Meet three entrepreneurs of color who have made meaningful and dream-fulfilling strides on their small business journeys, thanks in part to the SBA's Community Navigator Pilot Program which LISC is helping implement. Each business person has connected with a CBO or community business organization that has connected them with invaluable know-how and access to flexible growth capital - the support system that no small enterprise can go without.

By Destiny Allen & Michelle Harati

This Small Business Week, we are highlighting how the Community Navigator Pilot Program, administered by the Small Business Administration, is investing in local and national partnerships with trusted organizations to reduce the barriers entrepreneurs face in accessing critical support. Partners work with small business owners across the country, including veterans, women, people with disabilities, and those from rural places and communities of color.

Kiva loans supported by LISC are a lifeline of zero interest capital to dozens of micro-business owners in underserved places across the country. But just as critical to the loan’s success as an entrepreneur’s dreams and drive is the role of the Kiva trustee—a trusted, community-based partner who supports borrowers from application and business development all the way to loan repayment. Joseph Ceasar, founder and CEO of Legacy Institute for Financial Education in rural Lufkin, TX is an exemplary Kiva trustee, on a mission to bring financial know-how and stability and generational wealth-building back to his community.

In recognition of Small Buiness Week, we're revisiting a vibrant project in rural Astoria, Oregon—a community of 10,000 people in the northwest corner of the state—where a co-op grocery store has adapted to the pandemic and found ways to get healthy, affordable food to residents. A LISC small business loan helped make the difference.

The menu of free digital resources to help entrepreneurs plan, manage and grow their businesses is the latest collaboration between LISC and Verizon to support community-rooted enterprises reeling from the pandemic’s economic fallout. Since April 2020, LISC has distributed $17.5 million in grants from Verizon to nearly 1,700 small businesses, most of them women- and BIPOC-owned.

By Bill Taft, SVP of Economic Development

As LISC celebrates the extraordinary contributions of small businesses this week, we are taking stock of how our grantmaking and other support touched 16,000 small businesses across the country, and what they have told us they need to survive and flourish going forward. Affordable capital and technical assistance top the list. We’ve heard them, loud and clear, and are responding with increased investment, like a new partnership with the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready initiative.

Small business owners cherish their independence, but they can also use outside advice and technical assistance to be successful—or simply to survive a crisis like the pandemic. And that's where business development organizations (BDOs) come in. LISC BDO partners link their on-the-ground networks and insight with LISC’s national scale, funding and expertise to support small businesses, in the midst of COVID, and for the future.