SMALL BUSINESS RESILIENCY

Thread Capital Partners,

I am pleased to present our Impact Report for Fiscal Year 2020/21. While we experienced challenges due to the pandemic like everyone else, our overwhelming feeling was one of inspiration from the extraordinary resilience of our communities and our clients. We are excited to share the stories of how we positively impacted small business owners across the state, helping the entrepreneur, their business, and their community to become more resilient. 

We have a lot to share. Last year we enjoyed substantial growth. Just finishing our third full year, we needed to continue to develop our systems and processes, balance remote work operations, and double our staff to support our increased loan production. In addition to these practical considerations, we began a lengthy look at how our work, and the businesses we serve, fit into a historical context of active discrimination and predjudice. 

In the past year we significantly increased our loan production from the previous year with a total of 826 loans and a disbursement of over $57 million in 78 different counties.  The majority of our lending was focused on preserving the small businesses in our communities that we already love and rely on. We did this work through the NC COVID-19 Rapid Recovery Loan Program, a NC Rural Center led consortium of eight CDFIs. We take pride not only in the volume of lending we provided, but in our reach to unserved and underserved entrepreneurs, including women, veterans, people of color, low-wealth, and rural communities. Over the life of the program, Thread Capital originated 54 percent of the total loans and 51 percent of the total dollars distributed in the program.

While we measure progress by numbers, we must not lose sight of the fact that each of these numbers represents a relentless entrepreneur providing services to their community and a local business that provides critical jobs.  

All of our Rapid Recovery clients’ success stories have a recurring theme: Resiliency. A baker in the mountains used funds to stabilize and then grow their business, a farmer in Watauga county diversified his business by adding additional services, and a coffee shop in Durham gave back to the community that had embraced and sustained them in previous hard times. You can read more about a few of our clients here.

Our support of these entrepreneurs was a downpayment on our commitment that North Carolina’s economy will be a place where every entrepreneur has the opportunity to make their small business dreams a sustainable reality.

As Thread Capital moves into its fourth year, and we look to the future, we continue to look for ways to better help entrepreneurs in North Carolina. We consistently ask ourselves: What can we do today to support entrepreneurs and ensure that tomorrow’s economy will be more resilient and equitable?

We believe it starts with protecting the assets that our state already has. The businesses that have worked so hard to create solutions in their communities, hire their neighbors, and increase upward mobility in low-wealth communities need our support. Prior to the pandemic, the last large economic jolt our country faced, the Great Recession, saw a very uneven recovery. One that brought quick recovery for the affluent, and a painfully slow recovery for the communities that had the smallest margins to begin with. Protecting at-risk businesses in underserved communities now is pivotal to continued progress.

We have deployed a lot of capital in our first three years, but our work does not stop at lending. We are investing more and more in reducing the isolation that many emerging entrepreneurs experience. For every high growth business that gets into an accelerator program, there are hundreds that are doing their best with limited resources and networks. Thread believes that reducing the isolation of our customers through coaching and connections will have a multiplier effect for low-wealth communities and businesses. To that end, we’ve increased our capacity to address this challenge and are focusing on building networks and connecting small businesses to all of the resources that will help them thrive.

We hope you will join us in elevating small businesses and shining a light on all they do for their communities.  The ability of Thread Capital clients to leverage limited amounts of capital, coaching, and connections is truly extraordinary. Our small business customers are a model of resilience and dedication for all of North Carolina.

The future is bright for Thread Capital as we continue to provide services to underserved communities. I continue to be extraordinarily grateful for an amazing team and a growing network of supporters who have stepped up when the community needed them. Our work is made possible by each one of these vital resources, and we are thankful. 

With gratitude,

Jonathan Brereton
Executive Director, Thread Capital