By Ian Wiesner, Director, Business Development
Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) have been bringing investment to Detroit for more than two decades. The mission-driven approach and unique tools that CDFIs bring to the market have played a critical role in the development of new housing and community facilities like grocery stores and schools in the city.
By Candace Robinson, Director, Strategy for Aging in Community, Capital Impact Partners, and Amy Herr, Director, Health Policy, West Health Policy Center
This blog originally appeared as a Fast Fact on the Build Healthy Places blog. Read the original blog here.
Fact:
On average, only 35 affordable rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households (households that earn 30 percent of the median income). Twenty-six percent of extremely low-income renters are seniors.
By Elizabeth Luther, Detroit Program Manager
Between 2000 and 2013, Detroit lost one-quarter of its population—more than 244,000 residents. When the city filed for bankruptcy in July 2013, the exodus continued, with residents leaving the city in record numbers. Vacant homes and shuttered businesses meant that those who remained had little support and far fewer employment prospects to keep themselves and their communities going.
Alaina Beverly has spent her career championing and empowering underserved communities and working with stakeholders to work toward justice and opportunity for all. She started her career as a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later worked in the Obama Administration supporting civic engagement in communities. Her expertise as a lawyer and civic organizer for communities of color nationwide aligns strongly with our work, which is why we are honored to have her as a board member.
By Ashlee Cunningham, Detroit Housing & Community Development Specialist
Long before Midtown Detroit—or Cass Corridor, as 39-year-old Wayne State University graduate and artist Rachel Barker prefers to call it—was booming with aesthetically pleasing coffee shops, hip art galleries and expensive retail stores, it was the neighborhood where Barker found the first apartment that she called home.
The challenges of mass incarceration and poverty are all too often intertwined in the U.S. Seventy million Americans currently have an arrest or conviction record and that number is growing by the day. These “returning citizens” face a shocking number of barriers upon re-entry that often prevent them from securing jobs, housing, education, business loans, and other keys to social and economic security.
This summer, Capital Impact Partners’ Director of Impact Strategy Ron Kelly joined Mission: Launch’s President & Executive Director Laurin Leonard to discuss the “unlikely” partnership between these two organizations to address this important issue.
In early 2018, the organizations hosted a convening on the role that financial institutions can play in improving the financial stability and prosperity of individuals living with criminal records, or returning citizens, in the Washington, D.C. area. It brought together banks, nonprofits, and government agencies to think through the barriers that returning citizens face, how those impact them financially, and what these various actors can do to create an environment in which returning citizens can thrive.
How did this partnership come about? Listen to the podcast and find out!
In this podcast episode of Money + Meaning, Lindsay Smalling interviews Laurin Leonard and Ron Kelly of Capital Impact about this challenge and their efforts to create opportunities for returning citizens that could create pathways to financial stability for millions of Americans.
Mission:Launch is an organization dedicated to improving the financial health and social outcomes for Americans with arrest or conviction records. Capital Impact Partners is a Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) that has been a leader in the impact investing space for decades. These two unlikely allies have partnered to find ways to move a third of our population out of — in the words of Mission:Launch Co-founder Laurin (Hodge) Leonard — “perpetual disenfranchisement and an invisible life sentence.” Together, they are working to raise awareness among CDFIs and traditional banks of how they can tear down barriers that are locking people with arrest and conviction records out of economic opportunities.
This blog post originally appeared on the Social Capital Market (SOCAP) website. For the original post, please visit this website.
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.
By Lauren Counts, Senior Director, Strategy, Innovation, and Impact Management
Mission-driven organizations face down some of the world’s biggest challenges – systemic poverty, inequality, and racial inequity, to name a few – as a matter of business practice. Certainly these are not easy issues to tackle; they require bold thinking and brave action in order to create transformative change for those underserved communities that experience these inequities.
By Candace Robinson, Director, Strategy for Aging in Community, Capital Impact Partners, and Amy Herr, Director, Health Policy, West Health Policy Center
This blog originally appeared as a Fast Fact on the Build Healthy Places blog. Read the original blog here.
Fact
Currently, more than half (51 percent) of individuals aged 75 and older live alone. The risk of death for people who are socially isolated is as great as the risk of death for people who smoke 15 cigarettes a day, according to a study funded by Brigham
Young University.
By Candace Robinson, Director, Strategy for Aging in Community, Capital Impact Partners, and Amy Herr, Director, Health Policy, West Health Policy Center
This blog originally appeared as a Fast Fact on the Build Healthy Places blog. Read the original blog here.
Fact
For the first time in U.S. history, older adults are projected to outnumber children by 2035. Increasing life expectancy, a declining birth rate, and the aging of the baby boom generation will dramatically increase the number and proportion of the U.S. population over the age of 65.
