(WXYZ) — The COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on small businesses in southeast Michigan.
But help is on the way.
The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation is offering millions of dollars in aid to stores that are struggling.
The President and CEO of the DEGC Kevin Johnson is joining us to talk about it in tonight's 7 UpFront segment.
You can see the full interview in the video player above.
"There's been a challenge to remain open, given all the orders and starts and stops that has happened in this community and around the state, quite frankly, around the country," Johnson says. "Because of the uncertainty of the revenue events that would happen because we were opening has had this unpredictable flow of information and dollars that these small businesses need in order for them to survive and so their chief challenge is 'when can we have a predictable revenue stream to stem the tide of the impact' and when that happens, then we have to layer in a level of support to give to them in order or them to survive."
"www.degc.org provides a link to the state's website to give [businesses] access to the application that they need to complete in order to get into the queue so that they can go through this process [applying for the Michigan Small Businesses survival grant]," he says. "The distinction here is that tomorrow is the deadline for those applications to be submitted. And we would hope that many of those businesses that are in need of these funds can get to that website, get an application filled out so that we can start the process of scoring those and hopefully getting dollars to them as quickly as possible."
