Local businesses that have been hit hard by COVID-19 could be eligible for assistance from new initiatives of The Alliance for Downtown New York.

The Restaurant Online Ordering Sponsorship Program is an initiative undertaken between the Alliance and BentoBox. Eligible restaurants will receive delivery and takeout platforms as a way of adding profitability to those services. Each business will be able to customize the plug-and-play e-commerce experience to their particular needs.

The other program has been undertaken in conjunction with Streetsense, offering Lower Manhattan based small businesses technical assistance in legal COVID-prepared requirements.

Another industry that has been struggling is wineries.  Merritt Estate Winery and Liberty Winery have both been hit and marketing director of the latter Beth Margolis explained that: 

“while business is definitely down – mostly because of the lack of tourism – we’ve been making changes to weather the storm and we’re slowly opening back up.”

Things were definitely extremely hard at the beginning but since then lots of changes have been made and now – at least for these wineries – a new normal is being embraced.

One example of this is the public tastings (small groups, reservations required) that the wineries have held.