In 2021, the Nourish DC Collaborative launched. This initiative supports the development of locally owned food businesses in Washington, D.C. communities to create vibrant, healthy neighborhoods.Nourish DC offers flexible loans, grants, and technical assistance to emerging and existing food businesses. While it serves the entire District, the collaborative focuses on supporting businesses in underestimated neighborhoods, which are more often owned or led by people of color.
Learn more about Nourish DC in our series. Read our blog about how technical assistance helps local food businesses create change.
In this series about community development lending, we aim to shed light on the diverse types of loans we offer at Capital Impact Partners, in the hope that it will provide the clarity our borrowers need to make an informed decision about applying for a community development loan. In this first installment, we delve into the essence of predevelopment loans, exploring what they are and how developers and community leaders can utilize them to bring their community-centered projects to life.
For anyone seeking to access lending for community development projects, understanding the different types of loans can be confusing.
At Capital Impact Partners, our commitment to fostering positive social impact drives us to support mission-aligned real estate developers and community development leaders with a range of flexible and affordable financing solutions.
Our community development lending offerings include predevelopment loans, real estate acquisition loans, construction loans, working capital loans, refinance loans, New Market Tax Credit (NMTC) leverage loans, and NMTC Qualified Low-Income Community Investment (QLICI) loans.
Our loan products are designed to help our borrowers achieve their goals and revitalize disinvested and underestimated communities, whether that constitutes developing or preserving affordable housing, creating jobs through a small business, or building the resilience of communities through access to health care, healthy food, and education.
In this series of blogs, we aim to shed light on the diverse types of loans we offer and explore their significance within the context of Capital Impact’s mission-driven financing, in the hope that it will provide clarity to help borrowers make informed decisions about applying for community development loans.
As a mission-driven developer, organization, or business looking into community development projects, you may be coming across language that might sound confusing and be challenging to understand. What is a CDFI? What is NMTC? What is LTV?
At Capital Impact Partners specifically, we offer flexible and affordable financing to a broad range of community development projects that deliver social impact, including community health centers, public charter schools, small businesses, cooperatives, healthy food retailers, affordable housing developments, and dignified aging facilities.
This glossary aims to demystify terms to help you navigate through our lending and programmatic services and offerings. Below you will find definitions of terms divided into the following thematic sections:
A strong local food ecosystem is essential to community health and economic prosperity — and in Washington, D.C., food deserts (areas without full-service grocery stores) in communities living with lower incomes are a significant factor in persistent food insecurity. Building local food businesses in underinvested communities can help support healthier neighborhoods, build economic prosperity, and increase access to high-quality jobs.
In 2021, Capital Impact Partners and the Government of the District of Columbia – along with a group of partners – launched the Nourish DC Collaborative, an initiative that supports the development of locally owned food businesses in D.C. communities to create vibrant, healthy neighborhoods.
Nourish DC offers flexible loans, grants, and technical assistance to emerging and existing food businesses. While it serves the entire District, the collaborative focuses on supporting businesses in underestimated neighborhoods, which are more often owned or led by people of color.
In this blog series, learn how food business owners are supporting their local communities and how technical assistance offered through Nourish DC helped them create change.
2022 is a special year for us at Capital Impact Partners as it marks our 40th anniversary. Four decades of leaning into helping people build communities of opportunity and developing pathways to success.
And while this is an exciting time for us as we embark on a new strategy under Momentus Capital, it is equally important to remember our roots as a champion for the cooperative movement.
By Mary Donnell, Program Manager, Michigan Good Food Fund
The grocery business is more competitive than ever. Even in normal times, much of the market share is taken up by the big-box players. But in the face of an unprecedented pandemic, local, independent grocers are focusing more deliberately on serving their communities, going out of their way to provide the goods that customers that they often know by name need. These grocers continue to fill an important niche in the landscape, often serving communities that do not see much investment from national chains with top-notch customer service and a focus on community development and local food.
Each year at Capital Impact Partners, we host an offsite, where all staff comes together to discuss successes and challenges in our work, and strategizes how we can continue to commit to the communities that we serve for greater social impact. This year, we held our offsite in our backyard: Washington, D.C. Being a mission-driven organization, we also sought to live out our values and be “of” our Washington, D.C. communities by getting out from behind our desks and serving those who need the most support.
Community engagement is a critical component to our work at Capital Impact, particularly as supporters of innovative community-based work. As a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), we support community-driven solutions that address the economic, social and racial justice barriers to success in our most underserved communities. Having first-hand knowledge of our communities and their needs helps us ensure that the projects we support have the outcomes our clients need.
With our home base in the Washington D.C. area, we strive to be present and engaged in the city’s communities. We work with organizations across the city to address various issues of structural exclusion and poverty. One of the areas that Capital Impact focuses on in this effort is healthy food access. Our strategic focus on health care and healthy food ties directly into our call to help communities achieve their full potential. We all need access to healthy food to thrive.
