Last week, LISC announced the launch of our newest and most ambition initiative: Project 10X, which aims to help close our country’s racial health, wealth and opportunity gaps. In many ways, Project 10X is an evolution of the intensive and unprecedented emergency relief work we began at the outset of the pandemic: supporting Black and Brown communities, and minority- and women-run small businesses, to survive and transcend the crisis.
James Baldwin once wrote that “we are trapped in history, and history is trapped in us.” The past eight months—spanning the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting deep recession, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others at the hands of police, and the ensuing national racial reckoning—all underscore Baldwin’s truth.
And while we often describe the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as unprecedented, a look back at our collective history reveals that the roots of its disproportionate toll on communities of color—both in terms of health and economic fallout—were planted a long time ago.
Our urgent response to the financial toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on the places and people we serve, both urban and rural, includes intentional efforts to bridge the gaps that created this disparate impact in the first place. Our experience warned us unequivocally that the very communities already burdened by a history of discrimination and underinvestment were going to be hardest hit.
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Small business grant recipients.
And that’s exactly what happened. So we mobilized at a level on which we’ve never operated before, creating the Rapid Relief and Resiliency Fund, and delivering more than $200 million in grants to women- and minority-owned small businesses in danger of closure, and to support thousands of community-based organizations that serve clients in need.
Partners old and new—ranging from corporations such as Verizon, Lowe’s and Wells Fargo to celebrities including Usher, Alicia Keys, Dan Levy, Dave Matthews and Janelle Monáe—stepped up as never before to back this effort. When the current pool of grant dollars has been distributed, we will have supported more than 4,100 businesses, 90 percent of them owned by people of color and women, and 10 percent by veterans. That figure is the sum of investments from more than 70 companies, foundations, individuals and other entities.
Some $50 million of these investments reached people through LISC’s deployment of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, via our SBA-licensed subsidiary immito, while the rest are individual grants targeted to small enterprises. LISC has also focused on rural small businesses; $26 million of a $55 million commitment from Lowe’s was earmarked for entrepreneurs in rural places.
And on top of the capital disbursed from LISC’s national headquarters, more than half of our 36 local offices also established local grant pools that to assist entrepreneurs in their local markets, to the combined tune of nearly $134 million. We are also deploying nearly $4 million to business development organizations working in urban and rural communities across 32 states and Puerto Rico, so that they can better assist small business owners to operate strategically and survive the pandemic. And we have delivered more than $2 million in emergency cash assistance to clients of our Financial Opportunity Centers to help them get to the other side of crisis.
In spite of these record-setting efforts, if the past months’ events have shown us anything, it’s that we need to do more. We realize that we must prioritize equity and racial justice in every program and policy recommendation we deliver. We must scale proven strategies and seek out new ones that are especially effective at narrowing racial wealth, health and opportunity gaps. And all of this demands that we make extraordinary investments in community organizations and Black financial institutions to create the America where everyone— regardless of race, ethnicity or zip code—can flourish.
That’s how LISC’s most ambitious initiative to date, Project 10X, was born—out of the understanding that we need to address head on the tenfold difference in wealth between Black and White residents—and that the wealth gap signifies other pervasive challenges to be tackled simultaneously, from poorer health and shorter lifespans to increased risks of eviction and incarceration for people of color. Of course, we will continue to provide relief as long as the virus continues to ravage communities, while at the same time we are delving deeper into the work of long-term recovery.
James Baldwin, we should add, also talked about the antidote for our entrapment in the parts of history we must never repeat. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” he wrote. “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We are committed to facing these challenges head on, even as we face more months of the pandemic and a long road to changing the discriminatory systems and practices that have twisted and stymied the American democratic experiment. Led by the communities and people with whom we work, and with partners as determined as we are to make an impact, we can forge a future of equitable, long-term recovery. Informed by our history, but no longer entrapped.