Trauma-Informed Small Business Support: Why It Matters

“Trauma‐informed” is a term most often used in human services and public health, but it has strong relevance for small business support, entrepreneurship, and ecosystem building. Before launching GTB Advisors, I held a role serving as a grantmaking intermediary of a large corporate foundation and, as such, made grants to business support and workforce organizations. When a prospective grantee submitted a proposal to incorporate trauma-informed practices into their approach to upskilling adult talent, I leaped at the opportunity to learn from the experience.  I was initially introduced to the concept at a workshop on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), so a seed had been planted that the grantee watered.  

Here’s why I thought embedding trauma-informed practices would make a difference in outcomes:

• Many entrepreneurs, especially from historically marginalized communities (BIPOC, women, immigrants, survivors of violence or abuse, persons from disadvantaged backgrounds), carry trauma or adverse experiences that shape how they engage with capital, systems, networks, and growth. Forbes Magazine reported that financial trauma is impacting some 68% of Americans and silently driving business owners' short and long-term decision-making due to internalized “money stories” playing in the background.

• A trauma-informed approach means recognising the widespread impact of trauma, understanding how it influences behavior, and designing supports, processes, environments and services that do not re-traumatise, but instead foster safety, resilience, healing, and empowerment. One widely used definition is from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA): “A program, organization, or system that realises the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery; recognises the signs and symptoms of trauma; responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; and seeks to actively resist re-traumatisation.” Fairfax County+2National Council for Mental Wellbeing+2

• For business-support ecosystems and funders, applying a trauma-informed lens can mean: educating yourself and your team on the topic, adapting how you engage clients/entrepreneurs (rather than expecting them to adapt to you); designing processes (application, due diligence, reporting) that are less triggering; incorporating wellness and mental-health readiness into enterprise development; recognising the relational and trust dimension; building safe spaces for entrepreneurs to show up not just with “success narrative” but with complexity, setbacks, mental health, and resilience.

• From a systems view, trauma-informed business support matters because it aligns with equity and inclusion goals: it helps reduce structural barriers, meets entrepreneurs “where they are,” and fosters deeper resilience, which is especially important in high-stress, undercapitalised entrepreneurial contexts.

"How we show up in business is a reflection of how we’re showing up within ourselves. The unhealed parts of us, our fears, our scarcity, our past experiences, don’t disappear when we walk into work; they drive how we lead, build teams, and make decisions. When we begin to recognize how trauma shows up in us personally, we open the door to leading with more empathy, clarity, and courage. That awareness isn’t just personal healing…it’s a business advantage.”

-Tamika Goode-Otis, Founder & Principal KABOD Consulting Group, LLC

In short, business support that is trauma-informed isn’t a soft add-on — it’s a strategic differentiator, particularly if you’re working with diverse entrepreneurs, innovation ecosystems, or social equity-oriented funds and foundations.

Who is Doing It

Several organisations and initiatives provide clear examples of trauma-informed approaches in business or entrepreneurship ecosystems (or very closely aligned). Here are a few:

• Survivor Ventures — Their program “Survivors to Entrepreneurs (S2E)” supports survivors of human trafficking with trauma-informed, wrap-around business support (entrepreneurship mentorship, job coaching, small business incubation).

  
  

• Corra Foundation — Though more in the philanthropy/grant-making realm, Corra has worked explicitly on “trauma-informed grant-making” (which is adjacent to business support). They describe how they changed panels, how they pay lived-experience participants, how they changed timelines and funding durations, how they created safe spaces for decision-making.

• CareOregon — A health/community benefit organisation that describes using trauma-informed care and services in its high-acuity behavioural-health work, and has extended that thinking into network-based support of behavioural health providers, with implications for business/service models.

• While not strictly “business support”, many human-services and community-development initiatives demonstrate the model: e.g., National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) supports organisations and systems to become trauma-informed.

These examples show that the methodology is real, and that there are organisations actively applying trauma-informed practices. But there is still a gap in widely-adopted business-accelerator or small-business ecosystems explicitly framing themselves as “trauma-informed.”

Who is Funding It

Understanding how trauma-informed work is funded helps you design business-support programs and link entrepreneurs to resources. The grantee that I funded was able to attract additional funding from funders outside of her region due to the unique approach and results her organization generated from the initial grant. Key funding streams include:

• Government grants and public funding: For example, a county program in Fairfax County (VA) created a “Trauma-Informed Spaces Grant Program” through ARPA funds to support community-based organisations that experienced economic impact and were building trauma-informed supports.

  
  

• Foundations and private philanthropy: The concept of trauma-informed grant-making is described as an emerging best practice. For example, the organisation GMA Foundations describes how funders can incorporate a “trauma lens into grant-making.”

  
  

• Diverse revenue/financing models: A white paper on “Financing Trauma-Informed Primary Care” outlines how services can use public insurance (Medicaid, Medicare), commercial insurance, self-pay, grants, private philanthropy, and alternative payment models.

  
  

• Targeted economic empowerment funding: For example, smaller grants to survivors of domestic violence for economic/entrepreneurship empowerment are in place (see Jane Doe Inc. mini-grants program)

Takeaways for Business-Support Ecosystems

When you design trauma-informed business support, you can seek funding from:

• Economic empowerment/entrepreneurship funds that emphasise underserved or equity populations.

  
  

• Workforce development/job training funds (because trauma-informed support often overlaps with workforce readiness).

  
  

• Mental-health/wellness/behavioral-health funding streams (if your support integrates wellness aspects).

  
  

• Local government/ARPA-type funds aimed at social resiliency, community recovery post-COVID, etc.

  
  

• Foundations interested in equity, inclusive entrepreneurship, and new models and impact metrics of business support.

In our next blog post we will give actionable steps and tips to build or embed trauma-informed business support within your ecosystem.