Early on, the Chamber conducted a Business Impact Survey, and made personal calls to every member to better understand how businesses were being impacted by the pandemic. The data provided clear indication of the significant and ongoing negative impact.

With timely and much-needed support from partners including the Consumers Energy Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ruth Mott Foundation and Chase, the Chamber raised $570,000 for our Restart Flint & Genesee Small Business Recovery Program. Through this program, 144 small businesses received grants, 86 of which were minority-owned businesses.

Our team helped to facilitate grant programs from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and General Motors, and when you add up all of the grant programs that provided aid to businesses in Flint and Genesee County, our region fared very well:

• 447 grants totaling over $3.3 million dollars were awarded.
• Of that total, over $1.2 million dollars was granted to minority-owned businesses.

However, once the “Stay Home Stay Safe” executive order was issued to slow the spread of the pandemic, economic distress increased for many businesses. In response, the Chamber opened up access to our services – that are typically available to members only – to all businesses in Genesee County, at no cost. We quickly transitioned to offering online, on-demand business trainings to make information about grant programs and other opportunities accessible to larger audiences. We created a COVID-19 Resource Toolkit and served as a clearinghouse for resources, programming, advocacy and fast-breaking news and information. Later, we developed an online Restart Flint & Genesee Resource Center and a Small Business Help Desk.

As in-person learning at K-12 schools came to a halt, YouthQuest, our afterschool program, adapted to offer remote learning opportunities to support the day-school curriculum, and provided 450 families with school supplies. TeenQuest also shifted to a virtual format allowing pre-employment training to continue along with virtual graduations. Not only were teens able to participate in TeenQuest virtually, they were able to interview remotely with employers for summer jobs. Our staff also worked to adapt other Education & Training programs such as Career Edge, Flint Promise and Opportunity Youth to operate effectively within the confines of COVID-19.

Nationwide, the hospitality and tourism industry experienced major disruption. While the impact in Genesee County was not as drastic as some parts of the country, our region did not go unscathed.

Travel bans and restrictions on large gatherings impacted how we partnered with hotels and other stakeholders to promote the region and generate revenue for businesses and attractions. Our staff started thinking about how they could deliver value in different ways. They developed overnight packages for promotion online, including on the Pure Michigan website; converted the Certified Tourism Ambassador program to an online format to continue growing residents’ and hospitality workers’ knowledge about the region; launched the “Can’t Wait to See You” campaign to keep those in our social network connected and informed about what’s happening in Genesee County; promoted virtual experiences at attractions that were available across the county, and launched a new Explore Flint & Genesee destination website.

Along parallel paths, we continued to address our strategic challenges, including the need for a countywide vision and plan for economic prosperity, calling for collaboration between the City of Flint, Genesee County and the Chamber. There has been great progress in this space resulting in a vision, comprehensive plan, a dashboard of indicators that will measure our success and a community scorecard.

We also started work on re-branding the Chamber to improve our target audiences’ understanding of who we are, what we offer and to whom. Also, as part of our branding work, we revised our governance structure to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.

By late summer, there were resounding calls from Americans to address systemic racism, in the midst of the public health and economic crisis, and it was clear that business should lead in this space.

The Chamber leadership team agreed and determined that we should look inwardly first. We reviewed all policies and practices to ensure that equity and inclusion was inherent. We examined our leadership team to make certain that it is diverse and reflects different perspectives and experiences. We implemented a diversity training series to better understand where we may have unconscious biases and what to do about them. We surveyed our employees to learn their sentiments on how the Chamber rates on diversity, equity and inclusion. We also began to examine diversity within our boards and facilitated discussion on systemic racism with our Regional Leadership Council, which is comprised of 40 individuals representing major businesses and donors. In addition, the Chamber is an active member of the Greater Flint Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Inequities convened by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. This work also includes co-leading the Task Force’s Business Sub-Committee, where issues of importance to minority-owned businesses are addressed, such as relationship building with financial institutions, access to capital, income inequalities, training and mentoring opportunities. The committee convened a focus group of minority-owned businesses to speak to financial institutions and service-providers, we collected disparity data, we coordinated presentations with African American Advisory Committee to share grant and loan program information.