What is Community-Engaged Investing?
Our approach:
- Community input and partnerships that are too small for traditional investments.
- Improved decision making through deeper experience.
- Taking the time to negotiate a balance between the needs of capital providers and those seeking capital.
- We call this approach community-engaged investing because it is centered on a commitment to engage deeply with the communities that we are considering investing in.
- This engagement can take many forms, from explicit community ownership to partnering with community leaders to make investments and loans.
How We Implement Community-Engaged Investing
We look for investments with a few key characteristics:
- We make investments in funds or investment vehicles; we also consider investments to help build innovative lending or investing platforms at the community level. We typically do not make direct investments in operating companies.
- We make equity, debt, or hybrid investments.
- We seek investment returns appropriate for the financial risk we are taking.
- We invest throughout the United States, with a focus on communities and groups of people that do not have strong access to investment capital and those that are frequent targets of predatory lending or investing.
Contact Us
We appreciate hearing from:
- Those who are raising capital and think our approach might be a good fit for them;
- Those who are interested in investing their own capital with a similar approach and want to hear about how we do it; and
- Anyone else for whom our approach resonates.