Hear from peer funders and investors on lessons learned in providing entrepreneurship funding and technical assistance for small businesses. Leave with practical strategies that you can explore and implement in your post-COVID resiliency funding.
We are proud to announce that the first cohort of the Community Finance Fellowship—Louise Jordan, Benson Ochira, Andrew Moncada, Essence Rodriguez, and Crystal Sevilla—is graduating.
Marking two major milestones, we are celebrating our fifth anniversary this month as well as having disbursed $11 million in assets to the small businesses and nonprofits dedicated to social change in the region.
One of the youngest people to support Mission Driven Finance portfolio companies, Rachel Lozano Castro leaned into her passion and know-how to organize a shared donor-advised fund (DAF) with her family that supports our flagship place-based strategy Advance.
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.
WES Mariam Assefa Fund, one of the visionary supporters of the Community Finance Fellowship, highlighted Mission Driven Finance and the fellowship in this Insights post.
The COVID-19 crisis has forced small businesses and nonprofits around the world, including our Advance borrowers, to forget business as usual and respond in creative ways to best serve their community and survive—quickly. From delivering essential household goods and locally sourced food to staying connected with families by livestreaming nature walks, these businesses and organizations demonstrate the flexibility, resilience, and heart that make small businesses critical for communities to thrive.
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.”
In our quest to increase economic opportunity for underestimated groups, we knew we’d want to emphasize supporting women and girls. With a diverse and largely female team, empowering more women has always felt natural to us. We’ve long wanted to connect the resources and needs of our community in new intentional ways that make a real impact on gender inequality.
With 2019 officially behind us, our team took a second to celebrate our favorite wins, which helps us to also look forward and set goals for 2020.
Cutting Edge Capital spoke with Mission Driven Finance Co-founders Lauren Grattan and David Lynn to talk about our mission, and how our community-first perspective guides us to find investment opportunities.
Our flexible, personalized financing approach allowed us to provide Friends of Willow Tree a $100,000 bridge loan that they used for expenses at the start of the school year, keeping the program affordable and accessible for their majority low-income students.
The idea for Advance came from speaking with people who wanted to invest in their communities and the issues that they cared about but didn’t know how.
When we first met Kris Schlesser, founder of LuckyBolt, he was six years into a quest to make the perfect breakfast burrito easily accessible to professionals on the go, and had been financing the business with high-interest credit cards and microloans.
David and Lauren spent National Small Business Week on the road in New York; Columbus, Ohio; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They spoke with stakeholders from different walks of life who all recognize the transformative power of small business from varied angles.
“I have managed to invest…but one of the proudest things I have been able to do is pay for all of the school fees for my 7 children.”
—Seraphine, artisan
Our conversation with NPR about discrepancies in access to capital for lower-income communities and how we can level the playing field.
Mission Driven Finance, Civic San Diego, and a local foundation unlock $12MM for nonprofit Access Youth Academy’s facility in Southeast San Diego.
