Harvard University awarded the both Allston Village Main Streets and Brighton Main Streets funds through the Harvard University Allston-Brighton Emergency Response Grant Program to support their efforts in supporting the community.
The neighborhoods of Allston and Brighton are only four and a half square miles, but are home to hundreds of businesses, many of those facing significant impacts due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As small business owners in the neighborhoods navigate their day-to-day operations, a web of complex policies and opportunities grow daily. To help navigate this, those businesses and the people they employ often turn to two organizations for guidance: Allston Village Main Streets and Brighton Main Streets.
While the organizations are separate, Alex Cornacchini and Aidan McDonough, respectively the executive directors of the Allston and Brighton Main Street organizations, work closely to help the businesses and residents of their neighborhoods thrive.
Established to help create and maintain thriving business districts and assist the small businesses that operate in the neighborhood, both organizations have seen a substantial change to their daily tasks and the needs of their community.
“I used to have set office hours for small business owners to meet with me face to face, and now we can’t do that,” McDonough says. “Now we’ve gone to a model where [they] can access a program that is connected to my calendar and schedule a [virtual meeting] with me.” He notes that like many organizations, Brighton Main Streets is making use of video conferencing.
Cornacchini agrees that video conferencing has helped his organization stay connect to the business they serve, and he noted that he is also directed many people to other digital resources such as a small business workshops held by the Harvard Ed Portal.
Each organization is seeing similar requests from the businesses in their neighborhood – be it help to navigate a grant application, advice on how to interpret new city or state guidance, or other resources for them and their employees.
"Over the past few weeks as reopening plans have emerged, I am being asked to help businesses understand what each phase means and where they fall,” says Conacchini. “Before that, I was working with businesses to help understand different loan and grant opportunities and what they could access and how.”
Both directors noted that established partnerships and ongoing relationships with each other, other nonprofits, and representative from the education sector and government agencies has been key factor through these difficult times. Working with Jo-Anne Barber, the Executive Director of the community development organization Charlseview, Inc., the idea of a Worker Relief Fund was developed. Workers who were laid off or furloughed from their jobs at an Allston or Brighton business were able to apply for small grants to help them pay for essentials like groceries or their utility bills. Among other funding, the grants both organizations received from the Harvard University Allston-Brighton Emergency Response Grant went directly to support this program.
To date, nearly 120 individuals who worked for an Allston or Brighton small business and had their job status impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic have been awarded aid.
“Allston and Brighton’s small business employees are vital to the vibrancy of our neighborhood,” Cornacchini says. “Most of these employees don’t know when or if they will get back to work and we’re proud to help them out in this time of uncertainty.”
The organizations are also trying to keep the drumbeat going for the programs and initiatives they had planned for 2020. Brighton Main Streets has moved its summer concert series online, hosting the first virtual concert in May. More than 1000 people logged on to Facebook Live to check out the show. Allston Village Main Streets is maintaining its commitment to the numerous artists who live in the community and have plans to commission “Art Box” projects on utility boxes, and install a permanent artistic lighting project on the light poles on Harvard Ave.
As businesses continue to envision how they can maintain operations and work with the city and state to open safely, the teams at the Allston Village and Brighton Main Streets will be looking for creative ways to have an impact.