Thelma Johnson is getting ready to jumpstart the economic recovery from COVID-19 pandemic in Albany, Georgia, a town of 75,000 people in the southwest part of the state. She’s the CEO of Albany Community Together, a community development financial institution or CDFI that specializes in loans for small businesses in the Albany area.
The pandemic hit Albany “like a bomb,” wrote the New York Times last year. Around 90,000 people live in and around Albany, and seventy percent of them are Black, including Johnson and nearly all of her clients.
“You can imagine every Black family either knows somebody or is someone affected by COVID-19,” Johnson told me in a May 2020 interview. “Three or four generations of a family may live in one house, so you’re seeing families with multiple cases across generations at one time. It has been the craziest thing, so much grief, so much pain, but people are persevering with their businesses because they want to provide a life for their families.”
Johnson did not agree when Georgia started issuing orders for businesses to re-open as early as April 2020. At the time, Albany Community Together had about 34 borrowers in its portfolio, including barbershops and salons, food businesses and manufacturers. Johnson says most of her clients stayed closed because her organization found ways to support them otherwise — the restaurants could shift to curbside pickup. Nearly half of her borrowers deferred payments for at least three months.
“Some are going to need funding to re-launch,” Johnson said last May. “Restaurants will need funding to re-do floor plans. If they don’t get that funding, we will lose our Black businesses. It’s hard to create a legacy Black business that can be sustained and passed down to family.”
If the plan for economic recovery takes any cues from last time, it could be a boon for Albany.
During the Great Recession, a federal pilot program called the State Small Business Credit Initiative provided $1.4 billion in flexible funding for states to support small business lending. Georgia got around $47 million. States that received the funding partnered with local lenders like Albany Community Together to deploy the funds. Johnson’s group received $3 million in funding from the initiative, which it used to enable $21 million in loans to 20 Albany-area small businesses employing around 140 people. Some of those businesses, Johnson says, were planning to relocate if they couldn’t get the capital they needed.
As part of the American Rescue Plan passed in March, Congress is putting out a second round of the State Small Business Credit Initiative. This time, it’s providing $10 billion. States have until this Friday to notify the U.S. Treasury that they plan to seek funding under…
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