This Asian American Pacific Islanders Heritage Month, we celebrate Lei Nichols who established Wise Mouth Teas in 2016. When faced with lost sales and legal issues due to the pandemic, Lei turned first to Small Business Strong (SBS) for help. Now, Wise Mouth Teas is ready to resume its growth.

The webinar and panel discussion by Next City & LISC, featuring leaders and perspectives from Boston, shares how local governments and partners can help advance an equitable small business recovery.

By David M. Greenberg and Patricia Voltolini

A new playbook from LISC and Next City offers a framework for paving equitable pathways to small business success, and lays out concrete strategies for supporting capital access, small business capacity, and commercial real estate. Two of its authors explain why that’s so important. Local partners the City of Boston and BECMA contributed with some successes and lessons from here in the Commonwealth.

By Bill Taft

Since the onset of the pandemic, LISC has equipped 16,000 small business owners with relief and resilience grants. But to foster opportunity and long-term resiliency for all entrepreneurs who confront entrenched inequities, including people of color, women, immigrants and refugees, and people with lower incomes and wealth, we need a robust universe of small business “ecosystems”: the network of capital, services, and supports that every enterprise needs to get on its feet and grow.

Small business owners accessed the U.S. Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) with the help of LISC and a coalition of partners across the state.