Open Letter From Duncan Councilmember & Simpson Hotel Owner Deborah Mendelsohn
The Simpson Hotel is a grant recipient of the Local First Arizona Small Business Relief Fund.
Grant made possible by United Way of Graham and Greenlee Counties.
For the past 13 years, I have run a small B&B in a lovely old territorial hotel in tiny Duncan, Arizona, on the Gila River near the New Mexico border. I first did a top-to-bottom renovation of The Simpson Hotel, a hundred-year-old building, and then set about making it into a sort of incubator for community projects as well as a rural stopover for travelers from around the world. Along the way, a mutual friend introduced me to Kimber Lanning, and I soon wrote a grant to bring Local First Arizona to our town to help us imagine how Duncan might reinvent itself and prosper. I have since been impressed and sometimes even awed by the high standards and the reach of Local First Arizona’s work.
Then came the COVID-19, and like most hospitality businesses, we were crushed. Unlike others, we had no cushion, no savings, and not very good credit. But as I followed the development of the CARES Act Payroll Protection Program, I saw reason to think we would be able to rescue ourselves with a small loan.
“My business has almost never made a profit. I reconciled myself to that long ago since my husband and I love living where we live, love working on our old building, and love seeing the many community projects to which we have devoted ourselves to take wing.”
After I was turned down again and again for a $2,500 loan — yes, just $2,500 — I went public on Facebook and over email about the predicament we were in. Within minutes I had an email from Kimber Lanning about setting up a phone conversation. I was a little contrite when I saw that; just months before I had gotten cross with Kimber about the way a project in our community was going. I think maybe she understood it was my burn-out talking. In any case, she reached out to me, and the next thing I knew we got a $2,500 grant from LFA from the Small Business Relief Fund they had created to help small businesses that were shut out from the highly competitive PPP loan arena.
This gift, seemingly coming out of nowhere, lifted me out of despair and set me firmly on a new level of creative thinking about what lies ahead for The Simpson Hotel and for Duncan. Like many small businesses, we may now substantially redefine what we are and how we go about it. And our town has no choice now but to open up its thinking in a similar way. As a town council member I will approach that not with fear and anxiety, not with a search for someone or something to blame, but with a much more open mind that knows that out of suffering new insight, love and commitment can arise.
I hope this story helps convey how much more Local First Arizona is than a membership and advocacy organization. It’s a crucible. May it remain so for decades to come.
ABOUT THE LOCAL FIRST ARIZONA SMALL BUSINESS RELIEF FUND
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Local First Arizona and its community partners launched the Small Business Relief Fund (SBRF) to provide mini-grants to Arizona's smallest, locally owned, independent enterprises. These micro-entrepreneurs — businesses with 0-3 employees and less than $250,000 in annual revenue (approximately $35k-$45k in net profits) — needed immediate assistance to sustain the impact from decreased business and cash flow caused by the shut down of our economy. To this date, the fund was provided free aid to 400 family-owned businesses and has impacted 1,000 local jobs.