What's the SBA Community Navigator Program?

With a new administration comes new initiatives and political priorities. One of the Biden team’s goals for the Sba is to help businesses that happen to be unintentionally been left out of economic relief programs. In many instances, it is because business owners from socially or economically disadvantaged groups might not have the connections and resources to effectively exploit programs that have limited funding.

The SBA Community Navigator Program aims to lessen a few of the bumps and obstacles women-, minority-, and veteran-owned, in addition to rurally-based businesses might encounter when they try to queue up to have an SBA program.

What May be the Community Navigator Program?

Though the SBA happens to be promoting a community navigator model, they didn’t invent the idea. A community navigator model is a strategy used by traditional organizations to reach customers which are generally overlooked. In the case of the SBA, what this means is connecting with entrepreneurs in underserved segments of the community.

Take this: a business owner, fluent in English, who are operating in a middle-class neighborhood and it has some contacts from our government goes to obtain a PPP loan. If he's questions, he is able to ask his contacts for assistance with how to make sure his application gets seen and processed with priority. He finds out that he needs to apply through an SBA partner lender, not the SBA itself. He discovers exactly what documents he needs in advance. This program functions, more or less, because it was meant to.

But let's say the company owner is an immigrant for whom English is a second language? She's local contacts within her low-income community, however they aren’t connected to the broader government and financial system in the same way. She knows the SBA is managing a relief program, but it has a lot of rules. She could have a difficult time finding a translation of those rules that fully outlines all of the minutia. She might have a harder time connecting with somebody that can explain the rules to her. Because of that, when she does apply, her application may be missing necessary information. The probabilities that they doesn't happen the cracks are higher. A community navigator program could help put her comparable to the prior business owner.

So how's this accomplished?

Community navigator programs often use what’s known as a “hub and spoke” model. The hubs form the center of the network and therefore are typically a large, well-funded non-profit organization with a substantial amount of expertise. The hubs possess the resources, although not necessarily the reach. A hub will:

Coordinate meetings, planning, and strategy
Develop curricula
Develop best practices
Hire specialized personnel (lawyers, CPAs, etc) who speak the languages and understand the culture from the target demographics

The spokes are (usually) smaller organizations which are more baked into the communities the hub is trying to communicate with. Spokes effectively extend the reach of the hub organization, help with communication issues, and cope with logistical barriers between the client and also the hub organization. Duties of the spokes include:

Outreach (telephone calls, texts, e-mails, door-to-door canvassing)
Document preparation
Meeting participation goals for participation in programs inside the targeted community.
Finding and working with additional community partners like media, schools, churches, and native elected officials.

If the hub and spoke network is functioning effectively, it should be steadily sending qualified candidates the spokes have scouted and assisted towards the hub, ideally with completed applications and any necessary documents.

Will The Program Help My Small Business?

Maybe.

The SBA happens to be allowing Small company Development Centers (SBDCs), Women’s Business Centers, Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), SBA district offices, and state and local governments to utilize SBA funding to establish and run community navigator programs. The programs will likely take a moment to develop and mature, making them much more of a long-term strategy than an immediate relief program.

So do you are in position to benefit from SBA’s Community Navigator program?

If you’re already successfully applying for SBA programs, there probably won’t considerably here for you if you're a woman-, minority-, or veteran-business owner, a treadmill who operates in an economically disadvantaged area. The city navigator model’s goal is to get you to definitely and through the gate fully equipped with all you need to be approved.

On another hand, if you’ve regularly found yourself annoyed by bureaucratic, language, informational, or bookkeeping barriers when you’ve attempted to access SBA programs, you’re the kind of business customer that this program is supposed to help. If all goes based on plan, the institutions that you simply normally communicate with locally inside your day-to-day life will double as resource links for the business activities.

Community Navigator Program: Final Thoughts

The SBA’s Community Navigator Program appears like it could help many underserved businesses access programs later on. That said, it’s much more of a logistical reorganization than the usual direct program for businesses.

Looking for information about the SBA’s COVID-relief programs? Check out our guides on: