SBA identifies a client in an underserved community as those clients where:

• the primary contact is Non-White
• the primary contact is Hispanic
• the primary contact is Female
• the primary contact is a Veteran or is active military, or military spouse
• the primary contact is a member of a Tribal community
• the primary contact has a Disability
• the primary contact identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community
• the client's physical address is located in a USDA RDS Rural Area
• the client's physical address is in an area with Persistent Poverty
• is a member of a Religious Minority*
• is adversely affected by systemic inequality*

The "Member of an underserved community?" field on the client record was added to the Neoserra CRM system on 8/14/23. All existing clients, at that time, were updated to YES if any of the above criteria were met, with the exception of the last two criteria listed.

* The last two criteria: being a member of a Religious Minority and having been affected by other systemic inequality, are not natively tracked in Neoserra. However, both of these factors are part of SBA's underserved community definition. As such, there may be some clients who manually need to be updated as being a member of an underserved community.

If you are planning on tracking this data in your Neoserra database, then we strongly recommend that you activate this field in your Neoserra interface, and include it as part of your client intake form on eCenter Direct. Neoserra will not automatically update this field for you, and instead rely on you, the Neoserra user, or the eCenter Direct client to determine whether they are part of an underserved community. Neoserra will, however, prompt you when it determines that a client might qualify as a member of an underserved community:

This prompt will appear anytime you edit either the primary contact record and there are one or more characteristics that would qualify that person as being a member of the underserved community; or when you edit the client record and the client is located in either a rural or persisten poverty area.

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