We are relaunching The Longevity Fund to continue recovery efforts and drive long-term sustainability through business recuperation and improvement.

Our goal remains the same – doing all that we can to say Chinatown will always be open for business. Welcome to Chinatown aims to distribute $1 million in grants to Manhattan Chinatown small businesses by the end of 2021. Read more to learn about the grant fund.

Welcome to Chinatown started the Longevity Fund to provide short-term relief to our neighborhood’s small businesses at a time of dire need. But it is also increasingly apparent to us that neighborhood small businesses need more than short-term aid.

Respondents to our Small Business Survey Program cited marketing, website creation and updates, and design as resources they’d be interested in. Read more about how these findings influenced our relaunch of the Longevity Fund.

To aid struggling legacy Chinatown businesses and NYC neighbors, Grace is partnering with Welcome to Chinatown’s Sik Faan Fund to donate fresh, nutritious, and familiar meals for low income, food insecure, and at-risk senior residents in NYC. The hot meals will be purchased from local Chinatown businesses, including legacy restaurants like Hop Kee, Hop Lee, Wo Hop (upstairs and downstairs) and distributed among our community partners that serve our neighbors in need.

We are thrilled to announce our third and final round of Longevity Fund grant recipients! We not only met our fundraising goal of $200,000 but also surpassed it, giving us the ability to award an additional 5 grants, to a total of $225,000 in grant distribution to 45 Chinatown small businesses.

Welcome to Chinatown is committed to investing in small business sustainability to ensure Chinatown’s small business owners are empowered to thrive independently, which brings us to share the new direction of The Longevity Fund.

This week is bittersweet -- yesterday marked the one year anniversary of launching Welcome to Chinatown. On one hand, we feel more courageous, inspired and empowered than ever to do the work we’ve been doing in the last year, but on the other hand, we can’t help but feel a sense of despair, the same feeling we felt last year when we started, seeing that our community continues to hurt and be disproportionately marginalized because of the way we look, speak or exist. 

When we started Welcome to Chinatown, we saw ourselves simply as two residents of the neighborhood -- we had yet to realize what it meant to be a female-founded grassroots organization. We’re grateful to be surrounded by a supportive community of fellow female founders and leaders as well as allies who remind us each day: Asian and Asian American women change the world.