Minority Business Grants

US government minority business grants are not as easy to obtain as the many sources on the internet claim they are.

The Small Business Administration states quite plainly on it’s website, “grants are not available to start up businesses, except in rare cases - high technology”.
US government minority business grants may be found in a variety of federal departments, including (but not limited to) farming, environment, education, and parks. They are usually only available to existing businesses, and only exceptional schemes target the ‘minority’ business exclusively.

What this means to the minority small business owner is that, unfortunately, and perhaps unavoidably, they will need to spend a lot of time visiting government offices and researching departmental websites.

This is a time consuming process, and many try to avoid the hard work by using numerous websites that advertise assistance tools.

It is more likely that minority grants will be succesfully obtained from large corporations or public endowment funds. Publicly traded companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Blockbuster, and other large financial institutions including banks are active in promoting minority owned businesses.

Public endowment funds with both high and low public profiles institute grant programs from time to time that are specific to minorities. These are not easily researched and tend to be made known via word-of-mouth, within a community.

If a minority small business owner is fortunate enough to find a grant source, then it will often be for one particular business need. That may be to purchase or upgrade computer-related assets or it could be to hire training consultants for the benefit of minority hiring.

A minority business owner may find it more fruitful to search for those business situations where grants are available to the buyer of their product or service. Community groups and government organizations such as schools and recreation are very dependent on grants to build and improve on their services.

Many minority owners concentrate their efforts toward helping groups find the necessary financing they will need to start a particular project. It may be a new baseball field, housing project, or print supplies for a training course.

Groups who have managed to obtain minority small business grants can become excellent customers because quite often the terms of their grants demand that the money be spent by a certain date.

Minority small business grants can never be counted on to finance an enterprise for the long term, and as a small business owner you must realize that grants are really the ‘icing on the cake’ - albeit time consuming, rather than a key small business financing strategy.