No one can rightly accuse the chairman and chief executive of Starbucks, one Howard Schultz, of being short on ideas. Lately, his thoughts have turned to what most of us could do to help this country out of seemingly dire straits, and his most recent inspiration was a way for us to become job creators without having to hire anybody ourselves.

Mr. Schultz’s idea was to use the nearly 7,000 Starbucks stores with their tens of millions of customers to promote a way to lend money to small businesses that had lost access to credit after the financial crisis.

The way that Mr. Schultz and a handful of employees found to implement the idea was described in an Op-Ed column by Joe Nocera in the New York Times (October 18, 2011). The column started off with, “Howard Schultz. God bless him.”

The way they found to implement Mr. Schultz's idea was to have Americans lend money to small businesses, with Starbucks as the middleman. Customers who donated $5 to the effort when they bought their coffee would get a red, white, and blue wristband with the message “Indivisible.”

For financial partners in the project, Mr. Schultz and his colleagues turned to an umbrella organization for lenders that specialize in underserved communities, the Opportunity Financial Network, to establish the Create Jobs for USA Fund.

The Starbucks Foundation kicked off the fund-raising with a $5 million donation, and Starbucks and the Foundation will pay for the marketing costs, the wristbands, and every other cost associated with the Create Jobs of USA program. One hundred percent of contributions will be pooled for making small business loans to create and sustain jobs.

All very well, you might say, for donations in the millions, but how much good could a measly $5 donation do? (Of course, donations need not be limted to $5.) Here it gets a little complicated for us nonfinancial types, but it shows the advantage of having access to financial types.

The money collected in donations will not be loaned out directly. It will be used to create capital, or equity, which can be leveraged (multiplied, in that financially magical way) by a ratio of 7 to 1 for loans to small businesses. Accordingly, each $5 donation can lead to about $35 in loans to small businesses.

The Create Jobs for USA Fund surpassed $1 million in donations in the first two weeks after the program was launched on November 1, according to an announcement by Starbucks issued on November 14. That amount added to the $ 5 million donation by the Starbucks Foundation, for a total of $6 million, may create as much as $42 million in small business loans.

According to the announcement, “Based on conservative forecasting models developed by [the Opportunity Financial Network] with input from independent economists, one new job will be created or retained for approximately every $21,000 in loans – or approximately every $3000 in donations.

Another plus – the wristbands distributed to donors are individually handmade in the U.S.A. and all component materials are manufactured by U.S. suppliers, so the program is also helping to support American manufacturing jobs. As of November 14, more than 200,000 wristbands had been distributed to donors.

If you’re interested in making a donation but not necessarily in going out for a cup of coffee, you can donate to the Create Jobs for USA Fund by clicking on CreatJobsforUSA.org.

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