The SBA Can Provide Business Disaster Assistance

Disaster assistance is money provided to individuals, families and businesses in an area whose property has been damaged or destroyed following a Presidential-declared disaster; and whose losses are not covered by insurance. Loans may be available to businesses that have suffered an economic loss as a result of the disaster.

At no time do communities, small businesses, and individuals more need access to the Small Business Administration’s (SBA’s) “3 C’s” of capital, counseling, and contracts more than in the wake of disaster. SBA’s Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Plan (DPRP) ensures that all available agency resources are both provided and integrated into the federal government’s overall support to disaster survivors.

Recovery Cycle: When focused on recovery, the 3 C’s are sequenced as capital, contracts, counseling, and capital again. SBA’s immediate effort begins with the deployment of Disaster Assistance staff from one of its two Field Operations Centers (FOCs) to make disaster loans available to homeowners, renters, businesses of all sizes, and private nonprofits.

These physical and economic injury disaster loans are critical to repairing damage and sustaining cash flow in a community. Almost as quickly, the Office of Government Contracting and Business Development (GCBD), often in concert with the local District Office, reaches out to other federal agencies to offer waivers and other contracting flexibilities to ensure the engagement of small businesses – especially ones in impacted communities – in the process of rebuilding and recovering. Through counseling and technical assistance, small businesses are able to adjust their plans to account for the “new normal” after a disaster.

Ultimately, this is at the heart of successful recovery: Small businesses, in combination, are sometimes the local economic engine, but they are almost always critical to a community’s character. The recovery process can be said to have resolved into the business cycle when the final steps in small business recovery are financed with SBA Offices of Capital Access (OCA) and Investment and Innovation (OII) programs investing in that same “new normal.”

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Long and Short Term Supplies For Workplace Emergencies