"We Were Hungry for Information": How Minority-Owned Micro-Businesses Survived COVID-19, Rutgers Study Finds
During the COVID-19 pandemic, how did minority-owned micro-businesses in New Jersey stay informed and keep their businesses operating? A Rutgers study finds business owners, when searching for information and support, relied on the people closest to them, not state and federal agencies or major media.
“When COVID-19 hit New Jersey, minority-owned micro-businesses — the corner salons, restaurants, auto shops, jewelry stores, and childcare providers that anchor neighborhoods in cities like Newark, Trenton, and New Brunswick — were among the hardest hit,” said study co-author Matthew Matsaganis, Associate Professor of Communication. “But almost all the attention, from think tanks to news coverage, went to the financial story: lost revenue, who got a PPP loan, who got left out. We wanted to understand the part that was being overlooked: how these owners actually got the information they needed and kept going when official channels weren’t reaching them.”
The study, “‘We Were Hungry for Information’: Communicative Resilience and Storytelling Networks Among Minority-Owned Micro-Businesses During COVID-19,” was co-authored by Arpita Jindani Ph.D. ’26 and Matsaganis and published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Jindani conducted the research as a doctoral student working with Matsaganis at SC&I; she is now Senior Program Director at Grantmakers In Health. The study draws on communication infrastructure theory, a framework for understanding how neighborhoods circulate vital information that Matsaganis has helped develop and has applied in urban communities for nearly two decades.
The findings show that the business owners interviewed for the study made it through the pandemic by leaning on loyal customers, neighboring businesses, community and faith-based organizations, and trusted local figures embedded in their neighborhoods.
“We usually treat resilience as a personal trait: grit, toughness, the heroic owner who simply works harder. Our findings push hard against that,” Matsaganis said. “For the people we interviewed, resilience wasn’t a quality they happened to have; it was something built through relationships and trusted local networks, and it was unevenly available depending on the community. When we celebrate individual resilience, we risk two things: we hide the institutional failures that made survival so hard in the first place, and we shift the burden of crisis onto the people with the fewest resources to carry it.”
The research further challenges a common assumption in small-business research: that survival comes down to individual entrepreneurial skill, capital, and management. These micro-businesses functioned as community anchors whose survival was bound up with their neighborhoods. For example, a New Brunswick jewelry store lost its regular customers when a street closure for outdoor dining moved the nearby bus stops out of reach, while a Newark restaurant was kept alive after a community kitchen reached out and paid it to cook meals for homebound seniors.
“In my work with minority-owned micro-businesses across New Jersey, many large-scale programs did not serve the communities they were meant to serve, overlooking the health-related, financial, operational, and systemic barriers that kept those communities out,” said Jindani. “Among the systemic barriers, language exclusion and digital illiteracy stood out as structural communication inequalities, determining who could access resources and who was left behind.”
Data were collected through 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews in 2021–2022, in person or via Zoom, with minority-owned micro-business owners in three New Jersey cities — Newark, Trenton, and New Brunswick — each designated as socially vulnerable under the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index. Most participants were affiliated with the Equitable Recovery Program (ERP), a community intervention that operated across the three cities. Jindani led the design and implementation of the ERP, including building a team of local program coordinators in each city who functioned as key interstitial actors in this study. Concurrently, as a Ph.D. student at SC&I, Jindani grounded her doctoral research in the ERP, a dual role that brought a practitioner lens to this study.
For New Jersey agencies, crisis planners, and policymakers, the lessons to be learned from the study’s findings are clear, Matsaganis said. “Money spent on broadcast and digital messaging accomplishes little if it doesn’t reach the trusted local networks people actually rely on. Effective crisis communication in underserved communities depends on partnering with, and resourcing, community-based organizations, faith-based groups, and the local intermediaries who translate and circulate information block by block. And that infrastructure has to be built before the next emergency, not improvised during one.”
“The striking thing wasn’t what these owners told us about government or the media — it was how rarely they mentioned them at all,” Matsaganis said, describing the findings of the study. “The institutions we assume are doing the communicating in a crisis were largely absent from the story of how people actually got through it.”
The business owners themselves named the barriers with precision: information that never reached them, language exclusion, and years of underinvestment in their communities. A Latino auto repair shop owner in Trenton put it plainly: “Being able to just read and write English makes a whole difference. Because I know a lot of members of the Latino business community who had a really difficult time. They were looking for help, and they were not getting the right help, or they just couldn’t navigate [due to the lack of English reading and writing skills as well as lack of digital skills].” This observation captures what the study found across the interviews: the systems meant to help small businesses in a crisis were not built to meet their needs. For New Jersey and beyond, the implication is that crisis communication has to flow through the local, trusted networks people already use and through people who can literally and figuratively speak the language of the community.
Photo credits:
Photo of New Brunswick: ©2021 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Nick Romanenko.
Photo of Newark: ©2025 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Nick Romanenko.
