Community Reinvestment Act: Ensuring the Financial Inclusion of Disinvested Communities
By Scott Berman, Director, Policy and Development The civil rights movement sought to end legalized racial discrimination against Black-American individuals and communities. For generations, Black Americans were systematically denied opportunities that their White counterparts experienced, from the ability to buy homes to accessing quality education…
Mission-driven Organizations Continue Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Work for Democracy and Equity (Video)
By Michelle Betton, Writer Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy is one of challenging the systems that keep people from benefitting from the democracy that this country is supposed to provide to all of its citizens. The people for whom he fought were often people of…
Centering Equity and Our Civil Rights Roots in 2020 and Beyond
By Ellis Carr, President & CEO Throughout the year, I have thought a lot about what equity means to me and the work we do at Capital Impact. At its most basic, dictionary.com defines “equity” as “the quality of being fair or impartial; fairness; impartiality.”…
We Are All Immigrants: Centering the Needs of Immigrant Families Ensures That All of Our Communities Thrive
By Jason Anderson, Senior Director, Communications As 2018 came to a close and many of us were focused on the holiday season, a headline came across the news wires that stopped us in our tracks. It had been reported that a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who…
Co-ops Have the Power to Transform the Future of Work and Racial Equity for Communities of Color
This blog originally appeared on the SOCAP19 blog. Click here to visit the original post. By Alison Powers, Manager, Cooperative and Community Initiatives Communities of color have experienced historical and structural disinvestment, which has led to an unprecedented racial wealth gap, historically low home ownership,…
Partnerships Hold Immense Power in Redeveloping Cities
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…
Affordable Housing Integrated with Social Services Creates a Lifeline for Older Adults to Age in Community
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…
Woodward Corridor Investment Fund: Fostering Sustainable Community Development in Detroit
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…
Amplifying Assets to Achieve Justice for Our Communities
By Ellis Carr, President and CEO, and Dan Varner, Board Chair Looking back at our journey through 2018, both as an organization and as a country, it is no surprise to us that Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year” was justice. The meaning and implications of…
Fostering Communities of Opportunity: Getting to Know Alaina Beverly, Capital Impact Board Member
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…
Stay Midtown: Expanding Affordable Housing while Reducing Displacement of Detroit Residents
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…
Innovation in Practice: How Capital Impact Transforms Values into Equitable, Inclusive Communities
By Lauren Counts, Senior Director, Strategy, Innovation, and Impact Management Innovation is an important tool for mission-driven organizations as they work within their communities to address issues of social, racial, and economic justice. Traditional thinking will not solve the problems that communities across the country experience…
Leaving Communities Behind: Examining Financial Vulnerability for Black Families
By Olivia Rebanal, Director, Inclusive Food Systems Despite positive headlines about the American economy, financial vulnerability is a reality for many people. This was brought into sharp focus during the government shutdown Communities rallied around their members and organizations provided support, but it became clear that…
How the Civil Rights Movement Gave Rise to Community Health Centers
By Michelle Betton, Writer With thousands in communities across the country, community health centers (CHCs) seem like a long-standing part of the national health care system. However, the origins of CHCs are relatively recent, born out of civil rights struggles that started 10,000 miles away.…
Reimagining Opportunity: Partnering for Economic Justice for Returning Citizens
This blog post originally appeared on the SOCAP website. For the original post, please visit this website. 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…
Reflections on 1968: Fostering Equity and Justice in 2018 and Beyond
By Ellis Carr, President and CEO This has been a year of reflection and introspection for me. In 2017, Capital Impact Partners, a national Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), had its best year since our founding in the early 1980s. We implemented new programs and…
Living Our Values Within Our Communities: A Photo Essay
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…
Innovation as Culture: How Capital Impact Channels Its Values to Create Communities of Opportunity
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…
Bridging Health Care and Services Promotes Social Connectedness Crucial for Older Adult Health
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…
Integrated Services Create Opportunity for Investment in Healthy Aging in Place
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…
Unlocking Pathways to Social and Racial Justice Nationwide
By Ellis Carr, President and CEO, and Rosemary Mahoney, Board Chair We believe everyone deserves a voice and economic pathways that allow them to shape their own futures. We believe that a community’s voice and economic opportunities can be strengthened with the right tools. Our objective…
Capital Impact Honors Rosemary Mahoney and Paul Bradley, New Inductees into the Cooperative Hall of Fame
By Alison Powers, Program Officer, Strategy, Innovation & Impact So many qualities define the life of a Cooperative Hall of Fame hero. Conviction and focus. Vision and persistence. Innovation and leadership. All contributing to a life dedicated to cooperative development and shared prosperity. These characteristics…
The Financial Community Has a Role to Play in Improving the Economic Mobility of Returning Citizens
By Ronald Kelly, Director, Impact Strategies “3. 7. 8. 2. 4. 0. 3. 7. The first thing that happens when you go to prison, they take away your name, and from that moment forward, you’re that number: Hodge, 37824037. It’s the beginning of the dehumanizing…
Getting to Know Diane Borradaile, Capital Impact’s New Chief Lending Officer
Diane Borradaile recently joined Capital Impact as its new Chief Lending Officer. She leads her team to support Capital Impact’s mission to empower communities to break barriers to success by facilitating loan transactions for health care centers, charter schools, affordable housing, healthy food projects, and…
Innovative Financing Expands Care for California’s Underserved Communities
By Nicole Boone, Business Development Officer Boyle Heights is a bustling Latino neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles with a history dating back before the Mexican-American War. However, it’s the pressures of the present day that weigh heavily here. Approximately 66 percent of the…
$2.5 Billion Milestone Only Makes Our Commitment to Underserved Communities Stronger
By Virginie Arnaud LePape, Senior Director, Lending In 1982, Capital Impact was created with a single focus – support the development of cooperatives in underserved communities. Charter schools create opportunities for innovation that drive academic success for students in underserved communities.…
When Disaster Strikes, Health Clinics Come to the Rescue
By Will Robison, Senior Loan Officer As wildfires burned through California’s Napa and Sonoma Counties in late 2017, Sandy Cesario was forced to evacuate her home and all she knew. Like many of the 5,000 residents of her small Calistoga town, she took refuge at one…
Diverse by Design: Charter School Integration Leads to Growing Academic Success
By Emilie Linick, Senior Loan Officer Equitable access to education provides all children with the chance to live up to their full potential and lead choice-filled lives. With racial and socio-economic inequity growing across the nation, high-quality education is crucial to giving students from low-income…
What is a CDFI?
By Michelle Betton, Writer Across the country, unemployment numbers are down and the news talks of economic recovery and the booming stock market. Outside of that news, however, are many people who are still struggling to achieve equal opportunity and prosperity with the rest of…
Expanding Equity for Underserved Communities in 2017 and Beyond
By Ellis Carr, President and CEO This year has been a whirlwind for our country and for Capital Impact Partners. For all the headlines of stock market records and rising incomes, the reality is that too many of us across America are struggling. People of…
