Persisting With My Mother

a Sunday morning in Gainesville, FL — circa ‘98

My mother says she doesn’t like to burden me during the work week. I knew there was big news when she texted me this:

Hi Kelechi can you please read the latest email from SunTrust.

I checked my mother’s inbox to find an email stating the following:

Hello Felicia,

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has announced that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has run out of funds before their deadline of May 31, 2021. So, we’ve discontinued all loan application processing.

Unfortunately, your loan application was either not yet completed or still in process when the available funds were fully allocated, and a PPP loan is no longer available to you. But, be sure to check out payment relief options on your business accounts that we may be able to help you and your business with.

Thank you,

Your team at Truist

After confirming the news, I felt a wave of frustration and dread wash over me. I summed up the willpower to call my mother and hold space for her. Her defeated tone was filled with grief. “I just can’t catch a break,” she said. “I don’t know how long I can keep doing this. They denied me because of my last name…I know it.” What is a mother’s son supposed to do with this? The weight of her despair pushed me to write and share.

My mother is a Nigerian immigrant who has practiced nursing for over three decades and has dedicated her life and career to caring for others. For three months, I’ve been helping her apply for the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Second Draw Payment Protection Program (PPP) loan for her home health business, JoyNHome Private Care Services. JoyNHome is a small business that provides home health services to older people with comorbidities.

The purpose of the PPP loan program was to supplement small businesses that received First Draw PPP loans to keep their workforce employed as the pandemic entered its second year. JoyNHome applied via its payroll bank, SunTrust (now called Truist) and received $12,123.10 from the first PPP Draw, which was used to keep its six person part-time staff on the payroll while patients, following social distancing guidelines, needed to opt out of home care services. Given the first loan amount only covered payroll for about two months and clients were still refusing care, my mother welcomed this second PPP cycle.

New requirements were applied to the Second Draw PPP loan as compared to the First Draw; the main being companies must demonstrate at least a 25% reduction in gross receipts between comparable quarters in 2019 and 2020 so to prove the economic health of the business was materially impacted by the pandemic. For example: Q2 2020 (April, May, June 2020 Revenue) vs Q2 2019 (April, May, June 2019 Revenue) must have decreased 25% Year Over Year. Revenue reduction could also apply to the full calendar year of 2020 vs 2019. This requirement put my mother’s business in a bind for a few reasons:

1. JoyNHome was established in 2015 but wasn’t fully operational until my mother quit her full-time nursing job in May 2019. This meant she saw virtually no revenue for the first two quarters in 2019 and thus voided Q1 and Q2 as eligible quarters to prove the pandemic negatively affected her business per the Second Draw requirement. Q3 and Q4 in 2019, the first two true quarters of her new operational business, were the only eligible quarters.
2. JoyNHome, like many home health businesses in the state of Georgia, experiences a significant lag in posted revenue for rendered services, especially for patients insured by the VA. This lag is mainly caused by the VA’s slow payment disbursement processes. For example it took 100 days for the VA to pay for home health services rendered in a previous quarter. This complicated our documentation and contributed to Truist’s slow application review.
3. Remittance Advice (RA) documentation from the VA, which includes payment and rendered service date detail, is not accessible online. We unfortunately didn’t have successfully faxed RA documentation for all VA payments, and thus couldn’t determine and prove if services from payments made in Q3 or Q4 in 2019 and 2020 listed on bank statements were rendered in a previous quarter.

After a long call with an application review representative in late April, we finally convinced Truist to at least submit our application to SBA. Only two weeks later I learned our efforts would lead to nothing.

My mother wasn’t able to prove that JoyNHome was hurt financially by the pandemic. She continues to lose clients and staff because of the toll the pandemic has taken. On behalf of my mother, I’m requesting $75,000 via GoFundMe to help her and her business rebound from the pandemic. The utilization of donated funds includes economic relief for my mother, sole proprietor and Director of Nursing at JoyNHome Private Care Services, LLC, which would enable her to:

• Cover administrative costs
• Hire employees at a competitive rate
• Catch a break and generate hope

Thank you for reading, sharing, and donating. We persist!