Sen. Mark Warner stopped by the Waynesboro Family YMCA on Friday afternoon, helping tout the facility's recent commitment to thermal solar energy. "I want to commend everyone who's been involved in this project," said Warner, himself a former YMCA board member for 20 years.

Charlottesville's Mikro, Inc. is a great company most people probably have never heard of: its advanced manufacturing processes allow it to produce cutting-edge, clean energy wind turbines and sophisticated medical instruments. And when foreign investors recently suggested moving the operation offshore, Mikro executives insisted on keeping the facility in Central Virginia.

Even with Congress at a nadir of bitter partisanship, the so-called Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of senators who came together last year to try to devise a way to strike $4 trillion out of federal spending in the coming decade, is still quietly at work. The group expects to have a debt-slashing plan of the $4 trillion variety ready well before the November election.

Senator Warner skyped in to a classroom full of Virginia Commonwealth University today to speak with about 100 students about his work on bipartisan deficit and debt reduction, and his efforts to make it easier for innovators and entrepreneurs to form new businesses and create jobs.

The recession and its aftermath have pinched the budgets of nonprofits even as demand for their services has grown, and businesses can help fill the gap and shore up public trust in the industry by donating workers’ expertise, Virginia Senator Mark Warner said. “Rather than just giving an organization some money, how do you actually help build their capacity?” the 57-year-old Democrat said yesterday in an interview.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Congress to pass an agenda that helps start-ups and small businesses succeed. We have already introduced a plan that shares his goals. It's called the Startup Act. Research conducted by the Kauffman Foundation and others has consistently shown that companies less than five years old accounted for nearly all net job creation in our economy over the past three decades.