Save Small Business
Save New York

Tammeca Rochester, owner of Harlem Cycle and participating business owner.

Legal Services Collaboration During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a devastating economic crisis across New York City’s small business community, with impacts continuing to unfold every day, particularly in the outer boroughs and in commercial corridors within communities of color. Social distancing guidelines have caused small businesses’ revenues to freeze, leaving owners struggling to meet financial obligations like rent or loans taken out on the promise of revenue that is no longer coming in. Partnership for New York recently reported that 60% have already been unable to make full commercial rent payments, and 1/3 of businesses may close permanently.

Save Small Business, Save New York is a collaborative initiative between Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A (BKA), Volunteers of Legal Service (VOLS), and TakeRoot Justice (TakeRoot) to provide free, full legal representation and brief advice services, advocacy, and education to empower New York City’s most vulnerable small businesses to navigate the COVID-19 crisis and recovery, helping to stabilize their existing businesses and build for long-term sustainability.

This collaborative initiative builds from our collective experience working together through the NYC Commercial Lease Assistance Program, our more recent focus on providing responsive support during the COVID-19 crisis, and our longstanding pro bono partnerships to multiply impact. Our approach is groundbreaking, as it is one of the only comprehensive programs offering free legal services to low-to-moderate small business owners in the country, and the only in NYC. We also join 25 law firms and legal service providers to offer brief legal advice with pro bono support through the Small Business Legal Relief Alliance during the pandemic and recovery to follow.

BKA, TakeRoot, and VOLS are seeking private and public sector support and partnerships to respond to the urgent crisis facing New York City’s small businesses. For more information or to express interest, please contact:

Leveling the Economic Playing Field

Communities of color have been disproportionately affected by the triple pandemics of the COVID-19 public health crisis, economic crisis, and racial injustice. Many BIPOC-owned and other underrepresented small businesses were already in precarious positions before the pandemic, often lacking access to capital, technology, and protections afforded to larger enterprises. The crisis has only exacerbated their vulnerability and obstacles to recovery. Recent national reports show a 40% decline of Black-owned businesses from February 2020 to April 2020. A recent survey by the NYC Comptroller’s Office identified that 85% of minority- and women-owned businesses fear closure within six months, absent a reopened economy or larger-scale stimulus programs.

If small businesses close permanently, the whole economic ecosystem suffers – the business owner, their landlord, and their respective families and employees – as well as the community members who rely on their affordable and culturally relevant services. BKA, TakeRoot, VOLS, and our community and pro bono legal partners are deeply concerned that several trends will continue unabated when small businesses cannot access legal services to stabilize the business and build for long-term sustainability:

  • increased losses or closures by small businesses, who provide affordable and culturally relevant local services, leading to workforce cuts in NYC’s largest employment sector and a reduction in NYC’s tax base;
  • exacerbated racial inequality across business owners and local communities in achieving commercial stability, growth, and resilience;
  • increased commercial displacement pressure and discrimination from property owners; and
  • continued gentrification of diverse communities and the consolidation of retail space in the hands of fewer and larger national chains and corporations.

Access to free, high-quality legal services for small businesses – including legal representation, advice, advocacy, and education amidst fast-changing environmental conditions and governmental policies during the pandemic – is essential to promote economic recovery and equity along the dimensions of race and gender across NYC’s small business sector and community commercial corridors. This initiative is designed to scale up our proven legal intervention to help small businesses navigate the economic crisis and recovery.

Together, our organizations have helped to level the economic playing field for small business owners, serving in the last few years low- and moderate-income small business clients of whom 3 in 4 identify as people of color, 2 in 3 as immigrants, and over half as women.

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