LiftFund in the News: Announcing The Center for Main Street Stability

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (October 15, 2026) — The storm may pass in hours. The floodwaters may recede in days. For a small business, the financial disaster can last far longer.

LiftFund today announced The Center for Main Street Stability, a national initiative designed to combine direct funding and rapid recovery, long-term rebuilding support, preparedness education, advocacy, and a platform for capacity-building for local small business ecosystems. The center will build permanent capability that can be used repeatedly in communities impacted by disasters and directly support both small businesses and local community organizations.

“We have learned from disaster after disaster that the question is not whether capital exists, but whether the right capital reaches a business at the right time,” said Amy Hereford, President and CEO of LiftFund. “A business may need cash immediately to make payroll and different financing six months later. Recovery systems should be built around how businesses actually recover.”

The center will organize its work around three stages: Prepare. Respond. Recover. Before disruption, businesses need financial readiness, continuity planning and connections to resources. In the immediate aftermath, they need grants and rapidly deployable capital. For long-term recovery, they need affordable financing and other support as they rebuild operations and remain part of the local economy.

LiftFund has tested its approach through hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and wildfires, as well as disruptions that may never receive a federal disaster declaration, including infrastructure failures, water outages and prolonged construction. Across more than 50 disaster and business-disruption responses, LiftFund has deployed more than $250 million in relief funding to thousands of small businesses.

“Small-business recovery is often treated as a response to an event,” Hereford said. “We believe it should be treated as infrastructure. Communities should not have to invent a new system every time something goes wrong.”

A central focus of the center will be positioning capital before disasters occur so it can move when businesses need it. The center will work with financial institutions, philanthropy and policymakers to explore mechanisms for making that possible, while using LiftFund’s field experience to identify gaps in existing recovery systems and inform state and federal policy.

That approach aligns with the Aspen Institute’s 2026 report, From Crisis to Continuity: Optimizing CDFI Capital and Partnerships for Natural Disaster Response, which found that small businesses can face an immediate liquidity crisis after disaster and emphasized the importance of rapid capital and preparation before a disaster occurs.

“Small businesses can face an immediate cash crisis after disaster, while traditional recovery resources often take time to arrive,” said Joyce Klein, Senior Director of the Aspen Institute’s Business Ownership Initiative. “Our research, informed by the experience of community organizations (including LiftFund), underscores the importance of preparing before disaster strikes, with capital, partnerships and capacity in place to respond quickly and support businesses throughout the longer recovery.”

In May 2026, LiftFund convened business owners and leaders from government, banking and philanthropy to examine gaps in small-business recovery, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas presenting research on small-business resilience and disaster recovery.

LiftFund’s disaster work has received support from institutions including Bank of America, James Avery, JPMorganChase, Steadfast LA, Wells Fargo, and others. In 2025, Opportunity Finance Network named LiftFund its Outstanding Certified Development Financial Institution of the Year in recognition of disaster-related impact. The center’s objective is to replace a recurring cycle — disaster strikes, money is raised, programs are assembled and businesses wait — with a recovery system built before the next disruption occurs.

“If we already know small businesses will need capital immediately after the next disaster,” Hereford said, “we should not wait until it happens to figure out how to reach them.”

Reopening After a Disaster

Small businesses often enter crisis with little room for delay. JPMorganChase Institute research found that half of U.S. small businesses operate with less than one month of cash buffer. A September 2026 Federal Reserve analysis found that 84% of disaster-affected small firms experienced business interruption or lost sales, fewer than one-third carried insurance covering those losses, and only 4% of firms that sought external funds received enough to fully cover their losses.

LiftFund’s decades of experience responding to more than 50 disasters and other major business disruptions point to the same challenge: businesses need different kinds of help at different moments, while assistance systems are often organized around a single event, program or funding source.

On July 16, six inches of water entered Gibson’s Discount, Bonna Kemp’s family-owned Kerrville store, damaging merchandise, fixtures and equipment. The store, which has operated at the same location since 1968, suddenly faced the question confronting businesses after disasters across the country: how to rebuild without running out of time or money. Employees spent weeks removing water, shoveling mud and rebuilding in triple-digit heat as recovery expenses mounted. LiftFund provided funding the business could put to work immediately.

“Right now, every single penny counts. We were able to secure those funds and use them immediately for things we had never considered,” said Bonna Kemp Odle, co-owner of Gibson’s Discount.

Small businesses are the backbone of communities across America, making up nearly all businesses, employing almost half of private-sector workers and playing an especially vital role in rural economies. Small-business recovery is community recovery. When businesses cannot reopen or make payroll, workers lose jobs, families leave and the local economy needed to rebuild begins to erode. A community can rebuild its homes and roads and still not recover if the businesses and people that sustained it are gone.

Experiences like Gibson’s helped shape LiftFund’s conclusion that small-business recovery infrastructure needs to exist before the next disaster occurs.