On Thursday, July 16th, the Baker-Polito Administration announced that Ashland was the recipient of a $4,950,000 grant from the Department of Housing & Community Development to assist small businesses in 23 cities and towns across the Metropolitan Boston Region, including Concord.
The funding is being utilized to address emergency needs in light of the Coronavirus pandemic. This funding will support 181 communities in their work to provide vital services to low-income residents and small businesses affected by the pandemic. Specifically, the grant award for these 23 participating communities will be used to award individual grants of up to $10,000 for microenterprise businesses. A microenterprise is defined as a commercial enterprise that has 5 or fewer employees, 1 or more of whom owns the enterprise and must be a for-profit entity. Concord’s portion of the overall award that will be available to businesses is $210,000. There are business type exclusions to the grant, which include: real estate rentals/sales businesses, businesses owned by persons under age 18, businesses that are chains, liquor stores, weapons/firearms dealers, lobbyists or Cannabis-related businesses.
As the lead community for the regional effort, the Town of Ashland will work closely with the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation (“MGCC”) to administer and oversee the grant program.
The communities that are part of this coalition include: Ashland, Beverly, Burlington, Canton, Concord, Dedham, Essex, Lexington, Manchester by the Sea, Marlborough, Melrose, Milton, Natick, North Reading, Norwood, Randolph, Reading, Sharon, Southborough, Stoneham, Watertown, Winchester or Woburn.
An application and additional information will become available in the coming weeks. Individual cities and towns will be responsible for distributing application information to microenterprises in their community.
For the full press release, please view it here.