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Minority entrepreneurs who have trouble navigating the requirements of obtaining a grant to help them through the pandemic will benefit from a partnership formed between Facebook and Oregon State University-Cascades.

The so-called Blue Fund program will be either one-on-one help, small grants or posted webinars created by business students who work at the Innovation Lab, an incubator for new businesses. These videos will walk an entrepreneur through the paperwork of filing for a Paycheck Protection Program loan or other federal grants designed to help businesses experiencing COVID-19-related revenue losses.

In past Paycheck Protection Program loans/grants, less than a quarter of the businesses were owned by minorities, said Adam Krynicki, Innovation Lab executive director. Minority entrepreneurs are three times likely to be rejected for a business loan.

With a $10,000 grant from Facebook’s Prineville data center and in-kind donations from the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, Bend Chamber of Commerce, Economic Development for Central Oregon, Opportunity Knocks and the Small Business Development Center at Central Oregon Community College, minority businesses can get help accessing loans, investment capital and grants.

“We want to target the groups that have gotten a lot less funding on the federal, state and local levels,” Krynicki said. “Those in the non-Hispanic groups receive the bulk of the funding.”

The best way to help minority-owned businesses, Krynicki said, is by getting entrepreneurs the expertise they need in a format and language they can understand.

Daphne Lara-Luna understands this. As a Redmond-raised MBA student at OSU-Cascades and Innovation Lab intern, this is the second community program she has worked on. The first was to help some 1,400 businesses that applied for grants offered by the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.

While on that project, Lara-Luna would make calls and translate information into Spanish for the business owner. She’d also help with the required forms.

On this current project, Lara-Luna, who grew up in Redmond, said she’ll be helping to create webinars and other programming so that minority-owned businesses can access self-help.

“From my experience, one obstacle is that sometimes the way the questions are asked can be complicated,” Lara-Luna said. “A lot of times I’ve had to walk the business owner through the process in a conversation style, rather than reading the instructions.

“There’s a lot of language that is hard to translate.”

With a new round of U.S. Small Business Administration funding just released on Jan. 11, there’s a new opportunity for businesses to obtain funds from the coronavirus relief act.

Businesses are eligible to apply if they have obtained forgiveness on the first round of grant funding or have not sought funding previously.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has already forgiven more than 1.1 million Paycheck Protection Program loans totaling $100 billion.

In all, the Small Business Administration has granted $525 billion, as of Aug. 8, in these funds, according to the administration’s website. Oregon has received $7.1 billion in these funds since the start of the pandemic, according to the Federal Pay, a free public resource for U.S. government employees.

Jose Balcazar, a former Bend restaurant owner who now advises other businesses at the Small Business Development Center at Central Oregon Community College, said the standard channels of obtaining information are normally not available for minority business owners.

Either there’s a language barrier or minority business owners feel they cannot qualify because of their immigrant status, Balcazar said.

“The biggest problem is getting the information out to the community,” Balcazar said. “Too often the people working in these places offering funding, don’t have people available who look the same or speak the same language.

“So they walk away.”

Another barrier to getting information or access to grant funds is access to technology. Some minority business owners don’t have reliable internet, a computer or even an accountant to produce the profit and loss statements sometimes required, he said.

“At our seminars (at the Small Business Development Center) we show them how to navigate a site, we make calls and get the info and that makes the difference.”

To obtain one-on-one help or to access the webinars, entrepreneurs can apply at osucascades.edu/bluefund. The Blue Fund program will begin Jan. 27.