With a new collaborative investment, the area near Normal Heights and City Heights is one step closer to having more affordable housing. A hundred and ninety affordable housing units are planned for the nearly 20,000-square-foot piece of land next to the City Heights Transit Plaza, at the corner of El Cajon Boulevard and 40th Street.
Through a combination of impact-first finance, a coalition of dedicated philanthropic and impact investors, and an incredible organization advocating for immigrant dignity, 100 people are now free from immigrant prison.
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.
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.
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.
Recently, our Co-founder and Chief Community Officer Lauren Grattan, and Freedom for Immigrants Co-founder and Co-executive Director Christina Mansfield spoke with Morgan Simon of Candide Group in Forbes.com to discuss why they launched the Freedom100 Fund—and how it’s a vital tool for investors and activists to join the fight for immigrant freedom.
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.”
We’re sharing with you—our community—the same message for small businesses and nonprofits that we provided to our active borrowers. During this challenging time, stay true to your values and support each other. None of us will come out of this unchanged. See our COVID-19 resources for small businesses and nonprofits.
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.
A year ago, we were certified as a B Corporation. This month we were named as one of the Best For The World for our incredible customers—the changemaking companies we support. We rank in the top 10% of all 3,000+ B Corps around the world for the positive impact we make together with our customers!
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.
We had the honor of hanging out with inspiring women leading change during our Women Build the Future breakfast with San Diego Habitat for Humanity.
“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
Mission Driven Finance, Civic San Diego, and a local foundation unlock $12MM for nonprofit Access Youth Academy’s facility in Southeast San Diego.
