The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) has gone through some changes recently. Hi. I’m Bette Hochberger at CPA, CGMA, and this is a quick minor update on the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. It’s a little different than PPP. This was very specific as to who can apply. You had to be a live venue operator. If you produce theatrical performances, live performances, concerts, movie theaters, museums, talent representatives, all these folks got super, super hit by COVID because even if they wanted to open, they really couldn’t.
So, because there was so much devastation in those industries, the SBA has an entirely separate grant, and it’s not like the PPP where it gets forgiven later and things like that. It’s a bit different.
The exciting thing with the billions and billions of dollars they have available for the shuttered venue is that they’ve got about 10,300 groups successfully submitted. People had to sit in those waiting rooms online for hours to have the luxury of even putting in the application.
While 10,000 sounds like a lot, there were over 12,000 that started the application and didn’t even finish it. So you can imagine it wasn’t easy if you went through PPP or EIDL or any of those things, and you saw how much information they wanted; this was like a hundred times worse. I did work on a shuttered venue grant for a nonprofit I’m on the board of, and it was not for the faint of heart, that is for sure.
They don’t know how quickly the funding will run out, but it’s set up in a tiered priority distribution system that is complicated. I’m not going to get into all of that, but they do have somewhat of a timeline ish, more or less. So they think that end of May priority round one should be getting funded. And if you manage to get into priority round two or three, that should happen in June if there’s any money left over. They don’t know how much they’re going to be giving out yet, and we still have those over 12,000 incomplete applications. Wow. It’s so many, and who knows how many of them will ever actually finish.
So that is your update on the shuttered venue. If you put in for that, hopefully, you’re going to get it. Hopefully, you’re going to see it kind of before summer starts, but who knows? We’ll see you next time.
