The recent peace between once bitter enemies Ethiopia and Eritrea has transformed lives there.
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Friday, April 17, 2020
Jay-Z-Backed Robinhood Stock Brokerage App Is Nearing An $8 Billion Valuation
The figure, however, is “a pre-money valuation. The company received an estimated $7.6 billion valuation after a funding round in July 2019. The online service dealt with a fair share of technical problems, outages, and maxed-out credit lines, blaming the problems on “unprecedented” user demand. An outage on March 2nd lasted for the entire U.S. trading session, during which the S&P 500 climbed 4.6%.
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Expert: Coronavirus Could Have ‘Devastating’ Effect on the Wealth of Black America
The novel coronavirus is having a sobering effect on the American economy, but its impact on blacks could be staggering. And it will certainly exacerbate the already troubling wealth gap.
In fact, it could be “immense and devastating,” said Duke professor William “Sandy” Darity during a media briefing about the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on families.
Darity is a professor of public policy, African and African American Studies, and economics who specializes in wealth and income disparities, the social-psychological effects of exposure to unemployment, and reparations. He also directs the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
He and his colleagues agreed that the $2 trillion stimulus bill won’t be enough to solve the financial problems facing America’s working families, particularly African Americans, and that a massive infusion of cash and other government resources is needed.
William A. Darity, Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University
Here’s what Darity had to say about the pandemic’s potential toll on the income and wealth of black Americans:
On the disparities in health and wealth…
“Black Americans constitute approximately 13% of the nation’s population but only possess about 2.6% of the nation’s wealth. This translates into an average gap per household of about $800,000 This immense differential means that under any emergency circumstances, black families have considerably less resources to function as a cushion and they do not have the resources to have access to the best health care or the best preventive measures to insure one has better health.
“And, as a consequence, we’re seeing these staggering numbers associated with racial disparities and the mortality from COVID-19. For example, in the state of Louisiana, blacks make up 32% of the population but 70% of the deaths from the coronavirus.”
On the greater risk to blacks…
“The types of disparities we’re talking about in terms of disadvantage, particularly with respect to employment, is fairly widespread but it disproportionately weighs on black America.
“Particular for folks who are in personal contact, personal service employment, that require close connections to your customer base at a time when we’re trying to minimize connections between individuals and trying to minimize large gatherings, that means the odds of job loss is high. Or, if they’re in … employments we deem essential, like people in health care services or the hospital sector, they themselves are at greater risk. It’s somewhat of a prisoner’s dilemma: Either you lose your job or you keep a job in which you’re going to be exposed to a high level of danger.”
On black unemployment…
“I think that on the side of income, as opposed to wealth, the first thing we have to consider is the vast amount of job loss that’s going to take place. We know that historically in the United States the black unemployment rate is consistently two times the white unemployment rate. And that’s true regardless of educational attainment. This has always been the case from the time we first began to collect unemployment statistics in the United States.
“People are projecting that the national unemployment rate is going to reach 30% or even higher possibly. Then, the projected unemployment rate for black Americans could run as high as 50%, which is absolutely staggering and is a number we have never seen in this country. There could be immense and devastating income effects associated with the evolving depression.”
On the racial wealth gap…
“In terms of wealth effects, if anything, I would argue the existing policies we put in place, like the CARES Act, disproportionately benefits individuals who already are relatively better positioned because of the amount of resources going indirectly to workers, because they have to be delivered as the pass-through to small businesses but also fairly substantial large corporations.
“We might actually observe a further worsening in wealth disparities both in general and in respect to the racial wealth gap. I’m hard-pressed to put a real number on what that might look like, but it’s been horrendous in recent years and I can only imagine those kinds of disparities will get worse in the absence of any significant policy intervention.”
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Drinking Alcohol Can Increase Chances Of Being Infected By Coronavirus
Drinking alcohol can increase the risk of catching COVID-19 and make the symptoms worse if you get infected with the virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
According to CNBC, the WHO made the announcement Tuesday, recommending government leaders worldwide limit alcohol access during coronavirus lockdowns.
“Alcohol compromises the body’s immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes,” the WHO’s regional office for Europe said on its site late Tuesday.
The WHO also published a guidance dispelling the “dangerous myth that consuming high-strength alcohol can kill” the coronavirus.
“It does not,” the WHO said. ““Therefore, people should minimize their alcohol consumption at any time, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The WHO added that it could result in serious health issues, including death. About 3 million deaths a year are attributable to alcohol without a pandemic driving up consumption. However, Americans are imbibing more at home now that bars and restaurants are closed. According to the financial services company Rabobank, the bar and restaurant market stands lose $15 billion in alcohol sales over the next two months.
Additionally, alcohol sales at U.S. liquor and grocery stores were up 22% for the week ending March 28 compared with the same time last year. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus offered healthier advice, including eating healthy and getting at least 30 minutes of exercise per day for adults and an hour for kids.
“It’s normal to feel stressed, confused, and scared during a crisis. Talking to people you know and trust can help,” Tedros said. “And try not to read or watch too much news if it makes you anxious. Get your information from reliable sources once or twice a day.”
The coronavirus outbreak has sent the world indoors. Researchers believe it will stay that way for some time. The virus has significantly impacted Americans as more than 16 million people have lost their job.
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Congresswoman Velázquez Calls for More Equity in Now Broke Paycheck Protection Program
Small businesses have been devastated by the global outbreak of COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, and are fighting to keep their doors open. This week U.S. Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), Chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee, called for programs to do more for underserved communities.
Velázquez has joined forces with the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC), National Restaurant Association, Illinois Restaurant Association, Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, and the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) to speak out on access issues with the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to marginalized communities—just.a day before the SBA announced that the program has run out of funds.
In a webcast, they urged for a more equitable implementation of the program featuring increased investment to vulnerable small businesses. Such additional dollars will be even more critical since the SBA had to stop accepting loan applications once the funds were exhausted.
“In these trying times, reaching traditionally underserved businesses in our federal relief efforts to COVID-19 is essential,” Velázquez said in a press statement. “That is why I will keep pressing for additional funding and commonsense reforms to strengthen federal relief efforts and ensure that all small businesses have the opportunity to secure capital and other resources that are key to a full and efficient recovery.”
Martin Eakes, president and CEO Self Help Credit Union, also joined the webcast to address the PPP’s emerging issues. “As the one of the largest CDFIs [Community Development Financial Institutions] in the country, our mission is to create and protect economic opportunity for all. Businesses of color are the backbone of the American economy, and many of them rely on CDFIs and other local, community banks to conduct their financial needs,” said Eakes.
“For the Paycheck Protection Program to be successful and benefit entrepreneurs and communities of color, and others who are traditionally shut out due to discriminatory banking practices, CDFIs must play an integral role in the implementation.”
The webcast included a Q&A section to address questions from attendees with others, including Renee Bender, Senior Professional Staff with the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee under Chairman Marco Rubio; Raul Raymundo, CEO of the Resurrection Project, a member organization of NPNA; and Melissa Jung, who serves as the Chief of Staff for Chairwoman Velázquez.
“We want to thank Congresswoman Velázquez and Senator Rubio for continuing to champion Paycheck Protection Program opportunities for the most vulnerable businesses and institutions in our society,” Raymundo said.
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Thursday, April 16, 2020
Grandson of a slave, Maryland centenarian still fights for Black history and civil rights
Harvey Zeigler, 100, is the grandson of a man who escaped slavery in Orangeburg, South Carolina in the 1850s through the Underground Railroad.
That man, Doc Zeigler, a musician, would ultimately settle near a small, rural, unincorporated town in Montgomery County, Maryland called Damascus, named after the capital city in Syria.
Damascus was also the town where Zeigler’s great-grandfather, Richard Holsey, was gifted a parcel of land that was once a slave plantation, known as the Mullinix Plantation after he was identified in the 1850 Census as the family of free slaves on the homestead.
READ MORE: Ben Carson on slavery reparations: ‘No one is ever going to be able to work that out’
The old Mullinix slave Plantation became Holsey Road, and nearly two dozen free slaves — including Zeigler’s great grandparents, uncles, and aunts, as well as other descendants of slaves – settled on the road where they thrived, even in hard times.
“Holsey Road was a Christian community. The best kind of community,” Zeigler said. “The people worked hard in the trades — carpenters, brick masons. It was between poverty and middle class. It was oatmeal, cornmeal, missed meal or no meal during my time.”
“Most of the people who lived here were farmers,” Zeigler added. “My father was a musician and worked on a farm. My mother was a domestic.”
Recently, Zeigler, a former youth organizer with the Montgomery County chapter of the NAACP, discussed what life was like growing up amongst free Blacks on Holsey Road, how gentrification changed the demographics of the road and the town, and how race continues to shape almost every aspect in America.
Just like the rest of Montgomery County, Damascus was segregated in the 1920s and 1930s when Zeigler grew up. Holsey Road became their refuge: the place where they were nurtured and sustained by their people.
As a young man, Zeigler, who was the 6th of 13 children born to Ellsworth and Bertha Lyles, said he started working early in the community. “During the summer, I would cut the people’s grass. I did a lot of work in the community. I had a reputation for being a Good Samaritan,” he said.
Today, much has changed on Holsey Road. Zeigler and one other family are the only Black people who remain. “That’s the sad part about it,” Zeigler said.
In recent years, Black enclaves in Montgomery County like Holsey Road were gentrified, as people continue to flock to the county for its good schools and property values.
“I feel a little depressed (but) you can’t beat progress,” Zeigler said recently. “You’ve got to take the good with the bad with progress.”
Zeigler’s fond memories still remain.
After he graduated from the all-Black Lincoln High School in Rockville, Md., Zeigler was drafted in the U.S. Army and became part of the 329th segregated unit during World War II.
“We would guard the ammunition, equipment, food, and gas,” Zeigler said. Zeigler worked as a private first class in a Black unit and said he guarded supplies that soldiers needed while fighting on the front lines of Europe.
When he came back to Maryland after his military service was over, Zeigler married and settled down on Holsey Road just like his parents had. He bought a house right next to his sister, Inez Macabee, who is now deceased. Macabee’s home was built by slaves and is on Maryland’s historic registry.
Zeigler said the area had so much African American history, it just felt right to keep his roots firmly planted, even if Jim Crow still persisted at that time in Montgomery County.
Growing up in Damascus and coming of age in the early to mid-20th Century, Zeigler said he remembered the time when Blacks were openly discriminated against and lived in segregated communities.
“I couldn’t go to lunchrooms, swimming pools, churches, schools. I couldn’t go anyplace in 1966,” Zeigler said. “We took a lot of beatings, Afro-Americans, back in that time.”
When Zeigler and a cousin hoped to open a trucking company in the late 1940s but couldn’t get bank financing, Zeigler accused the bank of discriminatory lending practices. A decade later, when he was passed over for promotions at the Atomic Energy Commission, he solicited the NAACP’s help and filed a complaint against the AEC.
Times have changed for certain, but Zeigler said he still sees some negative remnants of racial discrimination in America. He also thinks in some ways we are moving in reverse.
“I think we’re taking a step backward, a big step,” Zeigler said about President Donald Trump. “All the things we did accomplish, he’s trying to undo.”
He is also frustrated at the cavalier attitude some young Black people have towards voting.
“These youngsters, when you talk to them and they tell you ‘my vote don’t matter,’” Zeigler’s voice trails off. “I can’t deal with some of it.”
“I talked to a guy the other day and he said everything he got, he got on his own,” Zeigler said. “He said he made straight A’s at Seneca Valley and I asked him how do you think you got into Seneca Valley. He said he walked in it.”
Zeigler said some young Black people even tell him they no longer see a need for the NAACP.
“They say, we don’t need the NAACP, we’ve got it good. We don’t have no problems. If you talk to the youngsters, you’ll hear them say this,” he said.
When asked how that sentiment makes him feel, Zeigler doesn’t mince words.
“Like my life was just destroyed. All that work, all that beating, police poking you with the bully sticks,” for nothing, he said.
Zeigler doesn’t blame the children entirely. He said Black history is no longer taught in the schools, like when he attended all-Black schools.
“When I was going to high school, they would teach Black history for a semester. Now they can’t even get it into the curriculum,” Zeigler said.
So Zeigler fought to create a Black museum.
Warren Fleming, Zeigler’s nephew, said his uncle has always used his voice and his actions to help Black people attain civil rights and continues to do so now whenever he can. Fleming heads up the Damascus Connections Committee, a nonprofit that preserves African-American culture in the community.
READ MORE: Wake Forest apologizes for slavery in university’s past
“We began to utilize our strength. My uncle wanted a Black museum,” Fleming said.
Soon, white organizations wanted to join in a partnership with Zeigler to ensure a Black museum came to fruition. The Montgomery County School System donated a trailer and the committee turned it into the Damascus Heritage Museum, which is dedicated to telling African-American history.
“My uncle was always about unity in the community,” Fleming said.
The post Grandson of a slave, Maryland centenarian still fights for Black history and civil rights appeared first on TheGrio.
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Deploying more conversational chatbots
The comedian Bill Burr has said he refuses to call into automated customer service lines for fear that, years later on his death bed, all he’ll be able to think about are the moments he wasted dealing with chatbots.
Indeed, the frustrating experience of trying to complete even the most straightforward task through an automated customer service line is enough to make anyone question the purpose of life.
Now the startup Posh is trying to make conversations with chatbots more natural and less maddening. It’s accomplishing this with an artificial intelligence-powered system that uses “conversational memory” to help users complete tasks.
“We noticed bots in general would take what the user said at face value, without connecting the dots of what was said before in the conversation,” says Posh co-founder and CEO Karan Kashyap ’17, SM ’17. “If you think about your conversations with humans, especially in places like banks with tellers or in customer service, what you said in the past is very important, so we focused on making bots more humanlike by giving them the ability to remember historical information in a conversation.”
Posh’s chatbots are currently used by over a dozen credit unions across voice- and text-based channels. The well-defined customer base has allowed the company to train its system on only the most relevant data, improving performance.
The founders plan to gradually partner with companies in other sectors to gather industry-specific data and expand the use of their system without compromising performance. Down the line, Kashyap and Posh co-founder and CTO Matt McEachern ’17, SM ’18 plan to provide their chatbots as a platform for developers to build on.
The expansion plans should attract businesses in a variety of sectors: Kashyap says some credit unions have successfully resolved more than 90 percent of customer calls with Posh’s platform. The company’s expansion may also help alleviate the mind-numbing experience of calling into traditional customer service lines.
“When we deploy our telephone product, there’s no notion of ‘Press one or press two,’” Kashyap explains. “There’s no dial tone menu. We just say, ‘Welcome to whatever credit union, how can I help you today?’ In a few words, you let us know. We prompt users to describe their problems via natural speech instead of waiting for menu options to be read out.”
Bootstrapping better bots
Kashyap and McEachern became friends while pursuing their degrees in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. They also worked together in the same research lab at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
But their relationship quickly grew outside of MIT. In 2016, the students began software consulting, in part designing chatbots for companies to handle customer inquiries around medical devices, flight booking, personal fitness, and more. Kashyap says they used their time consulting to learn about and take business risks.
“That was a great learning experience, because we got real-world experience in designing these bots using the tools that were available,” Kashyap says. “We saw the market need for a bot platform and for better bot experiences.”
From the start, the founders executed a lean business strategy that made it clear the engineering undergrads were thinking long term. Upon graduation, the founders used their savings from consulting to fund Posh’s early operations, giving themselves salaries and even hiring some contacts from MIT.
It also helped that they were accepted into the delta v accelerator, run by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, which gave them a summer of guidance and free rent. Following delta v, Posh was accepted into the DCU Fintech Innovation Center, connecting it with one of the largest credit unions in the country and netting the company another 12 months of free rent.
With DCU serving as a pilot customer, the founders got a “crash course” in the credit union industry, Kashyap says. From there they began a calculated expansion to ensure they didn’t grow faster than Posh’s revenue allowed, freeing them from having to raise venture capital.
The disciplined growth strategy at times forced Posh to get creative. Last year, as the founders were looking to build out new features and grow their team, they secured about $1.5 million in prepayments from eight credit unions in exchange for discounts on their service along with a peer-driven profit-sharing incentive. In total, the company has raised $2.5 million using that strategy.
Now on more secure financial footing, the founders are poised to accelerate Posh’s growth.
Pushing the boundaries
Even referring to today’s automated messaging platforms as chatbots seems generous. Most of the ones on the market today are only designed to understand what a user is asking for, something known as intent recognition.
The result is that many of the virtual agents in our lives, from the robotic telecom operator to Amazon’s Alexa to the remote control, take directions but struggle to hold a conversation. Posh’s chatbots go beyond intent recognition, using what Kashyap calls context understanding to figure out what users are saying based on the history of the conversation. The founders have a patent pending for the approach.
“[Context understanding] allows us to more intelligently understand user inputs and handle things like changes in topics without having the bots break,” Kashyap says. “One of our biggest pet peeves was, in order to have a successful interaction with a bot, you as a user have to be very unnatural sometimes to convey what you want to convey or the bot won’t understand you.”
Kashyap says context understanding is a lot easier to accomplish when designing bots for specific industries. That’s why Posh’s founders decided to start by focusing on credit unions.
“The platforms on the market today are almost spreading themselves too thin to make a deep impact in a particular vertical,” Kashyap says. “If you have banks and telecos and health care companies all using the same [chatbot] service, it’s as if they’re all sharing the same customer service rep. It’s difficult to have one person trained across all of these domains meaningfully.”
To onboard a new credit union, Posh uses the customer’s conversational data to train its deep learning model.
“The bots continue to train even after they go live and have actual conversations,” Kashyap says. “We’re always improving it; I don’t think we’ll ever deploy a bot and say it’s done.”
Customers can use Posh’s bots for online chats, voice calls, SMS messaging, and through third party channels like Slack, WhatsApp, and Amazon Echo. Posh also offers an analytics platform to help customers analyze what users are calling about.
For now, Kashyap says he’s focused on quadrupling the number of credit unions using Posh over the next year. Then again, the founders’ have never let short term business goals cloud their larger vision for the company.
“Our perspective has always been that [the robot assistant] Jarvis from ‘Iron Man’ and the AI from the movie ‘Her’ are going to be reality sometime soon,” Kashyap says. “Someone has to pioneer the ability for bots to have contextual awareness and memory persistence. I think there’s a lot more that needs to go into bots overall, but we felt by pushing the boundaries a little bit, we’d succeed where other bots would fail, and ultimately people would like to use our bots more than others.”
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Helping K-12 students overcome school closures
School closures brought on by the Covid-19 outbreak have affected students across the globe. But while some districts have moved quickly to train teachers and buy software to facilitate online learning, others lack the resources to make a smooth transition to the virtual world.
Different home environments also exacerbate inequalities, as some households lack computers for each member of the family, rely on children to care for their younger siblings, or have parents deemed essential workers.
Those were the problems on the minds of a group of students from MIT and Harvard University when they started CovEducation, a mentoring platform that connects volunteer college students with children from low-income communities for academic support.
The organization, also known as CovEd, has scaled rapidly since its inception in mid-March, with more than 1,300 mentors and 850 K-12 students currently signed up.
The early tutoring sessions have also included help with career planning, the college admissions process, and any other academic issues the student may be struggling with. The sessions are meant to be as natural and responsive as CovEd’s fluid internal operations.
“One thing we’re trying to preserve [as we scale], which is the essence of our organization, is that this is a very tailored program for the students,” MIT undergraduate Daniela Velez says. “We match them in an organic way, trying to form very natural connections by finding mentors that are perfectly suited for them, and who can serve not only as a tutor, but also as a role model.”
CovEd catches on
CovEducation began as an idea in a small group chat among friends, including Evelyn Wong, a student at Harvard who is also an undergraduate research fellow at MIT. Harvard and MIT had just announced they would be moving to online instruction, and it was becoming clear that school districts would do the same.
The plan was to help K-12 students from low-income communities through virtual tutoring and mentorship. As the group chat grew, the idea excited a lot of people who were eager to volunteer their time and expertise.
“We all just wanted to turn this into an opportunity for the students to thrive and continue pursuing what they’re passionate about at home,” Velez says.
Wong made a Facebook page for CoveEducation on March 16, around the same time a group from MIT, including undergraduates Velez, Dheekshita Kumar, and Sarah Dohadwala, along with current PhD candidate Tam Nguyen SM ’19, had reached out separately offering to help pull together resources and develop the platform to match mentors and students. The MIT group, Wong, and Zoya Surani, an undergraduate at Harvard, make up CovEd’s management team, though the team stresses CovEd has always been a highly collaborative effort involving many volunteers.
The group received guidance through MIT Sandbox, MIT’s Office of the General Counsel, and the Boston University Law Clinic as they built out the organization. The structure of CovEd sprung up organically as new tasks presented themselves. Groups formed to handle things like outreach to superintendents, compiling resources for mentors and parents, and developing the soon-to-be-released web app.
“It’s very structured; we have this core group of nine people or so that decides the direction and the big tasks, and then each person in the group has a subgroup,” Dohadwala explains. “So we decide what we’re going to do at a high level, then go to our subgroup and say, ‘Here’s our slice of this task and how we’re going to do it.’”
As the team reached out to potential partners, they confirmed their concerns about some students getting left behind. They heard from parents who didn’t feel equipped to teach their children for a number of reasons, from their unfamiliarity with certain subjects to their difficulty with English. School districts also shared their struggles working with limited resources and time.
CovEd’s first mentoring sessions were held on March 30.
An instructional, social network
When mentors and students sign up on CovEd, they take a quick survey that asks about their interests, hobbies, and favorite subjects in school. Students can also say what they want to be when they grow up, and CovEd has been able to match those students with mentors studying in similar fields.
“I wish I had this resource as a child, because when you come to college your knowledge of what is possible expands,” Kumar says. “For me, I thought the only professions I could be were teacher, doctor, engineer, these generic terms, but there’s so much diversity in all of those things. … It can be an invaluable experience, getting to know someone who is doing something you’re interested in. They have a different lens of the profession to share.”
Most sessions are held on the video conferencing platform Zoom, which has a number of useful tools for education, including a “whiteboard” that users can share and collaborate on in real-time.
Parents are always present for the sessions, which are held about once a week, although students and mentors often work out meeting scheduling and frequency on their own.
“We’re trying to make it as flexible as possible, because we know everyone has different needs, and some students might want more lax academic support than others,” says Velez.
Many of the mentors have experience working in the education system or tutoring, which has allowed CovEd to pair students with special needs with mentors who have worked with those types of students in the past.
The project has led to an unexpected whirlwind of work for the management team, but it has also brought some notable benefits.
“I think one of the things a lot of students were sad about when we moved to virtual everything was that we wouldn’t make new friends or meet new people,” Kumar says. “I didn’t know any people [on the management team] before this, and I didn’t know a single person in my subgroup, so one of the other things that’s been really lovely is meeting other people who also care about these issues.”
The biggest payoff for the team, though, has come from getting positive feedback from students, parents, and mentors. To date, CovEd has paired 600 students with mentors, and stories have already begun to regularly brighten their day.
In one early matching session, the team was able to connect a student and mentor who both use the same hearing aid. In another case, a student said she wanted to be an FBI agent when she grew up, so the team was able to connect her to a mentor majoring in criminal justice.
Of course, mentors also connect with their students through smaller similarities. Other important questions on CovEd’s sign up form include “If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose?” and “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”
“We’re just looking forward to moments like that, where we find the student and mentor bond beyond the classroom,” Velez says.
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US Chamber Organizes Social Media Blitz To Get Congress To Replenish Small Business Stimulus Funds
Rick Wade, Vice President, Strategic Alliances and Outreach for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the organization is rallying the business community to use its collective clout to press Congress to approve emergency funding for programs designed to rescue legions of small businesses ravaged by the COVID-19 economy. In fact, Wade says they will engage in a “morning blitz” via social media today urging congressional leaders to take immediate action to replenish stimulus funds.
In a release from the US Chamber, Wade stated: “Today, we learned that the Paycheck Protection Program — a critical lifeline for small businesses across the country — has reached its statutory limit. Meanwhile, the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loans expanded by the CARES [Corronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security] Act are running on empty. Congress has yet to replenish the funds for either program. As our Executive Vice President Neil Bradley wrote in a letter to lawmakers today: ‘There is absolutely no excuse for failing to get these funds approved immediately.’ “
As a means of lobbying “to refuel these vital programs,” Wade said the US Chamber’s recently-instituted Save Small Business Initiative has organized #SaveSmallBusiness Day of Action.
In his role, Wade, a top Commerce Department official during the Obama Administration, has placed a special emphasis on the US Chamber forging partnerships and developing programs with organizations such as the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), US Black Chamber and National Business League, among other outfits, as a means of spurring minority business growth. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and government lockdown orders in states throughout the nation, black-owned businesses have been among the hardest hit.
To effectively engage in the lobbying effort, Wade says it has made available the #SaveSmallBusiness Digital Toolkit, complete with suggested assets that US Chamber members, entrepreneurs and small business advocates can use on their social media channels. The toolkit also provides “content calling for more emergency funding as well as more universal small business support messaging.”
He says morning blitz of social posts between 9 AM and 1 PM.
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