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Community Wealth Blog

The National Housing Institute, publisher of the 30-plus year-old community development journal Shelterforce, is seeking an executive director. NHI is a 33 year old progressive national non-profit communications, advocacy, and research organization dedicated to providing resources and information to those advocating and organizing for, and/or creating and preserving affordable housing and thriving communities.

In early March 2008, about 530 charity and business leaders gathered in Boston for the 9th annual summit of the Social Enterprise Alliance. One topic discussed at the Summit was a proposal to create a low-profit, limited liability company, or L3C. As discussed previously in this blog, the L3C designation aims to increase the number of program-related investments, or PRI’s, that foundations make in social-purpose businesses by making those enterprises easier to find.

For the last 35 years, social entrepreneurs have created thousands of profitable businesses across diverse industries demonstrating that companies can “do well” while “doing good"… The current marketplace, however, is confusing and fragmented. Increasingly, everyone claims to be green, responsible, or sustainable, making it difficult to distinguish between “good” companies and “good” marketing.”

The National Housing Institute (NHI) published a significant new study on Shared Equity Homeownership by John Emmeus Davis of Burlington Associates, a community development consulting group with a focus on providing technical assistance for community land trusts.  This was the first study that brought together to the practice and policies of limited equity coops; deed-restricted housing; and community land trusts under the umbrella of shared equity homeownership, a term that John Davis coined. 

This past December, a conference organized by NeighborWorks America and NCB Capital Impact, an affiliate of NCB, the National Cooperative Bank, explored ways to “scale up” shared equity housing.  Additional event sponsors include:  Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored housing lender enterprise, the Ford Foundation, the National Housing Conference, American Sunrise Communities (a nonprofit group established in 2006 by former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros), and the National Community Land Trust Network.

The Innovation Network for Communities (INC) is a new national non-profit that seeks to develop and spread scalable innovations that transform the performance of community wealth building in such areas as education, energy, land use, transportation and workforce development. The start-up of INC is being supported with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

HousingPolicy.org a new resource developed by the Center for Housing Policy, the research arm of the National Housing Conference. The site provides government and business leaders, housing practitioners and advocates, and other interested individuals with timely and reliable information on successful policies that states and localities have adopted to expand the availability of homes for working families. 

A new report released by the Ottawa-based evaluation firm Social Research and Demonstration Corporation presents the 18-month results of learn$ave, a project designed to demonstrate how matched saving credits can encourage low-income adults to save in order to increase their human capital by participating in education or training, or starting a small business. The learn$ave project was conceived and implemented in 2000 by the Toronto-based nonprofit group, Social and Enterprise Development Innovations.

The National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations, an association whose membership includes 27 state, city and regional associations of community economic development associations, comprised of a network of 2,000 community development corporations, reports that ten states to date have passed legislation seeking to stem the tide of house foreclosures.

A little over a year ago, study commissioned by the University of Cincinnati titled “Community Interactions and Collaborations: Peer Institutional Study” was commissioned so that the University of Cincinnati could gauge the effectiveness of its own partnerships with local communities in an area known as Uptown.

The CDFI Fund, operated by the U.S. Department of Treasury, has, since its formation in 1994, played an important role in helping expanding the capacity of community development financial institutions to support community wealth building efforts through loans and equity investment.  In 1995, community development financial institutions — which include community development banks, credit unions, loan funds, venture funds, and micro-enterprise funds — had only about $4 billion in assets.

Introduced with little fanfare this past August, U.S. Senate Bill 1982, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act, coauthored by Senators Bernie Sanders (I) and Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont and cosponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) would authorize $100 million to create a U.S. Employee Ownership Bank within the Department of Treasury to provide loans, loan guarantees, technical assistance, and grants to expand employee ownership throughout the country.