Bill Cunningham & SCORE Rhode Island

This was a good year for SCORE at the SBA RI District Awards event. Attached is the SBA press release for yesterday's event. The awards process included a US Congressional Breakfast on Monday, the Awards Luncheon with 300 attendees yesterday, and further recognition this afternoon at the RI Statehouse.

1. Bill Cunningham won Financial Services Champion. Attached is the nomination form for this award. See sections 8, 10, 11 & 15 for details.
   
2. The Chapter was also an award winner. View the press release here. We and the RI Small Business Dev Center each won the Director's Award (normally only 1 awarded annually. Our Chapter won due to both the Covid impact that we had, and the fact that we grew our team to also support record levels of new business startups. Here are the stats the I provided to Mark Hayward regarding the Covid team effort:
1. For RI SCORE, the biggest impact came from our Covid Response team, led by a team of 9 people. Mentors Bill Cunningham, Bill Welsh, Rochelle Blease, David Lucier, Jeff Bodenstab, Dennis Callanan, Ray Gorman and me, plus Chapter Admin Teri Terrien. Collectively this team achieved the following, with some support from other members of the Chapter. 

• These 8 Mentors provided 1663 mentoring sessions to 431 clients in FY 20. 
• In FY 21 those counts were 1544 sessions and 434 clients
• This team was also responsible for the creation and delivery of covid related educational programs, that guided clients on the grant and loan programs, plus ways to pivot their business. In 2020 there were 25 sessions with 911 attendees. In FY21 there were 21 sessions with 904 attendees.

3. Our client Katy Westcott  received SCORE's Joseph Knight Award as an outstanding small business. This award was co-presented by SBA Director Hayward and me.