UUP responds: Unionists lend support to ailing NYC firms

In the three months following the World Trade Center attacks, relief efforts for victims have usually portrayed young families in need of financial assistance because their breadwinners died in the Twin Towers.

But another World Trade Center relief effort has been quietly unfolding around the state, in which dozens of UUPers have unselfishly given their time and expertise to businesses devastated in the Trade Center fallout. That effort is taking place among the state’s 24 Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), operated by the state university system. In peacetime, the SBDC counselors and directors — many of them UUP members — advise entrepreneurs on financing and resources. Now, they are also giving advice on federal and state disaster relief loans.

Among those UUPers helping are Susan McCartney, director of the Buffalo State College Small Business Development Center, and her co-workers Bill Grieshober and Andrea Lizak, both Buffalo counselors. McCartney helped start a development center in New York City in response to the attacks, and Grieshober and Lizak have been counseling business owners affected in Western New York.

Dozens of other UUPers have filled in as staff at the emergency development centers in New York City, said James King, state director of the SBDC program.

Grieshober and Lizak started counseling business owners affected in the Buffalo region after special training, and McCartney headed to CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College in Queens, one of three emergency development centers.

McCartney, who was in Queens for several days in October, found her experience “very, very rewarding.”

“We were very happy to serve, having contacted the leadership of the SBDC and saying, ‘Send us down. What can we do?’” McCartney recalled.

McCartney, a former Small Business Development Center Advisor of the Year, was a logical choice because she has the outgoing personality needed for getting into a new setting quickly and making the best use of available time, King said.

“She was terrific. She’s a very dynamic personality,” said Joyce Moy, the acting director at the Queens site.

Grieshober and Lizak have found plenty to do in Buffalo, as the effects of the Trade Center attacks have reached the Canadian border.

Lizak said it has been especially rewarding when business owners have come in confused and anxious, and they leave knowing help is available.

In peacetime, it can take minutes to clear customs and cross one of the four bridges connecting the U.S. and Canada in the Buffalo region. But with heightened security, bridge traffic is crawling, and many Canadian tourists who usually come to Buffalo for theater and sporting events are skipping their visits, Grieshober said.

Grieshober has counseled business owners such as a restaurateur who has seen revenues drop by 50 percent. He’s also encountered the unexpected, such as the client who might qualify for assistance because arsonists burned down an apartment building in which the man had tenants of Middle Eastern descent.

Like McCartney and Lizak, Grieshober has found it rewarding to be part of the Trade Center relief effort.

“That’s what we’re there for — we’re there to help people. And these people certainly need the help,” Grieshober said.

— Darryl McGrath