Helping Entrepreneurs in COVID19 World, Part 2: There is over $1 trillion in capital relief available - can you find it fast enough?

note: updated: May 5, 2020

On March 25 I posted about making some of our learning resources available to entrepreneurs globally to help with COVID-19 realities. And in the month of April, over 5000 new visitors from 60 countries came to casesmartimpact.com to take advantage of 2 weeks to sign up for free access to our video training on how to strategize, target and close the right impact investing deal, and to sign up for an invitation to our free webinar on managing capital raising during the crisis. Collectively, in one month, they have spent nearly 1000 hours with our content. That’s equivalent to us spending 24 hrs per day for 38 days teaching how to strategize, target and close an impact investment! Honestly, this was just thrilling to all of us at CASE at Duke. A map of where they logged in from in April is below:

Today, I'm posting about capital resources. Cold hard cash. We usually talk a lot about the impact of business, and I wrote a few months ago about the arrival of stakeholder capitalism, and sometimes people aren't sure if they believe in it. But in these troubled times when businesses are closing and unsure how to stay alive when they have very few customers, staying in business has an impact beyond just owners that everyone can understand.

We knew that a lot of people have made new emergency funds available for entrepreneurs, but we didn't know how to find them. We figured if we didn't, how would a stressed entrepreneur do so? We googled, we asked colleagues, and two days ago, we started crowdsourcing. After a day, we realized we had hit a nerve and I went online in search of a way to share a database that was growing faster than I could make entries, even with some generous volunteer help from our students.

The result of that is a new site we opened in March and relaunched in May, called covidcap.com. It is a searchable database of over $1 trillion in COVID-19 cash relief resources available to small business and nonprofit entrepreneurs everywhere. 

So, what have we learned so far from putting this together?

• There is over $1 trillion available in capital dedicated to COVID-19 relief. When we launched in March, we had 90 separate entries, totaling $14B. By May 5, we had 550 listings totaling $1 trillion. The host organizations offering the cash are governments, nonprofits, individuals, corporates, and foundations. They range from $2500 grant programs to the US government's $349B in SBA Payroll Protection Program loans earmarked in the CARES act for small businesses.
• Many of the resources are governmental. The US government issued the CARES act after we launched, and replenished it a few weeks later, but states and cities have sprung into action in ways that are truly impressive. Globally, the government resources we have are mostly national.
• Corporations are acting fast as well, and putting significant funds aside, but few have dedicated significant funds available to support entrepreneurs. We have a great list on the site by Just Capital that includes those that do.
• Foundations have been extremely active and there are many new funder collaboratives, especially for new grant dollars and for more flexible grant terms. There appear to be fewer loan collaboratives with philanthropic dollars.
• We have a lot, but we know much more is missing. Our national-level data is heavy on US and UK resources. We need more information on programs specific to countries in Asia, Latam, Africa, and even the rest of Europe.
• We joined the COVID Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs yesterday, on May 4, 2020. We realized we needed global partners to understand what's going on around the world. This partnership, led by the World Economic Forum, is already composed of over 40 global organizations dedicated to coordinating responses to the crisis for disadvantaged communities around the globe. We're delighted to be part of it.
• We want to know, not just what's available, but what's being used and what is needed. We learned in the US over the past few weeks that the availability of capital does not mean it is distributed fairly or effectively, or that it meets the needs on the ground. Our new site has forms now for you to add more resources, volunteer, and tell us about your cash needs. We hope to be building out more efforts as part of the Alliance to understand short- and long-term impacts of the COVID19 pandemic on entrepreneurs everywhere.

In the meantime, please share covidcap.com freely, with any entrepreneurs, support organizations, accelerators, government agencies, corporates, anyone. And if you have ideas for how we can get more attention to this, through press, media or otherwise, use our contact form

Thank you!