In January, Mayor Adams announced the launch of a $75 million Small Business Opportunity Fund, the largest in New York City's history and a critical step in helping to ensure that small businesses in NYC have the resources they need to succeed. Crucially, this fund will tap the city's nonprofit Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) as lending partners, mirroring the Center’s recommendations for the city to make CDFIs a key partner in efforts to strengthen under-resourced small businesses.

Our December 2022 report, Bolstering Immigrant- and Minority-Owned Businesses by Scaling Up CDFIs, called on the city to “make CDFIs a key component of city and state efforts to boost underserved small businesses.”

Additionally, we proposed "a unified CDFI network modeled on Philadelphia's Business Lending Network, [to] simplify the process for small businesses seeking financing, and generate referrals to CDFIs citywide”—a model that the Small Business Opportunity Fund is designed to emulate.