How the Alliance Helped Downtown’s Small Businesses During Covid

It’s our 30th anniversary, and we’re self-celebrating. Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out 30 stories about 30 of our biggest accomplishments, including everything from our daily public safety and sanitation work, to our small business outreach, to how we helped the neighborhood navigate challenges and even tragedies. You’ll be able to find these stories on our website, as well as in our weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. 

Covid-19 lockdown measures saved lives, but they came with a real economic price. In the spring of 2020, leasing and development slowed, employment dropped and tourists stayed home. Few businesses were spared lost revenue, but our small businesses were especially hard hit.   

The Alliance’s Economic Development team mobilized, developing and implementing an $800,000 Small Business Rental Assistance Grant Program. The program provided desperately needed direct support to struggling Lower Manhattan retailers. We approved 61 awards helping cover store’s April or May rent bills that year. The Alliance also launched a Small Business Technical Assistance Program, which provided free one-on-one technical assistance sessions to Lower Manhattan small businesses. We  partnered with Streetsense, a well-regarded retail consultant, to assist restaurants and retailers on how to reconfigure their spaces to meet social distancing and new hygiene guidelines. Streetsense also produced two detailed Covid recovery toolkits for businesses downtown. 31 businesses received consulting sessions from Streetsense, worth $1500 each; in addition, we provided $3,000 implementation grants to 27 businesses.

Another way we supported Lower Manhattan’s businesses as the pandemic raged? Making online ordering easier, and more profitable. The Alliance partnered with BentoBox to create the Online Ordering Sponsorship Program, which provided restaurants with their own delivery and takeout platforms in an effort to separate them from third-party services like Seamless and Grubhub. The program included a virtual orientation, one-on-one training for each restaurant and additional periodic webinars to receive restaurant feedback on aspects of the program that could use improvement. The program covered a full free year of services, including ongoing technical and marketing support.

Our business grants didn’t end once the worst of the pandemic eased. In the spring of 2022, we launched a new business assistance program called Get Social. The Alliance paired 10 businesses with social media consultants, each of whom demonstrated skills and strategic insight in how to build an audience on a variety of platforms. We provided each participating business with six hours of consulting services, as well as a $1,500 grant to spend on digital advertising; we also hooked businesses up with a 45-minute professional photoshoot to help them with their image. The program was such a success, it spawned multiple cycles of grant making.