In the first of what Mayor Ras Baraka calls a series of sweeping six million dollar economic initiatives, the city of Newark has launched a grant program to help small businesses affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The city has earmarked two million of those dollars to help hundreds of small business by providing up to ten thousand dollars each in emergency grant money. Mayor Ras Baraka says many of those businesses have been nearly crushed by the coronavirus pandemic.
“The majority of the business in the city whether your talking about beauty supply shops, beauty parlors, nail shops, hair salons, that have been shut down, and small service oriented business that have been shut down.”
Baraka says the city has repurposed money in its own coffers to fund the program adding that they hope to increase it through public private partnerships. Applications for the small business emergency grant program open Monday.
