SBS describes capital, technical assistance, and contracting summit programs
Garner says the city is starting to see change, pointing to a $400 million MWBE award. SBS Chief of Staff Haris Khan highlights the Contract Financing Loan Fund, one-on-one technical assistance, and the NYC Contracting Summit with over 100 agencies and resources.
I will answer that, and I want to defer and turn it over to SVS to talk about some of the supporting programming that they have for MWBEs.
But I will tell you, we are starting to see a change.
I mean, the mere fact that we have the ability to award a $400 million contract to an MWB,
MWBE tells us that what we're putting in place is working.
And so your question is that we have to have the ability to equip our MWBE firms with access to capital, surety bonding assistance,
and we have to have the ability to integrate them into the critical contracting path, allowing them to bid.
On larger projects, and we're starting to, in fact, do that.
Thank you, Chair, for your question.
Haris Khan from Small Business Services, Chief of Staff.
Wanted to add as well, in partnership with the Mayor's Office of Contract Services and the Office of MWBE, we work very closely in developing, delivering programming to support the capacity building.
Of smaller MWBE firms.
One particular program I'd like to highlight, Contract Financing Loan Fund.
This is a revolving low-interest loan fund for MWBEs that they could use to grow their capacity, hire more staff, do capital improvements as they fulfill city contracts.
So get upfront capital at a roughly 3% interest rate, much lower than market rate, and start delivering on the work that they have been engaged with a contracting agency.
And that's just one of the variety of services.
We have one-on-one technical assistance, capital access support, some legal help available, educational programming.
And we're really proud of organizing, and we promoted it across all of our CBO partners and with the district offices as well of our NYC Contracting Summit.
Tagline, a new era.
For small businesses, this was in January 14th, the second week of this administration.
Deputy Mayor Hsu was the keynote.
Chief Gardner was the keynote as well, where we talked about and promoted under one roof over 100 city and state agencies, programs, and resources for MWBE firms.
That crowd, it was open to all businesses, but overwhelmingly, over 85% of the attendees there were minority and women-owned.