An important part of the City’s outreach to our small businesses has been the webinars that OED have developed to provide targeted, useful information and how-to advice in the form of online workshop/webinars offered on Zoom. The webinars are usually presented with one of our community technical assistance partners, cover subjects ranging from how to apply for a federal loan to how to pivot to online business operation.

Since January 2021, we have moved to a regular weekly cadence of webinar offerings, and in those months more than 2,000 participants have attended. Two OED staff, Vic Farlie and Dhez Woodworth take turns leading or presenting, usually with subject matter experts from organization such as the Small Business Administration, Ernst & Young and Silicon Valley SCORE.

Here are some of the workshops presented since early March:

• American Rescue Plan: what’s next for business?
• Performance venues and businesses can get SBA grants
• American Rescue Plan allocates $28.6 Billion in COVID relief grants for food and beverage businesses
• California Relief Fund opens for 5^th round of applications

We have also started providing simultaneous interpretation into Spanish, Vietnamese and Mandarin for specific webinars, and are planning to get those versions posted to our YouTube channel , as well as promoting through social media posts.