), an examination of the state of the U.S. microenterprise industry after its first 20 years. She has also authored and co-authored numerous other publications for FIELD, including Scaling up Microenterprise Services, The Informal Economy: Latino Enterprises at the Margins and The Informal Economy: Making It In Rural America, and Improving Microenterprise Training and Technical Assistance.

Ms. Edgcomb is also the author and editor of works on evaluation practice, institutional development, financial analysis, and on microenterprise strategies implemented both internationally and in the United States.

Previously, she served as the founding Executive Director of the Small Enterprise Education and Promotion (SEEP) Network, an association of more than 50 U.S. and Canadian nonprofit organizations that support small business and microenterprise development in the developing world. As a consultant to the Aspen Institute's Self-Employment Learning Project, she had principal responsibility for guiding the project's case study research on organizational strategies and issues in U.S. microenterprise.