In a nutshell, the federal government built temporary tax incentives into the CARES Act to urge Americans to make charitable contributions in 2020 and support our neighbors. For those who are in a position to give or do impact investing, there’s no time like the present.
Hear directly from the 2020 cohort fellows— Andrew Moncada, Essence Rodriguez, Louise Jordan, Crystal Sevilla, and Benson Ochira—about their career goals and their experiences thus far changing the face and flow of finance.
![San Diego Foundation Sends First $1.5 Million To Nonprofits Hit By COVID-19 [KPBS]](https://www.missiondrivenfinance.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/cafe-KPBS-story-800x500.jpg)
The first $1.5 million in loans from The San Diego Foundation’s small business and nonprofit program have gone out to eight local organizations, the foundation announced Tuesday, part of a $5 million fund for organizations impacted by COVID-19.
San Diego-based impact investment fund manager Mission Driven Finance has deployed $1.5M in loans to San Diego County nonprofits that have been impacted by COVID-19, thanks to $5M in seed funding from The San Diego Foundation as part of the San Diego County COVID-19 Small Business & Nonprofit Loan Program.
![San Diego County expands small business loan program to include businesses in cities [The San Diego Union-Tribune]](https://www.missiondrivenfinance.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SD-County-admin-building-800x500.jpg)
“San Diego County supervisors unanimously agreed Tuesday to expand the county’s $5 million small business loan COVID relief program regionwide to small businesses operating in cities,” The San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
We’re honored to share that David—along with early care and education expert Laura Kohn and community finance fellow Essence Rodriguez—has joined the 2020 cohort of the Promising Ventures Fellowship to explore using real estate and finance to improve access to quality early child care.
As a financial services firm, we must address long-held racist beliefs in the world of finance and commit to doing better. Here’s how we are working on it.
The inaugural cohort of Community Finance Fellows—Louise Jordan, Andrew Moncada, Benson Ochira, Essence Rodriguez, Crystal Sevilla— impress and inspire us every day and it’s not fair to keep their wisdom to ourselves. So we invited them to share their thoughts on how finance can invoke true racial and economic justice. The fellows’ perspectives and lived experiences give us invaluable insight into how we can use finance as a tool for real impact.
WES Mariam Assefa Fund, one of the visionary supporters of the Community Finance Fellowship, spotlights Mission Driven Finance.
The San Diego County COVID-19 Small Business & Nonprofit Loan Program (SBNLP) is designed to help the small businesses and nonprofits at the heart of our community get back on track.
While sheltering-in-place during a pandemic, we welcomed five Community Finance Fellows to our team in March to begin learning in a virtual environment: Louise Jordan, a renewed San Diegan with a legal background who moved back from Virginia to join us; Andrew Moncada, a financial analyst from Florida who wants to run his own impact investment firm one day; Benson Ochira, a refugee from Uganda with a degree in business management; Essence Rodriguez, an undergrad research fellow with the U.S. Immigration Policy Center; and Crystal Sevilla, an executive assistant from San Diego with a deep interest in economics and finance. See how they are learning during a pandemic.
The Way Back uses trauma-informed care in its client activities—clinical groups, education groups, mindfulness meditation, relapse prevention groups, codependency groups, anger management, emotional regulation, and individual psychotherapy. “We are training men to be better fathers, better husbands, better employees, to stay out of prison, to work, to communicate,” says The Way Back Executive Director Chris Thomas, a licensed therapist who has been sober for 25 years. “Men are an important part of family structure, and addiction is a family disease.”
Mission Driven Finance has been named as an Emerging Impact Manager in ImpactAssets’ IA50 2020, a publicly available, online database for impact investors, family offices, financial advisors and institutional investors that features a diversified listing of private capital fund managers that deliver social and environmental impact as well as financial returns.
By focusing on underinvested communities, the Community Finance Fellowship is an accessible on-ramp for a traditionally inaccessible sector.
