Small Business Administration head Karen Mills kicked off National Small Business Week yesterday in Washington by celebrating some small business success stories from around the country.  And she stressed that, while many business owners are still struggling to find open channels of credit, the SBA has had some success in unfreezing credit lines and getting money to business owners.  Mills:

18 months ago, lending was completely frozen and credit lines were cut. Today, conventional small business lending is still very tight, but the SBA has helped fill the gap in credit.

Specifically, the raised guarantee and lowered fees from the Recovery Act have helped engineer a turnaround in our top two lending programs – 7(a) and 504. We’re back at pre-recession levels.

Altogether, we’ve taken about $680 million in taxpayer dollars… and turned it into more than $27 billion in lending support for about 63,000 Recovery loans. That’s nearly double our weekly loan volume compared to the weeks before it passed.

Mills also shared this slide, to illustrate the turnaround in lending since 2008:

Read Mills's speech here.  

For more on National Small Business Week, click here.