Congress is negotiating a sweeping stimulus package to offset the cascading damage wrought by the coronavirus. The package includes $500 billion for two waves of direct payments to taxpayers and an additional $500 billion in loans for businesses. To help small businesses specifically, those of us in the nonprofit small business lending space are coming together to ask Congress to apportion $1 billion of the $500 billion earmarked for businesses to go to the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. The fund, which has strong bipartisan support, promotes economic revitalization in distressed communities throughout the country by supporting the work of the nation's network of community development financial institutions, or CDFIs. A supplemental appropriation of $1 billion to the fund will allow CDFIs across the country to leverage $12 billion in capital that will be deployed to communities in need.