CAMDEN, S.C. — The City of Camden Main Street Program has been selected to participate in a new small business resiliency audit and resources program.
"The City of Camden is one of three towns in South Carolina, and South Carolina is one of three states in the country who are included," says Main Street Manager, Katherine Spadacenta.
"It's looking at what sort of challenges our small business owners are facing right now. Three years ago next week the entire economic landscape for small businesses changed when they were forced to shut down due for the COVID pandemic. So now three years later this is a great point for us to turn around and say, okay you've made it through the last three years now what do you need," she adds.
The first step is assessing businesses that will be taking part.
"So the invite has gone out to five businesses for the first initial phase of the audit. Resources will be available to many more businesses when we go further into the pilot program. For example, we have a retail boutique, a restaurant industry location, we have a solopreneur a digital influencer," she says.
Over the course of 4-6 months, they will perform an audit to see what they need in order to move forward with responding to their challenges.
After six months they are able to research potential solutions and develop technical assistance, materials, resources, and tools to meet the participant's needs.
"It's a technical assistance program, but it's not defined yet because the first phase of that program is a small business audit, what's really important about this program is that we are going to find out directly from small business owners what they need," she adds.
Once the program grows she expects they will be able to assist more small businesses.
