Q&A
Support for AAPI-owned businesses and language access initiatives
1:01:36
·
5 min
Council Member Krishnan inquires about initiatives to support AAPI-owned small businesses and address language access barriers. Commissioner Kim details various efforts by SBS to improve outreach and accessibility for AAPI and immigrant-owned businesses, including multilingual services and partnerships with ethnic media.
- SBS collaborates with the Office of Ethnic Media and Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs for community outreach
- The agency provides information in up to 22 languages for major initiatives
- SBS has formed Asian American and Latin American small business task forces
- The agency has increased its social media outreach with multilingual content, resulting in significant growth in engagement
Shekar Krishnan
1:01:36
Thank you, Deputy Commissioner.
1:01:37
And and I'm glad to hear that.
1:01:38
And I hope that that network and that investment can not only continues, but expands because all of these groups, legal services, I know well, and, you know, it's the the the issue is always the need so far outpaces.
1:01:51
The capacity you will have.
1:01:53
My final question at the chair permits is just an an issue that I know is personal to me, to you two commissioner, is when we when you touched upon it already, but, you know, our Asian American business in particular, whether it's in my district, accounts from Rejuvant Districts, or across the city too, One of the biggest issues that we face in addition to the other 2 I just mentioned is language access and the importance of We can have all these great programs, but it's so hard for our businesses and especially our API owned businesses to access these services.
1:02:25
Because of language barriers, because they're so bureaucratic complex, and that communication is so an accessibility both language and cultural accessibility is so important.
1:02:36
So have you given some thought and and what thought, if anything, given to, what kinds of initiatives Could we create or fund within SBS to support API owned small businesses?
1:02:46
You know, the subset of MWBEs as well, but the unique challenges that the API business is faced too.
Kevin Kim
1:02:53
Thank you for that question.
1:02:55
I think language access begins with outreach initially.
1:02:59
In language.
1:03:00
And one of the things that we've been actively doing is working with the office of ethnic media the mayor's office of ethic media, and we've been able to hold community ethic roundtables and all and I make sure that as many ethnic outlets are invited as those Jose Bionna does a great job of that.
1:03:23
And then mayor's office of immigrant affairs, Manuel Castro, has also attended all of these meetings with me.
1:03:30
We just held with commissioner Rodriguez, a whole community ethnic media roundtable around the dining out NYC rollout.
1:03:39
Because like you said, API community in New York City, they own, according to the Asian American Federation, 23% of all small businesses, so they have a disproportionate large number of these businesses.
1:03:51
And so whenever we do big initiatives, we make sure to cover as many of the languages.
1:03:58
The New York City Small Business Opportunity Fund, when we launched last year as a prime example, even though the law requires 10 languages, the top 10 most spoken languages.
1:04:08
We made sure to get the word out on day 1 in 22 languages.
1:04:12
The AI chatbot, the first ever in the country, to have this to help small business owners.
1:04:18
Initially, the first, first pilot was in English, but soon after a few weeks later, we updated it to include the 10 other languages as well.
1:04:27
We know that the with the Asian American business owners, we formed the Asian American small business task force during the pandemic, and that has been ongoing.
1:04:36
We also created the 1st ever Latin American small business task force.
1:04:40
And so part of it is making sure we get the organizations that are working with the small businesses in the community to come in, to understand it, so that we can provide as much information to them, and part of it is that they help get the word out in language as well.
1:04:57
Out Outreach Teams language capacity in itself.
1:05:00
You know, we cover Korean Mandarin Cantonese in several dialects in in Chinese for the API community, of course, as well as Russian and Spanish and and many of the other required languages.
1:05:16
I I think the key here also is that when we did a big push on outreach through social media, We created this character for our recreational vehicle.
1:05:25
It's the RV called Moby.
1:05:27
And in Moby, just cartoonizing cartoonizing.
1:05:30
I don't know if that's a word, but making it into caricature, cartoon style.
1:05:34
We also have Moby speak over 10 languages when we do our social media outlets, not just in English.
1:05:41
So he speaks Urdu and some of the languages that that most people may never have heard of, but is very important to the small API, small business community.
1:05:50
So we're proud of that.
1:05:51
I think that the social media outreach using those kinds of creative techniques has been one of the big highlights for SPS last year.
1:05:59
We increased our views of all of our postings by 45% to over 1,000,000 views now.
1:06:06
We've increased our following by 20%.
1:06:09
We have over a 100 16,000 followers now.
1:06:12
And I think the video views has increased by 500%.
1:06:16
So I think when we're doing it in different languages, more people are actually really engaging and they're watching.
1:06:22
And so the language access piece, I thank you for your your real champion of that because For SBS, we know that we can have the most amazing programs.
1:06:32
But if people don't know about it, it's off or not.
1:06:35
And so language access is a top priority for us.
