Beloved nonprofit friends. Beloved small-business friends. I beg you to believe me when I say the new federal CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program is not coming to save you. Speaking to you from my heart and from the best of my direct personal knowledge and experience so far: we must act in the belief that we will not get the forgivable PPP loans our organizations so desperately need. We must face the tough financial decisions ahead of us without counting on this promise of funding. Here’s why.

OMG, 2.5X our monthly payroll as an unsecured loan with no documentation needed beyond a simple 2-page form, at 1% interest, with 8 weeks’ worth of operating costs turning into a straight-up government grant that we never have to repay if we keep our headcount for that period? Sounds like every struggling nonprofit and entrepreneur’s fantasy in this moment. Alas, that’s exactly what it’s turning out to be so far — a fantasy.

Yes, you should absolutely apply for it if you can before the money’s gone. But good luck with the “if you can” and “before the money’s gone” parts of that.

How do I know? Because as the PPP supposedly “opened” yesterday (Friday 4/3/20), I was scrambling to help three different nonprofits, each of which was urgently trying and failing to figure out who would even take their applications.

But I’ve also got better authority than that, because yesterday I was lucky enough to talk with more than a dozen good people whom I know and trust in the financial industry, and they are scrambling, too. They’re desperate in their own way; they really do want desperately to help.

The fact is, even though the federal CARES Act authorization doesn’t require loan recipients to provide collateral or documentation, the government ain’t the one giving out the money. They’re running it through banks that already do Small Business Administration (SBA) lending. Those banks are regulated, and the regulations include requiring collateral and documentation. So bankers, however well-meaning they may be, are stuck trying to figure out how they can make this work in their systems, while public pressure mounts for them to get money out the door as quickly as possible. And that is likely going to mean prioritizing the applicants they know best: their existing customers with the most credit and the most money already.

Not the grassroots nonprofits. Not the microenterprises. Especially not the ones run by and for marginalized communities that have always been deliberately and structurally kept as far away as possible from credit and money in our racist systems.

Yep, maybe the banks could drop their rules overnight and start lending to random people who wander in with a PDF form. But in the real world, you gotta admit that’s a functional impossibility. Maybe it’s fixable over time but it’s sure as hell not a quick fix.

Meanwhile, on the much-touted first day, while the websites of the nation’s biggest financial institutions where most of us bank were decorated with “we’re trying!” messages, the SBA reported that $4.3 billion of the fund had already been depleted by close of business, Which is encouraging in a way; the word is, it mostly got loaned by community banks, who I guess can turn quicker than the big ships and are closer-up with their customers. And $4.3 billion is still only a little more than 1% of the total $349 billion available.

But. If you are like my three nonprofits that I’m trying to help, chances are you aren’t even in line yet, are you? You probably haven’t found anyone who’ll accept your application, amirite? One of my organizations had their application all ready, but got an email this morning (Saturday 4/4/20) from their bank saying the rules just got “clarified” and now they have to re-do their application which, remember, hasn’t even been submitted yet… and this org is still comparatively lucky because they do happen to bank with an institution that does SBA lending so they probably will, at some point, be allowed to hand over their form, take a number, and get in line at this particular deli counter.

So what happens now? As the big banks open their application processes — which you’ll see happening more and more today, tomorrow, and early next week — the rest of the money is going to evaporate faster and faster. It’s gonna be another one of those exponential curves we’re all seeing way too much of these days. This time instead of skyrocketing confirmed cases, eye-popping death counts, and astronomical leaps in unemployment, it’ll be dollars disbursed to the folks who were already and always first in line.

My nonprofits are still trying for it. You should too. For one thing, we might get the money after all. For another, whatever ends up happening to our organizations or our businesses as we face the tough decisions ahead of us, we can turn our experiences into education for others… and advocacy for next time. Because as our country dives deeper into this dark place that seems to be ahead, there is one unpleasant truth you can definitely count on: the supposed solutions that get rolled out won’t be made by or for the people who need them most. We all will need to fight for a future that doesn’t just take us back to the broken systems we had before.