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With a little knowledge and effort, investors of many kinds can work with financial advisors to learn how to match their investments with their values and build a meaningful portfolio with solid returns.

So what can you make happen with a domestic impact investment anyway?

Tracking social return on investment is more complicated than measuring financial return. How do impact investors do it?

An impact investment can move a nonprofit to a high level of effectiveness and stability—but only if it’s done its homework first.

“Investor apartheid” securities rules are keeping investment artificially blocked from the businesses with the most positive impact on communities— small, local ones.

As we prepared this issue, the term "philanthropic equity" kept surfacing. What is this new concept in philanthropy, and how is it different from both traditional grantmaking and program-related investments? In December we gathered a group of people from foundations and nonprofit intermediaries to explore the concept, its promises and pitfalls.

Who is at the table is important for both capital absorption and for the success of investments that get made. For example, in the...

Enterprise Community Loan Fund created the Enterprise Community Impact Note in 2010 with the goal of raising $50 million from impact investors. By systematically...

Memphis has knocked down all but one of its public housing complexes — and the housing authority assumed that a Choice Neighborhoods grant would be license to demolish the last one. But the community had a different idea.

Low-income residents transform their complex into a community of choice through ownership—without importing higher-income neighbors

A legacy of racial strife hangs over Little Rock, Arkansas, the city internationally known for the 1957 Central High School Crisis, in which an...

Across the water from Manhattan, this once working class city has experienced dramatic economic growth—but the rising tide did not lift all boats.

Partnerships between utility companies and affordable rental housing owners are ripe for development, when the right switch is flipped.

Connecticut experiments with a “megacommunity strategic simulation” to move the needle on residential energy efficiency—providing a look at a tool that could also apply to other community development challenges.

As afforable housing developments age, managing and preserving them, both physically and financially, while neighborhoods change and energy costs rise is becoming a key concern for community developers. Here’s how one group in Philly is taking that on.

CLTs can and should include their renters, not just their homeowners, in governance and wealth-building.

You can do good work even in a devastated city, but you have to build an alternate set of systems until the regular systems...

In a brilliant mash up of classic protest/beautifying strategies and state-of-the-art data management, artists are painting murals on abandoned Baltimore buildings  . . ....

Over the following pages, our authors explore many aspects of the community development field, and especially the role of community development corporations in it. But we know you have opinions too. To set the stage, last year we invited our readers to take a survey about how they understood the community development field and community development corporations. The survey was promoted through our weekly newsletter and social media. We got about a hundred responses.

For nearly half a century, community development corporations (CDCs) have been a tool of choice for organizing and implementing grassroots economic development programs. Emerging...