Broadway News: The portal to apply for the grant program, which could give eligible Broadway productions and theater owners up to $10 million, was set to open at noon Thursday, but quickly experienced technical issues, which prevented users from uploading documents or moving through the application process. At 4:15 p.m., the Small Business Administration shut down the portal.
2 comments:
It is sad to see that this program has currently been shut down indefinitely. Venues all across the United States have been suffering immensely through the pandemic, being one of the hardest hit industries. I had never previously heard of the Shuttered Venue Grant program, but it sounds like an excellent program to help suffering venues push through these last couple of months as a small speck of light appears at the end of the god forsaken Covid tunnel. That being said, it is a bit disappointing that the program was not prepared and that their organization of the portal and processing was not quite ready. The article does suggest that they are working to remedy this as fast as they can so that they can get the much-needed relief out to the venues that need it the most, and I am truly hoping they can get it up and running in a more prepared and organized fashion as soon as possible. The sooner they can get it back up and running, the fewer business will have to be in a stressful limbo of not knowing whether they will last another day.
I feel like a lot of efforts that have been made to preserve the theater industry over the course of the pandemic have been only surface level, including this one. I am only left to wonder why this program failed after reading the article because there must have been lots of mistakes along the way to lead to its current state. This project had not only the failure of the website, but also unclear guidelines for applicants, the ability to only apply once despite these unclear guidelines, and it was severely understaffed. As someone that only sees the end result of this project, it seems like it was an idea that was rushed to completion and was therefore poorly executed. It is upsetting to know that so much benefit rides on the success of this project, but it might not ever be attainable due to the mishandling of the operation overall.
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