Today BCI is excited to announce the launch of the BCI License Fund, which covers 90% of the costs associated with applying for a Street Vendor License under DC’s new vending laws! This $125,000 fund, made possible by generous individual donors, will help ensure vendors are able to afford the many costs of applying for licenses.
“With this $125,000 fund, we are giving DC’s smallest business owners a fighting chance to fulfill their dreams,” Geoff, BCI’s Legal & Technical Assistance Director, says of the fund. “We are doing our part to support street vendors. Now it is time for the Mayor’s executive agencies to do their part.”
Although the new law was passed in April 2023 and went fully into effect in October, vendors are just now beginning to see city agencies move to create a real pathway to compliance. The Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (DLCP) is responsible for creating a license application process that works, but vendors often find themselves tangled in red tape, unable to finish the license application process.
Many of DC’s agencies have a long and shameful history of providing services that are inaccessible to poor and working class street vendors due to language, literacy, and technology access issues, along with ineffective communication between agencies. You can read more about this in our new report, A Brief History of DC Street Vending which chronicles the history of street vendors fighting for recognition and legalization in DC, and the equally long history of DC Government’s regulatory repression and lack of support for one of the District’s oldest forms of entrepreneurship.
Since last summer, BCI has been pushing DLCP to cut through the red tape and create a series of pop-up clinics for DC Street Vendors. Today vendors are showing up to a clinic where financial need and barriers to tech, literacy and language access do not stand in their way. We hope this clinic is the first of many!
