Doing Well by Doing Good
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.
Small Dollars, Big Returns
So what can you make happen with a domestic impact investment anyway?
Measuring Blended Value
Tracking social return on investment is more complicated than measuring financial return. How do impact investors do it?
Preparing for Business as Unusual
An impact investment can move a nonprofit to a high level of effectiveness and stability—but only if it’s done its homework first.
The $15 Trillion Shift
“Investor apartheid” securities rules are keeping investment artificially blocked from the businesses with the most positive impact on communities— small, local ones.
What Is Philanthropic Equity? A Roundtable Discussion
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?
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 Impact Note
Enterprise Community Loan Fund created the Enterprise Community Impact Note in 2010 with the goal of raising $50 million from impact investors. By systematically...
Ground Leasing Without Tears
Editor’s note: There are two major legal mechanisms out there for making a privately owned housing unit permanently affordable: (1) a stewarding organization can...
Here’s How CDCs can Overcome the People-Based, Place-Based Gap
“Self interest generalized is community interest” — Kenneth Jones, Community Organizer
Throughout my experience in leading NeighborWorks America's Superstorm Sandy response, two critical aspects have...
You Put One Seed in the Ground, You Get Many in Return
The passing of two annual events: Thanksgiving, a time to celebrate the harvest and by extension with family, and Black Friday, an event that...
Our Financial Reform, Our Health
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., June 2012. 448 pp. $27.95 (Hardcover). Available on Amazon.
Pushing Back Against the Demolition Juggernaut
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.
Revitalization: Not Despite Us, But Because of Us
Low-income residents transform their complex into a community of choice through ownership—without importing higher-income neighbors
The Whole City’s Watching
A legacy of racial strife hangs over Little Rock, Arkansas, the city internationally known for the 1957 Central High School Crisis, in which an...
Jersey City: Lessons from Unequal Development
Across the water from Manhattan, this once working class city has experienced dramatic economic growth—but the rising tide did not lift all boats.
Lighting a Spark Between Energy Advocates and Community Development
Partnerships between utility companies and affordable rental housing owners are ripe for development, when the right switch is flipped.
Role-Playing for Energy Efficiency
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.
Maintaining a Bastion of Quality—and Affordability
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.
Community Land Trusts Have Renters Too
CLTs can and should include their renters, not just their homeowners, in governance and wealth-building.