“Stairways out of poverty” is an emotive phrase but one which if remotely realised makes for a better world, welcome to today’s SIB News:
The Social Bond: How Allia Is Making Cash Available To Social Ventures
Cambridge News
Bonds can be a great way of raising funds, and Allia in Cambridge has become a leader in doing this for social ventures. Jenny Chapman went to see Phil Caroe at the Future Business Centre.
There was a time when stockbrokers were up there with vicars – trusted, revered and dealing with something mysterious. Things have changed a lot with the former, for a start we are much more aware of the processes and, increasingly, we would like to see at least part of our money being put to good use, as in ‘doing good’.
Step up to the plate Allia, the organisation headquartered in Cambridge and which, over the past 17 years, has raised £55 million via bonds.
This money has been largely used to fund social housing, but also the Future Business Centre on Kings Hedges Road in Cambridge, where Allia is based, along with a myriad of social enterprises big and small. FBC is another big Cambridge success story, now in Peterborough as well.
Rochester Mayor: Investing In Co-ops Builds “Stairway Out of Poverty”
Oscar Perry Abello – NEXT CITY
What could you do with $1.7 billion in a city of around 200,000, where 33 percent of households live below the federal poverty line?
The city of Rochester, with Mayor Lovely Warren at the helm and supported by partners and allies across New York State and beyond, has hatched a plan to tap into at least that much to help level the economic playing field for Rochester’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The implementation schedule calls for the creation of a community-owned, cooperative business development corporation, to be known as the Market Driven Community Cooperatives Corporation (MDCCC). It will be set up as a 501(c)(3), and will begin its life under the auspices of Rochester’s Department of Neighborhood and Business Development.
MDCCC will serve as a holding company to get the cooperatives up and running, formalize partnerships with anchor institutions, provide technical assistance to cooperatives, and seek investors and funding partners for a revolving loan fund to serve as a source of capital for new and existing cooperatives or existing businesses interested in converting into worker co-ops. The plan points to several local partners that could serve as investors or hosts of the revolving loan fund, such as Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union and PathStone Enterprise Center.
Similar to Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, Rochester’s MDCCC will eventually fund its work out of profit-sharing agreements with the cooperatives it helps to form. Until that time, it will have to raise funds on its own from public and private sources.
Warren floated the idea of funding MDCCC through a social impact bond arrangement: If the MDCCC could show that it saved the city money by reducing the number of individuals receiving taxpayer-funded social services, as a result of moving up the economic ladder through worker-ownership, that could represent huge long-term taxpayer savings, justifying repayment of a hypothetical social impact bond.