A Community-Focused Approach to Lending for our 355 Park Street Project!
As we have been preparing to line up all the pre-development documents and plans for our new development at 355 Park Street with our development partner, Co-Everything, one of our big tasks is to line up the loan that will pay for the construction, to be paid back by the sale of the condos. We took an untraditional approach of identifying 4 local social impact lenders to share the loan:
LEAF (Local Enterprise Assistance Fund);
Boston Impact Initiative;
Boston Ujima Project; and
the CLT Fund (this is the Fund BNCLT helped to create with its CLT peers over the last few years).
Each of these lenders has its unique process for approving loan requests to support local businesses/NGO’s who meet a list of criteria grounded in community equity.
One of the partners, Boston Ujima Project, engaged its members through an extensive educational process to learn more about BNCLT and the proposed project, including sharing a dynamic presentation that you can see here. They then asked their members to vote on whether or not to invest in this project, based on alignment with membership and community values and criteria. The results:
90.12% voted to approve the investment in 355 Park Street.
A new Ujima record was reached: Out of a total of 240 eligible voters, 162 members (67.50%) participated.
When asked how they would support BNCLT beyond investment, 75.31% of voters committed to stay informed about BNCLT, and 25.31% committed to become a member of BNCLT.
This is Boston Ujima Project’s first real estate investment, and an important milestone. Just over a year ago, BNCLT was vetted and approved to be part of Ujima’s Good Business Alliance. In addition to receiving all kinds of support and being able to connect with Ujima’s network, membership in the Good Business Alliance rendered us eligible to receive investment dollars if approved by Ujima Membership. We couldn’t be more grateful to receive this groundswell of support from the community.
Next City featured Boston Ujima Project’s investment in BNCLT in their recent article — check it out here!