Summer 2013
Issue #174
Impact Investing: Will It Bring New Money to Old Problems?
This issue has been designed to introduce you — policymaker, advocate, or practitioner working to improve distressed communities and empower low-income families — to the field of impact investing and to help you understand how such investment might work, how it might affect your work, and what you should do to take advantage of these new sources of capital. Going beyond our readership, it is also designed to introduce the potential for impact investing domestically in the community development world to a broader audience of potential investors, showing them what community development is and how it would benefit from their investments.
“Money Must Serve, Not Rule!”
In November 2013, Morgan Stanley launched its Institute for Sustainable Investing and announced that within five years it was aiming to manage $10 billion in client assets targeted to “impact […]
Occupy Wall Street: A New Wave of Fair Housing Activism?
Is there a new community reinvestment movement afoot?
Layers of Opportunity
Land of Opportunity Interactive, landofopportunityinteractive.com
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.
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.
Letting the Dollars Land
To realize the promise of community investment, the capacity of specific places to absorb available capital needs to grow.
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 Role of Government in Impact Investing
Impact investing may seem like a market-based concept, but government can and does support, enable, and participate in it many ways.
Measuring Blended Value
Tracking social return on investment is more complicated than measuring financial return. How do impact investors do it?
Two Structured Community Development Funds: A Peek at How They Work
The details, lessons, and impact of two innovative community development funds created by Enterprise Community Partners.
Small Dollars, Big Returns
So what can you make happen with a domestic impact investment anyway?
Doing Well by Doing Good
With a little knowledge and effort, investors of many kinds can work with financial advisers to learn how to match their investments with their values and build a meaningful portfolio with solid returns.
Impact Investing for Community Development
New sources of mission-driven private capital could step up to support community development where traditional sources of financing are withdrawing.
Too High to Pay
The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph Stiglitz. Norton & Company, Inc., June 2012, 448 pp. $27.95 (cloth).
Q: Are manufactured homes a bad form of affordable housing?
A: Not any more! There are many myths out there about manufactured (or “mobile”) homes, but in fact they can be a very important source of quality affordable housing…