Community Investing News

Most startups fund their earliest days with money from friends and family, as well as angel investors. But what if your friends and family are not wealthy—and, in fact, are more on the struggling side of the equation? That’s the stark reality for many entrepreneurs, especially those from diverse backgrounds. The average white household has […]

In this age of wealth inequality, runaway development and gentrification, it’s easy for communities to feel powerless in the face of rapid change. Lynn Smith founded Buy The Block, a real estate crowdfunding portal and the first portal that is African American-owned, to help change that dynamic. Smith (pictured above) has invested in real estate since […]

Impact Investing & ESG Why Foundations Should Step Up their Game in Impact Investing There’s a growing number of people in the world of social entrepreneurship focused on not just building impact-oriented companies, but on creating a more fundamental systemic change. Impact Investment: Private Equity Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Hasn’t Been Impact investing […]

TriLinc celebrates 5 years of its impact investing strategy: Private Debt Plus®. The post TriLinc Celebrates 5 Years of Impact Investing appeared first on TriLinc.

Women are creating more businesses than their male counterparts, and African American and Latina women are driving that trend. However, women, especially non-white women, still lag in  revenue and job creation. Those are some of the top line findings from the 2018 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report, an annual report commissioned by American Express and prepared […]

Impact Investing & ESG To Invest for Impact, We Need to Start by Agreeing What ‘Impact’ Means  Michele Giddens, partner at Bridges Fund Management, explains how the Impact Management Project is the first sector-wide effort to produce a commonly-recognized convention for analyzing and talking about impact. State of the Small & Growing Business Sector- 2017 […]

Bonny Moellenbrock, LOCUS’ advisor, shares insights on how Community Development Loan Funds (CDLFs) can be used for impact investing. This spring, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and investment firm Symbiotics released The Financial Performance of Impact Investing Through Private Debt, the latest in a series of reports benchmarking impact investing opportunities in different asset […]

Impact Investing & ESG The Rise of ESG & Sustainable Governance in Blockchain A changing of the guard is taking place right now, as the Baby Boomer generation moves into retirement and Millennials form a growing proportion of total capital investments. The Rise of B Corps Highlights the Emergence of a New Way of Doing […]

Investment crowdfunding may finally get the fixes that advocates have long called for. On Wednesday, a sweeping collection of bipartisan bills known collectively as the JOBS Act 3.0 passed the House of Representatives with broad support. The package now moves to the Senate. Sponsored by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Ranking […]

Ms. Jessie Ball’s fortunes changed in 1920. It was during this year that Jessie, having returned to her childhood home in the Northern Neck of Virginia, reconnected with a long-time friend, Mr. Alfred I. duPont – of the distinguished duPont Family. Shortly thereafter, the two wed, and Jessie adopted the name that would become associated […]

Impact Investing & ESG 5 Things About Sustainable Investing in the First Half of 2018 Five key takeaways from sustainable investing in the first half of 2018. Legendary Investor’s Embrace of Sustainable Investing is New, but the Movement Isn’t Earlier this month, hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones made headlines across the financial press with […]

Long before the JOBS Act and state-specific laws legalized investment crowdfunding, there was the direct public offering, or DPO, a sort of do-it-yourself IPO. Kassandra Mayhew of Cutting Edge Capital recently talked to Real Pickles cofounder Addie Rose Holland (pictured at left) about how a DPO helped the Greenfield, MA company transition to a worker-owned cooperative and preserve its […]

Having trouble keeping up with the latest developments in the world of impact investing? Allow us to help. We dove into the weeds of four of the field’s most notable recent studies, extracting the most interesting findings for you. Some of the key themes involve the mainstreaming of impact investing, the vital role that women […]

Impact Investing & ESG Money Managers are Flocking to a $23 Trillion Investing Strategy that Morgan Stanley Says is Ready to Take Off Environmental, social, and governance investing — also known as ESG — has exploded in popularity, with roughly $23 trillion being invested with at least a partial ESG mandate. Investors are Right to […]

Impact Investing & ESG Can Impact Investing Avoid the Failures of Microfinance? The impact investment industry is growing rapidly. In 2010, J.P Morgan projected up to $1T in investment would be deployed this decade — which would make impact investing twice the size of official development aid to the world’s less develop countries. Getting Asia […]

Crowdfunding success is often measured by the number of campaigns meeting their funding targets and the dollars raised. But what about the investor side of the equation? It’s still very early, and there are no industry-wide performance metrics that measure investor returns. But there are inklings. Some investment crowdfunding portals have lately taken to reporting […]

Two years ago today, Regulation Crowdfunding went into effect with a promise to transform the investment landscape for entrepreneurs as well as investors. So how’s it working out? In the first two years, 910 businesses have used the Regulation Crowdfunding exemption (aka Title III of the JOBS Act) which allows them to raise up to […]

Impact Investing & ESG How Socially Responsible Investing Can Help You Avoid Catastrophic Drops within Your Portfolio Martin Kremenstein, head of retirement and ETF solutions at Nuveen, explains how ESG metrics serve as an indicator of quality and can be used as a risk management tool. ESG Reins in Volatility after Rough Start Critics of […]

Across the United States, LOCUS estimates that $9 trillion will transfer from one generation to the next by 2029. When you dig into the numbers, it’s clear that communities – rural and urban, wealthy and poor – have assets. The challenge for community philanthropy is how to turn that wealth into what a community really […]

It was concern for Hawaii’s environment, economy and farming system that inspired Brett Jacobson to launch Hawaiian Ola, a maker of healthy beverages, in 2012. Jacobson, a farmer who previously ran a biofuel company, wanted to start a business that could help Hawaii’s struggling farmers—the average farmer in makes about $15,000 a year, according to the […]

Impact investors are increasingly gravitating to place-based investing. The latest example: a new impact investing fund in Canada that will focus on loans to social and environmental enterprises in Southwestern Ontario. The VERGE Breakthrough Fund, as it is called, also underscores the willingness of impact investors to experiment with new approaches. The fund was created by VERGE […]

By Travis Green Solutions Consultant, LOCUS Impact Investing The staff of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation(AAACF) has taken to calling their foundation “a community impact engine” where the whole staff – finance, administration, development, program – works in service of impact. “It’s a virtuous cycle… create impact, build endowment, create more impact, build more […]

The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) released its Roadmap for the Future of Impact Investing: Reshaping Financial Markets. Commenced at the ten-year anniversary of the coining of the term impact investing, the Roadmap assesses industry progress to date, presents a vision for the financial markets, and outlines 18 specific actions needed to exponentially enhance the […]

When Guerrilla Development opened up crowdfunding for its latest project, a two-building mixed-use development called Jolene’s First Cousin, the team figured there would be strong demand. An earlier project, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell (they have a penchant for quirky names to go along with their iconoclastic buildings), raised $1.5 million from 121 investors in eight months, using Regulation A. […]

Impact Investing & ESG Demystifying Impact Investing for Newcomers – and the Rest of Us Three impact fund managers break it down during a live panel at Liquidnet’s New York office How to Invest With a Conscience (and Still Make Money) Jean Case, the chief executive of the Case Foundation, is a leader in impact […]

Investment crowdfunding is beginning to fulfill its promise of democratizing investment and access to capital. While women entrepreneurs are still outnumbered by men on most crowdfunding sites, their ranks are steadily growing. At Republic, a Regulation Crowdfunding portal that emphasizes women-owned ventures, 8 out of 13 businesses currently raising capital are women-owned. And on investibule, a platform […]

Since 2015, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has advocated for tax incentives for those who invest in low-income communities, recognizing that the benefits from the economic recovery have largely bypassed those communities. Their efforts were rewarded when their proposed opportunity zone program was included as Subchapter Z of the 2017 tax law overhaul that was […]

Microlender Grameen America is upping its game in impact investing. The U.S.-based microfinance organization marked its ten-year anniversary last month by announcing a new $11 million impact investing fund, the first in what it said will be a series of new funds. Called the Social Business Fund, it’s aimed at providing additional money to women entrepreneurs […]

Two years ago, Baltimore Community Foundation was working to build race equity into its selection process for investment managers when a question was raised. “We asked, ‘Why are we not considering local impact investing that could specifically address race equity and lack of access to capital for communities that have been shut out of wealth opportunities for […]

It’s time for a crowdfunding update. Regulation Crowdfunding closed out its second calendar year, and the folks at Crowdfund Capital Advisors (CCA) analyzed the data recently in a report for the S.E.C. While still in its infancy, the investment crowdfunding market is growing at a fast clip and represents a viable capital-raising alternative for small and mid-sized […]