Supermajority of small businesses support a role for government in NEW report released this week

May 4th, 2021

Washington, DC - A new report from Business Education Fund, in partnership with the Main Street Alliance reveals a supermajority of 67% of small businesses owners overwhelmingly believe in government responsibility for protecting Main Street. 

In a launch event yesterday, Main Street Alliance Executive Director Stephen Michael outlined what this could mean for governments from local to federal as we transition from rescue to recovery.

"We have both the opportunity and need to work with small businesses and the government to create more programs to get us through this still challenging time. But as we look towards the future, we have an opportunity to build a strong, inclusive, equitable, resilient and sustainable economy," said Stephen Michael, Executive Director of the Main Street Alliance.

Having a community-based outreach effort was key to reaching local business owners, particularly those not connected to government programs prior to the crisis.

"I would say to local [government] agencies you need to go and speak to small businesses directly...because trust gets built when you actually get to know the person," said Ole Hongvanthong, owner of PhotOle and one of the interviewees for the report.

And of those local networks formed during COVID, it presents the government a unique opportunity to tap into broader stakeholder networks as future policies are developed. 

"The question going forward is what do these networks do now. They did all this outreach to small businesses, they learned anew what some of the challenges were, and now there are some institutional partnerships that can be brought to bear on helping small businesses recover and thrive," said Joseph Parilla, Research Fellow with the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program.

"The success of Main Street after COVID is going to depend on a couple of things. Small businesses need to have the ability to compete with big business for talent and staff, and also, and this is important, for aggregate demand, people in the community need to have money to spend in their local communities," said Natasha McKeller Crosby, President of the Richmond LGBTQ Chamber. "For these reasons, businesses of the chamber I represent, support these kinds of investments in social safety nets and investments in their community."

And not only investments, but also enforcement and reform of lopsided tax system that benefits the wealthy and corporations at the expense of working families and small businesses. There is a role for government to address this growing inequality.

"We need to invest in the agencies that are responsible for ensuring that corporations and wealthy Americans pay their fair share," said Didier Trinh, Main Street Alliance Government Affairs Director.

Small business owners want effective, equitable, and active government support for a thriving small business sector. Though this preference may run counter to conventional wisdom, it reflects the priorities and day-to-day reality of real small business owners across geography, race, gender, and even political affiliation.

Entrepreneurship is heralded as a path to opportunity. Yet it is only through government efforts to create a more equal economy – with a specific commitment to dismantling systemic racism – that entrepreneurship can contribute to generational wealth, financial security, and prosperous local economies. That is, only government can make the public investments at scale and set the market rules necessary to sustain a thriving small business economy. These investments cannot be left to philanthropy, which does not have the resources and policy tools to generalize benefits, nor to the market as currently structured. Moreover, for effective delivery of the scale of relief necessary, it must be done through an open, democratic process -- one only government can provide, concludes the report.