At Capital Impact, we’re committed to building stronger communities. While we do this primarily through financing, we also recognize the importance of giving back to the communities in which we live and work.
Capital Impact staff celebrate our commitment to our communities throughout the year with individual contributions and volunteer activities. An annual volunteer event has also been part of Capital Impact’s summer all-staff retreat. This year we took our retreat to Detroit, MI, where we visited several of our project sites and learned more about our place-based strategy in the city.
Driven by another year of strong lending, Capital Impact ended 2015 with a solid financial position. The organization’s overall portfolio increased by $22 million or 11 percent. This growth was matched with continued strong credit performance, as our delinquency rate was just 0.4 percent. Once again, our focus on financial strength and social impact was rewarded with AERIS’ highest possible rating of AAA+1. This honor pleases us greatly.
Top-line revenue continued to grow as well. Net income rose by $11 million—a year-over-year increase of 213 percent. Net assets saw an expected decline as a result of launching our Green House and Cornerstone Partnership programs and the accompanied grant revenue that was used to fund those activities.
At Capital Impact Partners we put money to work, focusing our efforts on the best ways to use dollars to achieve powerful outcomes. Our lending work at Capital Impact Partners in 2015 increased more than 17 percent above our 2014 level—a success that we celebrate in the present as we look ahead to new levels of accomplishment. This level of lending volume is a source of strength as it supports our organization financially while simultaneously reinforcing communities with increased access to critical housing, services and employment opportunities.
As Capital Impact’s new CEO, I am incredibly excited to take this opportunity to both look back at 2015 and to expound on our new five-year vision to 2020.
Over the past year, we continued to build upon the organization’s strong financial position, deep partnerships, and innovative product development. We provided ongoing leadership in the health care space, helped a number of charter schools expand their educational offerings, and saw several of our projects come online across Detroit. We also launched two new lending initiatives that will expand access to healthy foods and support age-friendly communities.
As I think about my 32 years with Capital Impact Partners, I am overwhelmed when I consider the thousands of stakeholders that have made contributions to our work of helping people and communities across the country reach their highest potential.
This army of people and organizations, all part of the ongoing and thriving community development finance sector, includes partners who have worked shoulder-to-shoulder with us; investors whose capital participation helped us stand up a strategy that continues to generate high impact outcomes; foundations whose contributions increase our capacity and enable transactions that otherwise would not be possible; and our many board members whose selfless contribution of their time and talent helped to guide us in our endeavor. In my mind, they are our real heroes.
Since Benjamin Franklin launched the first mutual fire insurance company in 1752, the cooperative sector has seen waves of success in the United States. Dairy and cheese coops were first organized in the early 1800s, and other agricultural cooperatives followed. By the Great Depression, cooperative businesses were developing in urban and rural areas, bolstered by President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a new wave of consumer food co-ops grew out of the counterculture movement. In 1981 Capital Impact was born out of federal legislation to keep up that momentum. And for the last four decades, Capital Impact has sought to do this through a mix of financing, capacity building and technical support.
More than 10,000 low-and-moderate income homeowners are sleeping better at night thanks to our partner ROC USA. Instead of worrying about rent increases or land sales that might force them to move, residents of manufactured-home communities (what many commonly refer to as mobile home parks) across the country have purchased their land and put down roots through ROC USA’s cooperative ownership program.
Since 2008, the nonprofit social venture’s innovative model has spun off 182 resident-owned communities in 14 states, ranging in size from eight to 300 dwellings. The 10,000th home was recently secured at Turnpike Park Cooperative in Westborough, Mass.
By Candace Baldwin, Director of Strategy, Aging in Community
Making a community a great place to live and work while also supporting the needs of low-income and vulnerable older adults is difficult. It takes patience, planning, and a group effort.
With this goal in mind, Capital Impact Partners joined with the AARP Foundation and Calvert Foundation to create the Age Strong initiative. Our goal? To build a first of its kind program that enables all of us – whether individuals or retail operators or philanthropic enterprise – to support strong and vibrant communities that can help low-and-moderate income individuals who are 50 and older to age with dignity, independence, and security.
Picture it: the freezer breaks and you’re scrambling to save all your frozen food. In a home, a big cooler or the generosity of a neighbor may solve your problem – but for a grocery store, the goods in a broken freezer cannot be housed at a neighbor’s house until the freezer is fixed.
The freezer, top of the line when it was purchased in the 1970s, was just one challenge faced by First Alternative Cooperative, a community co-op market in Corvallis, Oregon. Along with replacing equipment, including its critical point-of-sale system, which was past its prime, the grocery store needed to make some building improvements and consolidate debt to improve its cash flow.
There is no doubt that improving access to fresh, nutritious foods in low-income communities can help people improve eating habits and prevent diet-related diseases, such as obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
But the impacts for people and communities are even greater than that.
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Driven by another year of strong lending, Capital Impact ended 2015 with a solid financial position. The organization’s overall portfolio increased by $22 million or 11 percent. This growth was matched with continued strong credit performance, as our delinquency rate was just 0.4 percent. Once again, our focus on 
