The Impact of COVID-Recovery Programs on Local Innovation Ecosystems

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Welcome back to the SBA Innovation Ecosystem Summit. If you're just now tuning in, please share your takeaways with us using the hashtags ESL Summit 2023 and seed the Future. Also, visit the website America's Seed Fund, which is your go to resource hub for ecosystem builders like yourself. Our next session features a mix of funded and funding organizations to discuss the impact of COVID recovery programs on local innovation ecosystems. There have been multiple historic investments in regional economies and local innovation entrepreneur ecosystems over the past three years. Our panelists are going to share how these investments are already impacting local economies and supporting our most innovative entrepreneurs. I'm pleased to introduce Joseph Perilla from Brookings Metro who's leading this discussion. Let's give Joseph and his panel a warm ESO Summit 2023 welcome.

Thank you so much. Jamila My name is Joseph Perilla. I'm a Senior Fellow and Director of Applied Research at Brookings Metro and I'm so excited to be moderating this panel featuring leaders that are on the front lines of implementing Covid recovery programs to support economic opportunity in local communities. And this is an extremely timely discussion. As you all are well aware, we're living in the midst of a historic surge in public investment, and at Brookings Metro we see the four major pieces of legislation that have passed over the past couple years as a major shift for the federal government. First, it's a shift in the theory of federal economic policy, a pivot from trickle down economics or redistributed policies to what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called a modern supply side strategy that it focuses on the productive capacity of companies, workers, and importantly, local communities. Second, it's a shift in the scale of federal investment. As evidence of that, in 2022, non defense federal spending on physical capital, research and development, and education and training as a percentage of GDP reached its highest level in the last 60 years. And then finally, it represents a shift in the orientation of federal efforts to grow our economy. Rather than assume that Washington has all the answers, many of these bills empower places to advance key national priorities by supporting local leaders tailored efforts to generate inclusive prosperity. So in that spirit, this panel we're going to hear directly from the leaders working on the front lines of that. Mark Madrid is the Associate Administrator for the Office of Entrepreneurial development at the US Small Business Administration. In this role, he leads the OED, which is the SBA's technical assistance arm and national resource Network. Jessica Milano is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Small Business, Community Development and housing at the U.S. department of Treasury. And excuse me, Jessica, you'll have to correct the title that I when you come on. And Kathleen Warner is a senior advisor to America Achieves and is a member of the technical assistance team that has worked on the Economic Development Administration's Billion Dollar Build Back Better Regional Challenge. So we're going to do two rounds of questions. The first, each panelist is going to describe their recovery program, its stage of implementation and any early impact on local innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. And Jessica, because I don't think I got your title right, which I apologize for, I will let you go first. So please introduce yourself and then we'll do Mark and Kathleen, thank you so much.

No worries at all. Joseph, Sorry, I was smiling because that title is from the Obama administration. So it was quite some time ago. But thank you for the warm introduction and allow me to introduce myself. I am the chief program officer at the U.S. treasury in what was called our Office of Recovery Programs, but now our Office of Capital Access. And we are charged, as the name implies, with implementing the programs that treasury stood up to restrict respond to the economic crisis from the pandemic. So we oversee the Office of State and Local Recovery Funds as well as our housing programs, emergency rental assistance and homeowners assistance. And what I'm here to talk about today, our small business support programs, State Small Business Credit Initiative, which is I think a really important program to this audience and maybe not widely known, but a compliment to the SBA portfolio of products and something that I'd really like more of you to know a little bit more about. But first off, Joseph talked a little bit about and quoted our secretary, Secretary Yellen, who likes to talk about modern supply side economics. And what does this mean to us at Treasury? I think it means building a more inclusive economy because as we've shown that places and communities that receive support during the pandemic and when all Americans are included in economic growth, economic growth overall is more robust. And we've seen the results of these policies and the impact they've had over the last couple of years in our communities, in job creation, in housing stability and the impact the housing programs had. And for our audience today, the record number of new small business starts, I think over 14 million new business starts in the last two to three years. And so what we spend a lot of time thinking about is how those businesses find capital and how they're supported to grow and how that growth becomes sustainable for the communities they serve. And so SSBCI State Small Business Credit Initiative is a really important piece of this SSPCI was passed as part of the American Rescue plan as a $10 billion program. And it's an innovative program. The way SSBCI works is it provides funding to states, territories, tribal government to design and develop their own small business support programs. And there's five different types. Equity. It is the only federal funding source of its kind where states can use a directly fund venture capital, which is often a challenge in harder to serve markets or for minority owned businesses. And then on the credit side, states can set up collateral support, loan guarantee, loan participation and capital access programs. So everything from the very micro, you know, loans less than 50k all the way up to mezzanine debt and financings over several million dollars. And so I think that's a really cool and innovative tool. The other thing that's very interesting about this program is because it's at the state level. We work very closely with state economic development agencies and teams so that they think holistically about how they're identifying and developing the programs that best serve their local markets. Are you an area with a high concentration of auto suppliers or manufacturing, or are you an. Maybe there is significant vc, but it's not reaching the type of underserved entrepreneurs that you would like to set up a fund to support in places where we can pull in on the microcredit side, CDFIs, community banks, just a range of lenders and financiers. And that really helps, I think communities best target and serve their local needs. And so that's a key component of this. And then the last thing I'll say, Joseph, just to kick us off before I turn to our other panelists, another innovative feature of SSPCI this time around, because it's a program that was initially passed in 2010 during the financial crisis of the capital program. This time around, the legislation not only increased the size of sspci, but it added a technical assistance component. And so treasury has thought about this technical assistance in three ways. We've provided all recipients with some technical assistance funds through formula to make sure everybody has that funding. But we've also transferred funds to the Minority Business Development Agency at Commerce to help seed new accelerators and incubators for minority businesses, since that's an underserved market segment. And treasury recently announced our own Small business Technical Assistance Competition, Small Business Opportunity Program. First time we've done one of these, really designed to get places thinking about how they can align funding from historic federal investments like infrastructure, chips, arp, et cetera, in ways that they are supporting small business Ecosystems and small businesses accessing supplier opportunities from maybe chips, manufacturing, development in their area kind of thing. And so these are the some of the things that I hope we can dig in further on the panel. And I just want to make sure that your audience is aware of these opportunities. And thank you again for inviting me to join you today.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jessica. It's a great segue to Mark. You teed him up nicely talking about the work that the Small Business Administration is doing. So, Mark, over to you.

Thank you. And thank you, Jessica, for that wonderful description. It's a wonderful program. And thank you for what it is that you're doing that is providing tentacles for innovation and growth and scale of our small business owners, our small businesses. They're responsible for half of of our workforce, 2/3 of new net jobs. It's the highest honor imaginable to serve them. I should know because I am from a small business, so I have small business DNA. My parents met on the cotton fields as migrant farm workers, and my dad said, enough of that. I want to be my own boss. So that's what I'm rooted in. So it's an honor to be here at the sba and it's an honor to just talk about the Community Navigator pilot program. And I'll give you a highlight of this program in terms of its context, its origin. I'll tell you a little bit about the program, then I'll get a little bit into the innovative aspects of it, and I'll make sure that I'm under my four and a half minutes so that we can keep this thing moving. But if you want to find out more about this, just go to SBA.gov, sBA, like small business Administration. And I'd like to thank the Office of Investment and Innovation, the wonderful team that's just right down the hall from me. And also, this is a wonderful effort. The 2023 Innovation Ecosyste Summit. Those three words in of themselves are very, very powerful and together limitless. So in November of 21, the SBA awarded $100 million in grant funding to 51 grantee hubs, organizations that are working to close resource gaps for our US Small business owners. Specifically, those who have not heard of the SBA previously or that are underserved and I say underrepresented and I say underestimated across America. So since its launch, these hub networks, we work off a hub and spoke model. The hubs are the grantees themselves, the 51 grantees of the SBA. So they have economies of scale. They have the national networks, in some cases the state and regional networks. On a localized level, they serve as a hub in terms of marketing, support, infrastructure, et cetera. So the hubs have established agreements with over 400 hyperlocal organizations, community trust organizations that know the small businesses on the ground, that know them well, because sometimes in underserved communities. I just heard this just an hour ago at the White House from small business owners themselves. They say, you know what, at first we were a bit, we were a bit skeptical. We don't know we trusted these resources. The exact words a little while ago were, are there strings attached? How much is it going to cost? These are real concerns, especially if you flashback. You know, I don't walk in your shoes, but I lost my dad to COVID 19, that small business owner that made me who I am today. And so I'm not sure what you went through, Covid, but I'm sure you went through something, right? And our small businesses definitely did. So imagine if they have that, if they have that feeling, that sentiment, and then they go through the pandemic even more. So that's why these hyper localized trusted partners are so important. So through this pilot program, this diverse national ecosystem of hubs and spokes delivered free Community Navigator small business services to increase awareness of connections to and participation in programs of the SBA as well as other federal like treasury and Commerce and NBDA, other federal, state and local resources. And all 50 states in Puerto Rico have coverage. And we're at the tail end, actually the two year performance. The pilot program has now terminated. And that's why we were at the White House just moments ago celebrating together. So the Community Navigator pilot program was funded through the arp. The American Rescue plan was designed to advance equity through this hub and spoke model and to focus on these disadvantaged groups. Specifically the statute called out veterans, women and communities of color, both in urban and rural America. So I'll end with the innovative. What makes us innovative? Well, there's nothing like delivering a story of innovation than a story itself. So I'll tell you about an innovative farmer that was just at the table at the White House in Tennessee, at Hardin County, Savannah, Savannah, Tennessee and Hardin County. So all this farmer is doing is saying, you know what? We deserve to have some skin in the game when it comes to technology. We deserve, because of everything that we're facing, the world global crisis when it comes to food security, with the wars happening with supply chain, we need in on technology, we need in on cooperatives, we need to know what the startup community is doing, we need to know more about exporting. And by the way, this farmer and his wife run a rural health clinic. And so that's the spirit of Navigators because we've developed this network of 51 grantees and over 400 spokes. And what we want is there to be the peer to peer mentoring support system as well. So what's going on with that rural farmer in Tennessee is scalable. It's scalable in rural areas all over the country. I'm fortunate to have visited 30 states since I began here. I was the first batch February of 2021. And so what I've seen is this model works. What's also innovative about this is that these 51 grantees, they have different secret sauces, if you will, the superpowers that they hold. So some of them might have unlocked solutions for access to capital. And we saw that. And I'll close with data because that's really important. Even though we're in a higher interest rate environment here at the sba, we increase our lending numbers and we increase our lending numbers in underserved communities, over 2x with black communities, over 1.5x with Latino communities. And so these communities that I was talking about, you know, in the my experience with Latino communities specifically over the last 15 years, not all, but some believe in mattress money. You know, we don't want to owe anybody and certainly during a higher rate environment, we're not going to, we don't want to owe anybody at that rate. But some of them have seen the light that access to capital could mean leverage. It could mean more possibilities to expand and grow and scale. It could be the possibility to build a credit score. So I think that's the innovative aspect of that because the farmer in Tennessee can now scale the business even in this environment and be more profitable, be more efficient and equally important, share these technological experiences in agtech that can have a reverberating effect on the entire ecosystem of farming. So thanks for this opportunity to just tell you more about the Community Navigator pilot program and how it connects to innovation.

Thank you so much, Mark. And I think we just heard from both Mark and Jessica the tremendous amounts of capital that have come from the federal government to support small businesses, but then an equally intent focus on how to build ecosystems of support to ensure that capital flows inclusively and that the job creation and growth results. Kathleen, I'm going to turn to you to talk a bit about your work as a funded organization. So we heard from the funders in the federal Agencies and you actually receive resources to support regions in a pretty novel place based competition that the EDA runs. So tell us a bit more about that.

Yeah, thanks so much and frankly honored to be up here with Jessica and Mark. Incredible programs that they're, they're running and leading. Super exciting. Yeah. I'm a senior advisor to a group called America Achieves which as you pointed out received some funding from the, from the EDA to support recipients of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge grants which was part of a larger infusion into regional economies to really support recovery and jumpstart and transform innovation. So actually in America, cheese, we not only worked with Build Back Better Regional Challenge winners through this EDA grant, but also with good jobs challenge winners again, another EDA program and more recently with some tech hubs folks, both through the dollars that came through eda. And just, you know, I think what I heard in terms of the difference here, eda, as some of the folks we worked with over there, it's not your grandmother's economic development, this focus on ecosystems equity being that really that transformative first dollar into these communities gets overused, but has been game changing and the forward thinking of commerce and EDA has just been phenomenal and frankly has validated so many of these communities and given them this infus of, you know, both hopefulness, you know, not only dollars, but hopefulness and like we're doing amazing stuff and, and you know, we are getting validated by the fact that these dollars are coming in and it's, it's, you know, not only to support existing industries, right, to sort of transform them, but to create, you know, nascent, nascent industries, whether that's within AI, quantum, you know, quantum physics. And, and I think what's been so inspiring, and I just came off a little tour of places like Detroit, El Paso, Louisiana, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is that this, what this challenge has done and what EDA has done through its programs and what I'm hearing from, from Jessica and Mark as well, this notion of bringing together, right, this is not, you know, look at a work, I mean look at a workforce program, look at an educational program. What is industry doing? What's going on with the startup ecosystem? It's that not economic growth and good jobs in vital communities really depend on that local based coalition folks coming together with all the pieces to work in tandem toward a brighter, transformative economic future. And that in terms of the game changer, not only in terms of dollars, bringing people together on the ground in a way that I think is just, just, just unprecedented. And that there has been, you know, we worked with folks America achieves both on their phase one. So Build Back Better, just stepping back. Build Back Better had a phase one application where 60 regions across the country won sort of planning grants and then 21 regions received the 25 to 75 million dollars to do their implementation. And they have a lead institution to, you know, to lead these efforts again across workforce, across infrastructure grants. And they're, these folks are deep in it, right? They're already, as I said, I was in Detroit recently and you see this, the innovation hubs that are going on, this continued bringing together of folks, this continual iteration on what their plans are to really to drive the jobs and this, you know, collaboration and connectivity that has just been so important and essential to the grant. So I'm super excited to have some questions and talk a little bit more about it. It's just really, really inspiring.

Fantastic. Kathleen, Great, great segue to go back to Jessica. And just so what, what is treasury learning about the implementation of ssbci? And maybe just, you know, focus a bit on what the audience that's here, which as I understand it, is a combination of these local, regional, state ecosystem builders. What advice would you have for them about how to design and execute small business capital access strategies based on what you're learning from the implementation of ssbci?

I think it's a really great question, Joseph. I appreciate you asking that and I'm glad that we have this audience with us today because it's an audience that we work so closely with across so many programs at Treasury. And I think one of the things that we are learning from implementing the American Rescue Plan programs is a lot of places got a historic amount, like a once in a generation amount of funding at a very sort of pinpoint moment in time where it's hard to kind of absorb all of that and think about that in ways you have all these different sources coming in, they have different reporting and compliance requirements. You're trying to figure out what to do with it. And it's expiring at different rates. And how do you think about really leveraging, leveraging this holistically in a way that supports an ecosystem of growth in your community? And so we've tried to be thoughtful about that. We're like, oh, we're grappling with this at the federal level. I can only imagine what our recipients are grappling with. How can we work with them? How can we share what we learn on one program with them on another program, or in the thoughtful way that we try to implement the next program. And so I think in SSBCI specifically, since that's our audience, I think we've very deliberately tried to think about with the technical assistance funds as Mark did, what are the market gaps? Right. How can we think about solving some of those market gaps, be it technical assistance for venture capital, for accelerators and incubators for our minority entrepreneurs. Well, MBDA is going to be able to do that better than Treasury. Let's work with them. How do we, with our Small Business Opportunity Program, think about helping fund places that are receiving these funds, leverage these funds and use the little bit of technical assistance dollars we have from SSBCI in a way that supports other things they're doing. And so we developed this competitive criteria much like an EDA Challenge grant where we said our awards are not going to be huge. But if you tell us that you're going to work this into your CHIP strategy or if you identify outside other sources of non federal match or outside funders that are going to contribute here, we're going to award points based on that. So other things equal, those are the type of applications we're trying to see and some of the innovation and some of the thinking we're trying to get and we're really hoping right now that we're going to get some really wonderful applications through this process so that more businesses get the technical assistance they need to access the capital opportunities from SSPCI and then SSPCI capital programs. Since this is an audience that's thinking about this, we have been working very closely with both groups like CDFA in the field or lender groups like icba, ABA or lenders or communities directly around. How do we help organizations make the most of this funding, particularly in the statute? There's two special pots of set aside money in this program. There's a billion dollars incentive for very, very small businesses, businesses reaching businesses with fewer than 10, 10 employees and a one and a half billion set aside for reaching SETI socially economically disadvantaged individuals, businesses owned by socially economically disadvantaged individuals. So minority owned businesses, states that do better at meeting these populations actually can get more money from treasury so that they can keep doing the work that they're doing. And, and that really requires innovative partnership with lenders that are sort of generating leads in these markets that are heading up special purpose credit programs to serve these markets. And so we have been doing a lot of work about how we can support that in our, our guidance and in our outreach with groups around the country to make sure that we're meeting those targets and that we're responding to feedback from communities that it would be really helpful if treasury did X so that we could do more Y. And we have this process where we update our FAQs regularly and we're working with recipients, we have office hours to try to incorporate that feedback in real time to make the program work as well as it can to serve those markets and to serve all of you on the phone better. So I appreciate you taking the time today to join us.

Yeah, thanks, Jessica. Yeah. What I heard was incentives from the federal government around equity and then some incentives around holistic planning, linking one program to another opportunity, and then strong emphasis on these feedback loops between implementers and decision makers in Washington, which is, I have to say, a nice evolution as you all have pushed a lot of resources out. Mark, you know, I'm, I'm curious for your kind of lessons learned on your pilot effort. And a question actually from the audience was, you know, given that it is a pilot, is there, is there, is there a sense that this should be something that's continued programming out of sba, given some of the successes that you outlined?

Well, that's not up to us, but I'll definitely answer the question. It wasn't in the President's budget. There was $30 million for the extension of the pilot program, the Community Navigator pilot program, the President's budget. But we will await the appropriators decisions on that. What I can tell you is that the pilot program, the hope is that, and I heard it just from some grantees just an hour ago, they said the work is just getting started. So we've been, so, we've been so motivated and seen the power of, you know, leveraging up on technology in terms of reporting, in terms of the agility that we provided with the salesforce driven tool. Let's see. Okay. To be able to project how we're going to link these underserved communities to more opportunities. So the bottom line to your question is I don't know. But in the construction of the pilot program, keeping this 51 grantees, although they had separate ecosystems and separate goals, we had a harmonious congealing, so we would get them together at least once a quarter. And so because of that, I feel is that some of these grantees are looking at other opportunities, whether inside the federal government or outside the federal government. That's truly exciting.

Thank you, Mark. Yeah. I mean, the size of the grants are something that in some instances philanthropy could backfill, especially if it's kind of building ecosystems and local communities over time. That's a, that's a natural follow on. Kathleen, I'm wondering if you've got any, if you want to pick up where you left off on some of the early implementation you've been seeing around the build back better regional challenge. If there's any early lessons that you want to share with the group about what it takes to successfully implement one of these multi sector, multi project economic development strategies. And I suspect many in the audience are considering something along those lines.

Yeah, you know, that and building on what both Mark and Jessa were speaking about, you know, the notion of equity and Jessica, you mentioned, you know, holistic planning, the notion of industry driven and it's a constant learning cycle. Frankly, that's what I'm seeing about these really driven folks who frankly are, you know, capacity challenge. It's like, here's all this amazing amount of resources that have been brought into these communities. How do we get these dollars out the door in a really effective way? Right. While still continually talking to our stakeholders, creating the, you know, the right kind of structure. So that's this. I'm seeing the, the folks who, in terms of successful implementation, as I said, sort of this comp. Consistent iteration and feedback loop, right. With their stakeholders, particularly with industry, which is, you know, can be a challenge. I mean this is a very different way of thinking about how to do economic development and you have a coalition of the willing in these places. But it's, it can be hard and you have a lot of really high performing people that think like what's the answer? You know what. And I keep saying to folks, you're creating the answers. This is really this notion of these local. This is not some edict from on high. It's really what within these regions was obviously guardrails and guidelines from, from commerce and from the federal government more generally. But what, you know, what, how are you building your own future? Which I think is really, really powerful. And I just want to talk about this notion of, you know, follow on funding. I mean that I think what has been, what has been really great across the federal government is this, you know, this connecting up of funding sources. Right. Creating some transparency around that. And you know, the, the build back better and the good jobs challenge programs themselves are supposed to be inter, interconnected and build on one another. So if you have five projects in a build back better grant, they're supposed to build on and connect with one another. We're seeing such great guidance from the federal government around, you know, building on, as I said, do you Build on something coming out of sba, coming out of treasury, coming out of, you know, chips act right and how these pieces all fit along your path to economic recovery. And also a lot of the work that we do because we, as you said, we had a grant from eda, but we're also, we also work a lot with regions around philanthropically funded proposals where philanthropy can fill gaps in a transformative way. Just like government is no longer doing business the way it did 50 years ago, you know, 20 years ago. Neither should philanthropy, neither should industry. So those are some of the, you know, I think initiatives and thought shifting on the ground that I'm seeing within these regional, you know, coalitions. Just super creative thinking not only about the initiatives themselves, the use of capital, but how they're engaging with industry and with philanthropy and bringing different kinds of dollars to the table. So it's pretty exciting. And I think one of the things that we're working on in America achieves with a small cohort of region. This notion of peer to peer learning has been so important both with the official communities of practice that were set up through Build Back Better and others. But we've done some smaller groups, super hands on, but learning from their peers, both about their challenges and their successes, about how do you build a workforce intermediary, what does it mean to actually successfully bring in additional investment when you've never really had it before? I live in Montana, for example, so it's, you know, the notion of like, how do people invest in rural communities. We weren't necessarily thinking that innovation and entrepreneurship happens successfully in places, you know, that are rural and more sparsely populated. So I just see a lot of interesting, I don't want to say experiments, right. But very different ways of thinking about utilizing federal dollars, leveraging federal dollars, bringing in industry. And I think for, you know, this constant iteration and connection back to community has been super important to ensure these are really place based initiatives driven by the communities and leaders therein.

Thank you, Kathleen. So we're going to go to some audience questions now. So I encourage folks watching on the Zoom. If you have any submit them. The first one goes to Mark. So this is a nonprofit called Veterans Intellectual Property asking how to collaborate with oed. But I think it's a general question of, you know, when there are these nonprofits supporting small businesses, what's the best way for them to be in touch with you for collaboration opportunities?

Well, thank you for that question. I'd like to thank everybody for, you know, investing precious time. Well, I'm an open book so you can get in touch with me. I'd love to give you my email address through the facilitators here, but please send me an email. Let's talk. Certainly veteran owned businesses are very important to this agency. They're important to Administrator Guzman and the president and vice president and important to me. And I'll explain why. Even with the Community Navigator pilot program, one of our calls to action was to serve veteran owned businesses. And we did that through Syracuse University, the Institute of Veterans and Military Families. I was going to lean into that. So thank you for that wonderful question because I didn't have a chance to talk about some innovation, ecosystem strategy involving veterans with this particular group in Syracuse. You know, we have Micron going in there in terms of semiconductor, and it's important to connect the dots with certification, readiness and procurement into industry and certainly technology and overall what this administration has achieved in terms of the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science act, the Inflation Reduction Act. But what does that mean in terms of opportunities for small businesses? And it comes down to procurement certification. So we want the semiconductor to come into Syracuse, but we want our veteran owned businesses served through the ivmf, the Institute of Veteran Military Families through certification, readiness and certification itself through a service disabled or other certifications to be eligible to build up that community. The same goes with bipartisan infrastructure law, the roads and bridges that are being erected and repaired all over this country. So anyhow, I'm going to make sure that we collect your information. Maybe I can see it in the chat and I promise you that I'll be in touch.

Great. Thank you so much, Mark. So question for the group. Can you talk about external evaluation of these programs? How are outcomes measured and what is the evaluation process to see how the programs are working? Jessica, do you want to start with that or sorry, Kathleen, did you.

You could start.

I can give my perspective from regions that's really, really key. And data collection and assessment, I believe is part of the requirements under Build Back Better. You know, that the government itself may have differing requirements than the regions do. But measurements of success, whether it's a data system or something else, is absolutely essential to really determine success. Those kinds of metrics, whether it's jobs, whether it's economic growth, it's really important from the regions themselves to show their progress along the way and where they might need to change course.

Sure. And I will chime in there as well. I think that's well said, Kathleen. And I also was thinking about this in two ways. And so I'm not entirely sure which way the question was intended, but I'll take both. I think we think about evaluation in terms of ourselves, in terms of we have a contract at treasury with the Office of Valuation Sciences to look at the impact and the implementation of the American Rescue Plan programs overall, and we produce reporting on that. But we very much think about the feedback loop and the impact that we're having and how we're implementing these programs. That's a, a key component of the work we do. But then when I think about evaluation, I also think about the intended impact of the program. So we collect lots of reporting information from recipients, and in the case of sspci, from lenders. Are they serving the borrowers they're intended to serve? Are they reaching minority businesses? And a big component of this program, ssbci, something that we're quite proud of, is that we had a need because in the statute there was a requirement to serve minority SETI and very small businesses. We had a need to collect that data. And I don't, I mean, I'm assuming there are many folks that are either lenders or work with lenders on this call, since this is an SBA event. Many of you know that collecting this demographic data for small business lending was a requirement of Dodd Frank, and the CFPB has been charged with implementing 1071 for a number of years, and it's still not being collected today by banks. Treasury issued an IFR to collect this data for any recipient participating in our program within the first year after passage of the statute. And that's a requirement of this program. And we plan to use that data in our public reporting on this program to make sure it's having the intended impact and also as a way of unlocking and dispersing those incentive funds. And so I very much think about, you know, evaluation as how are we providing transparency, evaluating, supporting the impact, reporting on the impact of the program, and how are we evaluating ourselves? And so hopefully that was helpful.

And I'll wrap up quickly. Thank you, Kathleen and Jessica, the excellent answers. I can tell you I'm in purely in that state of evaluation. So. And it's wonderful. We should. It's stewardship of the American public and the American tax dollar. So we have several arms of internal evaluation through our CFO shop, our chief financial officer, which is through their performance management teams. And we also have the, you know, external audits going on both with the GAO and the ig, which is great. But to pack on, it's what other internal evaluations are we going to have in addition to the key performance indicators of the grantees themselves and their goals, have they been achieved. And so I would submit for your consideration that pre, during and post that you impose new sets of evaluations, not only those that are imposed on you.

Thank you, Mark. All right, we have one more question and we'll see if we can get it in before the end. Are any of these grants good fits for solopreneurs, which I think is a new shorthand for sole proprietors?

Well, I can maybe take that one. So I think a little bit of confusion around sspci. We're not a grant program making grants directly to solopreneurs or sole proprietors. We work through states and we're hopefully providing through our programs and through the program, states establish credit or equity support. But yes, there are a number of products across the country targeted to sole proprietors, micro loan products, local CDFIs and small banks we work with with where a sole proprietor can come in and get a loan, a smaller size loan. And that is something that we very much support through the program.

Mark, do you have 30 seconds on this before we wrap?

Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of loan products, I would suggest, you know, a CDFI might be an opportunity for you to get into the game or a microloan. There are grants and that's where some of our providers in the Community Navigator pilot program, whether they be local chambers of commerce, might have that information for you. There's some of our spokes of this product, like hello, Alice. That frequently peppers the small business ecosystem. Hello, Alice. With grant opportunities. So thank you for that question. There are grants out there. You just have to know what you don't know. Right. So that's. Hopefully we can help out with that.

Mark, Jessica, Kathleen, thank you so much for giving your time for this panel and we will wrap it there. Appreciate everyone's time.

Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Thank you. Take care.

All right. Thank you, Joseph, Mark, Kathleen and Jessica for that much needed conversation. Let's give our speakers a round of emoji or gift. APPLAUSE if you're just now tuning in, welcome to the third annual SBA Innovation Ecosystem Summit. Thank you for being here. Say hi to us in the chat. Hi, Serena, Alyssa, Eve, Shakaria, I see you. Thank you for joining us today. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back here at 1:50pm Eastern for our next panel, Empowering Entrepreneurship in Rural Ecosystems. Stay tuned.