Veronica Lopez will always remember March 16, 2020. It’s the day that Los Angeles County ordered the closure of businesses and banned large public gatherings of any kind to contain the COVID-19 virus. Almost immediately, the constant phone calls from businesses seeking assistance began and didn’t start to slow down until several months later in June. "The demand was so high in volume, we couldn’t even document them all," says Lopez, business counselor manager for the Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment (PACE).
PACE is a nonprofit, community development organization in Los Angeles that creates economic solutions to meet the challenges of the Asian Pacific Islander and other diverse communities in five cores service areas: Workplace Development, Early Childhood Education, Business Development, Energy & Environmental Services, and Housing Assistance. Founded in 1976, PACE annually serves approximately 50,000 low-income residents per year.
PACE Business offers a variety of financial counseling and training options. The organization also functions as an SBA Microlender, SBA Community Advantage Lender, and Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). They offer loans ranging from $500 to $750,000.
The Los Angeles Metro area has been hit particularly hard economically by COVID-19. Businesses, some that had been in existence for more than 30 years, began closing. The Business team moved quickly to establish PACE Assistance in Disaster (AID) to address the immediate needs of small businesses attempting to survive and rebuild.
Lopez and the PACE Business team knew they wouldn’t be able to help everyone, but they wanted to help as many people as they could. That’s a challenge when a good portion of your clients are older individuals who may have language barriers and/or low technology proficiency with how to send emails, scan documents and complete other tasks electronically.
To ensure that she could meet the needs of her clients, Lopez completed several NeighborWorks online training courses and attended the February 2021 Virtual Training Institute (VTI).
NeighborWorks America is the nation's leading trainer of community-development and affordable-housing professionals, awarding more than 18,000 certificates in fiscal year 2020. NeighborWorks has developed a strong curriculum of online courses that specifically address a wide variety of issues and topics related to building capacity and strengthening counseling services, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Our trainings are created to provide new skills, tools and practices that are impactful and provide ideas for solutions to further influence positive change," says Cristi Ford, senior vice president of training for NeighborWorks America. Beginning in June 2020, the Wells Fargo Foundation partnered with NeighborWorks to provide complimentary scholarships for these trainings. To date, the foundation has awarded more than 16,000 scholarships.
NeighborWorks Online Training Scholarships – Underwritten by Wells Fargo
Scholarships from the Wells Fargo Foundation have been critical to the service that Lopez has provided to her community during the pandemic. Lopez used scholarships to take the Engaging Older Adults in Financial Capability Programs and Building Skills for Financial Confidence self-guided courses. These trainings gave her tools to engage with clients who are struggling to keep small businesses afloat while juggling economic stressors and providing for their families.
In fact, Lopez has included resources from the Managing Money & Debt course in several webinars she’s taught, while giving acknowledgement to the NeighborWorks instructor. The resources in the presentation have had a direct impact on her clients. One business owner wasn’t aware that a loan program had opened until attending her presentation. "He ended up getting a $20,000 loan from them—and it was just based on him attending the webinar," she says.
Community Impact
Since 1993, the PACE Business Development Center (PDC) has provided business training, technical assistance and access to capital for small business owners in the Los Angeles Metro area. PACE BDC also houses an award-winning Women’s Business Center and operates two of the nine Business Source Centers within the City of Los Angeles.
As job losses occurred in the community, the PDC also assisted many monolingual Spanish speakers stay employed by helping them obtain sidewalk vendor permits and licensing so that they could maintain an income. "We decided in the beginning of the pandemic to track everything, and that’s really helped to tell the story and show who we’ve helped," Lopez says. "It’s also helped us to get more grants and funding."
To date, PACE AID has received more than 1,300 inquiries from small businesses requesting $162.5 million in assistance. PACE has packaged more than 1,595 loans, of which 467 loans totaling $15.2 million have been funded. Through trainings like the ones Lopez conducts, the organization has provided financial education to 1,829 trainees and counseled more than 2,500 entrepreneurs. They’ve also helped prepare 1,626 tax returns.
