![]() A second social enterprise, launched about five years ago, designs websites and assists with social media and video content it has become the group’s “flagship” social enterprise. The store “sold everything from bedspreads to clothes” and generated over $100,000 in annual revenue. “The first one, when it started, was a thrift store,” Uishi explains. Over time, the organization developed social enterprise businesses. Uishi wanted to provide young African American males “with a community place where they can learn about social entrepreneurship, public speaking, and have a safe place to grow and develop.” Uishi explains that the nonprofit was founded in 2003 by Uishi, her husband, and a grandmother whose grandson would come to Indianapolis every summer. Pambana Uishi is a cofounder of an Indianapolis nonprofit known as Kheprw, a youth leadership, development, and community empowerment organization. Indianapolis Nonprofit Takes an Impact Investing Turn To provide a sense of the range of the efforts, three community-based efforts are profiled below. The nature of the funds also depends on the composition of the teams themselves and their specific capabilities. There are many reasons for variation: In some communities, capital is plentiful and BIPOC business capacity is in short supply in other places, the reverse is the case. But the cohort has carried on, and cohort members will “graduate” this month, with many graduates launching their own funds this fall.Įach fund is unique. Instead, due to COVID-19, the meetings took place virtually. Launched in the spring of 2020, the cohort was originally envisioned as taking place through a series of in-person meetings. Three more are regionally based: one in the state of New York, one focused on both Philadelphia and Brooklyn, and one in the state of New Mexico. Nine are city-based: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chattanooga, Dallas, Indianapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Minneapolis-St. Teams in the cohort stem from a dozen places. Now BII is actively seeking to spread the model well beyond Boston. As founder Deborah Frieze has put it, the aim of BII has been to “take an integrated capital or a blended finance strategy and deploy every tool in the capital toolbox to help close the racial wealth divide in my community.” Since 2017, BII has helped finance 30 local businesses in greater Boston, the majority of which are BIPOC-owned. BII, one of the funds profiled in that report, aims to use the cohort to help make funds like itself far more common throughout the country. Vann, quoted above, is a member of a team participating in a Fund Building Cohort that has been organized by the Boston Impact Initiative (BII). ![]() Benjamin Vann, CEO of Impact Ventures, DallasĮarlier this year, NPQ featured an article that reviewed a report by the nonprofit Transform Finance on grassroots community engaged investment-impact investing that builds community power while raising capital for BIPOC-owned businesses. ![]() ![]() “The system is broken and there needs to be a set of new rules.” ![]()
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