WATCH: Small Business Initiative Helps Western North Carolina Businesses Rebuild Businesses

NORTH CAROLINA, June 18 - Last month Governor Josh Stein announced that the Western North Carolina Small Business Initaitve had distributed $55 million in funding from the Dogwood Health Trust, the Duke Endowment, and the State of North Carolina to 2,182 North Carolina small businesses. 

Hear from some of the grants recipients below: 

Pig and Grits Barbecue, Burnsville 

"What it did for us here was it allowed us to buy some equipment, to take care of some of our employees that needed some help, and helped us rebuild our inventory and pay for some of the flooring and repairs and stuff that insurance didn't cover completely.”

“But as far as the community goes, everybody's jumped in. Volunteers have come from all over, and we want to say thank you for that. We are open for business and would look forward to serving anyone.” 

Henry River Farms, Morganton 

“So we lost our seasonal crop, our strawberries ... And then it also affected like our tourism side of things, our agritourism ... And then we also lost field trips, which we rely on throughout the week for our fall season.”

“So receiving the grant helped us with our operating cost and our repair cost for some of our infrastructure that was lost during the storm. The main crop that was affected was our strawberry crop, which covers about a third of our income for our farm. So just having access to funds to help us keep, you know going as we're going to have this through the spring where we don't have our normal income has been a huge help.”

Carolina Native Nursery, Burnsville 

“We had damage to over 100 greenhouses. Like anybody else would say, it's like nothing we've ever experienced before. Without the Dogwood Grant, it would just take us that much more time to recover.”

“It allowed us to keep people on payroll. At a height of our season, we have 20 people on payroll, so it aided with that and to achieve the size that we had, it’d taken us a lot. So this $50,000 really goes a long way to jump us forward, to get us back to where we're going to be.”

Governor Stein remains committed to western North Carolina’s recovery. The Governor continues to advocate to the Trump Administration and the U.S. Congress to send $19 billion to western North Carolina for disaster relief and to improve FEMA by reducing red tape and making disaster response efforts more efficient. Governor Stein’s second Hurricane Helene budget proposal also includes $891 million directed toward economic recovery, strengthening critical infrastructure, and getting western North Carolinians back into their homes. Governor Stein continues to encourage people from across the country to visit western North Carolina this summer and support small businesses