It’s never a given that relief funding will get to the people who need it most. We saw this play out last year, when local governments across the country struggled to get pandemic- related relief to individuals and small businesses in need.
Yet in Miami, a unique coalition of funders, leaders and local Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) came together to ensure that as many of our small businesses as possible would survive. The RISE Miami-Dade Fund (RISE), which the county commission seeded with CARES Act funding, was an unprecedented success. Miami now has the nascent architecture for connected community lending, data congruency and a vehicle for crisis relief in moments of federal cash infusions.
Today, a new report published by Axis Helps (a project of Urban Impact Lab) and the Dade County Federal Credit Union, in partnership with County Commissioner Eileen Higgins, looks at how RISE accomplished its mission and offers recommendations for the future.
RISE helped 900 entrepreneurs across the county keep their doors open and 4,500 families employed in the space of a few months. Thankfully, RISE also collected an unprecedented amount of data on our local small businesses, helping us to define a roadmap for how we move forward to best support our community.
These insights highlight some of the long-standing challenges our small businesses face and point to gaps in data that must be addressed in order to accurately assess systemic inequities in access to capital. They yielded the following recommendations to help small businesses grow in Miami-Dade:
Increasing technical assistance and mentorship for small businesses
Improving data collection for Black-owned businesses, to ensure their needs are being met
Creating more ways for immigrant-owned businesses to access the financial support they need; Educating business owners on the licenses and requirements needed to operate and
Expanding data and mapping to close gaps in the local small business ecosystem. Afterall, progress must be measured to be real.
You can read the full report here.
At Finance Local, a two-part convening on small business lending that starts Sept. 29, we’ll be speaking with the brightest minds in small business lending, with focus on gender and racial equity, on the way forward for small businesses, based on insights from the RISE report and new data provided by Axis Helps. Registration is open at financelocal.miami, we hope you’ll join the conversation.
Alexina Prather and David Carson
Axis Helps Miami