City of Dallas awards more than $600K to small businesses

The Small Business Continuity Fund (SBCF) program, a partnership between the City of Dallas Office of Economic Development, Dallas Development Fund (DDF) and National Development Council (NDC), continues to provide financial assistance to Dallas businesses impacted by COVID-19. Since the program’s application opened in May 2020, there have been a total of 46 grants approved, with an award total of $387,500. The average grant amount is $8,424. Additionally, six loans have been approved, totaling $221,000, with an average loan amount of $36,833.  

“The City of Dallas is continuing to support small businesses impacted by COVID-19,” said Dr. Eric Anthony Johnson, Chief of Economic Development & Neighborhood Services. “We hope that these loans will sustain small businesses that help make Dallas a vibrant city full of economic growth and opportunity.”  

The SBCF program was designed to assist low-to-moderate income (LMI) microenterprise business owners (five or fewer employees), or small businesses with 50 or fewer employees that retain LMI workers within the city of Dallas. Businesses were given the opportunity to apply for a $10,000 maximum grant or a $50,000 maximum loan. There were more than 1,000 businesses that qualified for the grant program and nearly 400 businesses qualified for the loan program.  Businesses were then ranked by lottery and placed in order to receive funding. 

To track data and statistics from the SBCF applications and awards, the Office of Economic Development has created a dashboard. The data from the dashboard can be filtered and searched by council district, award status, demographic information, and zip code. The dashboard is updated weekly and can be viewed on the City’s website. 

Written by Alanna Evans