PORTRAITS OF A PANDEMIC

A mother, necessity and her invention

Ask Blew Kind when she knew the pandemic had hit her cafe, Franny Lou’s Porch in East Kensington, and she doesn’t hesitate to answer: The second week of March, when sales went from more than $500 a week to just $88.

Normally, Franny Lou’s Porch — named for poet and writer Frances Harper and activist Fannie Lou Hamer — is warm and welcoming, with walls covered in art, flyers advertising local goings-on, and shelves lined with books on social justice and the history of marginalized groups. It’s also a gathering space to organize, recharge and engage in fellowship. Menu items reflect the cafe’s mission: sandwiches have names like “The Anti-Capitalist” and “Pro-Love.” Teas like “The Sparrow’s Fall” and “Songs for the People” are named after poems by Harper.

The dropoff in business was stark and immediate. Kind — 32 and a mother of three children ages 8, 5 and 9 months — employed a dozen or so workers and the cafe has become a local cornerstone since opening in 2015. Suddenly, her doors were closed and customers were fearful to leave home. And the cafe’s catering business suffered, too, as other small businesses around the city shut their doors.

“We lost a weeks’ worth of food because it happened s0 quickly,” Kind said. “It was not being sold at the rate we were selling. We lost four to five thousand dollars just in wholesale catering orders.”

Philadelphia is a city of proud neighborhoods, with small businesses often central to the identity of a corner, street or block. An estimated one in four of those small businesses are black-owned, despite African Americans making up 44 percent of the city’s population. 

According to U.S. Census data from 2012, women make up more than 35 percent of America’s small business owners. Minorities are less than 30 percent of all U.S. small business owners. 

The pandemic, which has exposed inequality across American society, is also showing the disparities among small businesses and who has access to resources to survive the crisis.

The federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program is mainly lending to existing customers, and many many business owners of color lack such relationships. As a result, a recent report by the Center for Responsible Lending found that 95 percent of black-owned businesses, 91 percent of Latino-owned businesses and 75 percent of Asian-owned businesses “stand close to no chance of receiving a PPP loan through a mainstream bank or credit union.”

Kind said she doesn’t meet the criteria to apply for federal funding to bridge her income gap and has had to be creative about maintaining that community in the pandemic. To keep as many of her workers as possible, Kind cut hours at the cafe and has tried to boost morale while minimizing signs of worry as the boss. She started a GoFundMe for her remaining 10 employees. A dormant online delivery option was finally started.

And when the doors closed, Kind made a window.

The idea, she said, came to her soon after her worst week. As she mourned the in-person atmosphere of Franny Lou’s, in talking to a friend outside the cafe, she saw a pair of double doors from a new perspective.

Within hours, she enlisted her partner and children to transform the space, using building materials and paint that were in the cafe’s basement. Two days later, Kind was taking orders from the new side window.

“I was so happy afterwards that it was exactly what I saw in my mind,” Kind said. “We definitely had a loss, and I sat with it. But we’re starting a new chapter and going in a different direction, and I think we’ll be strong coming out of this.”

This series, Portraits of a Pandemic, is a co-production between The Philadelphia Inquirer and The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics and policy. This work is supported by the Pulitzer Center and The Lenfest Institute.