Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has offered to help black-owned and women-led businesses that weren’t given the chance to take advantage of the funds made available from the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to Afro Tech.
The entrepreneur, who headlined the 2018 BLACK ENTERPRISE Entrepreneurs Summit, took to Twitter last week to announce that he wants to try his best to connect black-owned and women-led businesses to a bank. He also shares that there is still over $100,000 left in the program.
Critics have been saying that the loan program has been mishandled
, and Cuban agrees.Under this program, which was implemented due to the coronavirus, businesses that employ less than 500 workers can apply to receive loans of up to $10 million. If 75% of the loan goes toward maintaining pre-crisis payroll levels, the federal government will forgive it.
“The money was supposed to be quickly in the hands of small businesses so they wouldn’t have the need to lay anybody off,” he told FOX Business in an interview last week. “And then hopefully, within eight weeks, everybody thought we might be back to normal. But because that money wasn’t funded quickly enough, we saw what happened in terms of layoffs.”
Cuban is encouraging people to either apply or contact a business that may need the loan in the tweet below: