Small businesses led by women, minorities or people from rural areas are looking for aid from the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program aimed at helping smaller companies survive the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. But getting a slice of the roughly $350 billion set aside under the PPP so far is a challenge for lenders, who are struggling to gear up as quickly as banks and other lending institutions with greater resources, the Wall Street Journal reported. “We didn’t get started as quickly as the others did, so we’re worried that by the time our program gets in place, that all of the funds for PPP would have been allocated,” said Matthew Raker executive director of Mountain BizWorks, a nonprofit loan fund focused on lending to small businesses that typically have trouble securing loans through traditional financial institutions. Democrats in Congress are looking to address that issue by setting aside roughly half of $250 billion in additional PPP funding for what are known as Community Development Financial Institutions such as Mountain BizWorks, along with other lenders such as credit unions and community banks. That effort has faced resistance from Republicans, leading the emergency-funding appropriation to stall last week. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has helped spearhead the small-business relief efforts, said he favors expediting the current legislation and believes more community lenders should be encouraged to participate through other means. Democrats counter that community lenders, credit unions and other nonbank lenders serve small, fledgling businesses that are now at high risk of going under — and are typically underserved by traditional lenders.
