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How Vanessa Silva is Recreating Her Recipe For Success During a Global Pandemic
Vanessa Silva has always been comfortable in the kitchen. As an introverted child growing up in Brazil, food was how she preferred to communicate. Cooking became Vanessa’s love language, and by the time she was 10 years old, she was quite fluent in that love language, preparing special dishes for her parents’ dinner guests and…
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How a PPP Loan From a Low-Income Designated Credit Union Gave This Bay Area Nonprofit The Promise of a Brighter Tomorrow
Barbara McCullough knows a thing or two about nonprofit management. She’s been the CEO at Brighter Beginnings, a nonprofit created in 1984 to respond to the needs of families in resource-poor neighborhoods across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties, for nearly 24 years. With that level of experience comes the understanding that government funding is anything…
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Why CDFIs Often Create Better Lending Outcomes for Small Businesses
Small businesses that need financing often find themselves at a crossroads: apply for a traditional bank loan that’s difficult to get but has lower-interest rates or an online loan that’s quickly approved but can end up being inordinately more expensive in the long run. But some business owners don’t realize that there’s an additional option:…
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Meet Dr. Ira Mandel, The Retired Physician Opening Up Recovery Residences Along Maine’s Midcoast
Dr. Ira Mandel self identifies as “the nut” who runs into a burning building to help people when everyone else is running in the opposite direction. That’s exactly what happened in 2006, when Ira moved to Maine to take over the Pen Bay Medical Center’s hospice program. During his first week on the job, a…
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What’s Behind the Growth of Impact Investing
The Rockefeller Foundation coined the term “impact investing” at a 2007 meeting of investors, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists in Bellagio, Italy. Fast forward two decades and we’ve seen demand for sustainable impact investments grow exponentially. Impact investing refers to investments that generate a measurable social or environmental impact along with a financial return. Over the years,…
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Does Impact Investing Equate to Lower Returns?
While it may seem like a new trend, impact investing has roots that trace back centuries and it’s here to stay. But like any alternative investment strategy, public endorsement of the approach has varied. Throughout the years, hesitation stemmed from concerns about financial returns, the ability to measure social impact and stability of the markets.…
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How A Canoe-Building Small Business, Kamanu Composites, Switched To Making Face Shields To Weather The COVID-19 Storm
If there’s one thing Kamanu Composites has done well over the past 13 years, it’s been finding a way to stay afloat as a small business. The O‘ahu-based company, which specializes in outrigger canoe manufacturing, is one of the last of its kind on the islands. Most of Kamanu’s competitors have packed up and taken…
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Wealth Inequality: The Secret Cost of Unequal Access to Credit
America, “the land of equal opportunity”, isn’t delivering on its promise for the 90 percent that find themselves on the wrong side of the ever-widening wealth gap. In fact, the United States has a level of wealth inequality between the rich and poor that is larger than any other major developed country. According to the…
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Impact Story: Mountainside Community Cooperative
How Capital and Coaching Allowed Mountainside Residents To Purchase Their Park and Control Their Own Destiny Margaret Jones grew up and went to school in Camden, Maine; however, that didn’t make things any easier for her when she moved back to the idyllic town of her youth after 30 years of being away. Although Camden…
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Change Makers Interview: Mary Houghton, Community Finance Pioneer
When Mary Houghton partnered with Milton Davis, James Fletcher, and Ron Grzywinski to purchase what was then South Shore Bank in Chicago in 1973, she had no idea that she was shifting the course of community finance in the U.S. The quartet of “mutually respecting” entrepreneurs created ShoreBank, which was committed to fighting redlining and…
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