Redeveloping housing in Richmond while Impact Exchange Asia is working with the Clinton Global Initiative to deliver a Woman’s Impact Bond – what a wonderful end to the week for SIB News, happy reading:
Plan To Rehab And Sell 1,000 Of Richmond’s Worst Vacant Homes Moves Forward
Mike Aldax – Richmond Standard
Richmond City Council on Tuesday voted to move forward with a plan to use social impact bonds to rehabilitate and sell about 1,000 dilapidated and abandoned properties that have contributed to neighborhood blight.
The strategy, pitched earlier this year by prominent attorney and Richmond resident John Knox, would come at no cost to the city.
The city would issue social impact bonds, targeting investors who want their investment to have a positive social impact, then loan the bond proceeds to the nonprofit Richmond Community Foundation, which would buy the vacant homes from lenders such as banks, and then rehab and sell the homes at affordable prices to lower-income homeowners.
Potential homeowners would be identified by SparkPoint, a nonprofit financial education center in Richmond that guides low-income clients to becoming financially stable.
Following the sale of a home, a significant portion of the proceeds will be used to acquire and rehabilitate more properties.
IIX Announces Clinton Global Initiative Commitment To Action On Women’s Impact Bond
Eco-Business
Impact Investment Exchange Asia (IIX), a leader in social sector development through impact investing, recently announced its Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Commitment to Action on Women’s Impact Bond (WIB) at the 2014 CGI Annual Meeting.
The WIB will pool US$10 million into an investment vehicle that will support social enterprises and microfinance institutions working towards clean cook-stove initiatives. The WIB will be a publicly listed bond product on the Impact Exchange, the world’s first social stock exchange, allowing retail investors to participate in addition to traditional impact investors.
Over 12 months, IIX will develop a pipeline of potential WIB borrowers: revenue-generating organizations with proven impact to women’s lives, clear intention to scale, and capital requirements, accompanied by viable bond-repayment streams. IIX will then support these borrowers by structuring the WIB according to their capital needs and sources of repayment, defining a risk layering strategy, and developing a comprehensive impact measurement framework.
Through deployment of the funds raised, the WIB will help organizations scale their clean-cook stove businesses so that they can protect an additional 2.63 million people from harmful air pollution, benefit the lives of over 525 thousand women and in turn empower them through providing employment opportunities, increasing their social capital and facilitating their role as environmental stewards. In addition, the WIB aims to deliver environmental impact by avoiding emission of 315,000 tons of greenhouse gases and saves 456,000 tons of wood.