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Transform Finance is a research, education, and implementation partner that supports all stakeholders to challenge legacy investment approaches, seed transformative investment models, and build movement power.
There are several funds projects that seek to pool money from various capital sources and have grassroots stakeholders – like residents or key community organizations – steward those resources towards approved businesses. The goal of such projects is to fill capital gaps for enterprises that the community decides are important, and to build the capacity of residents and key community organizations to decide their economic destiny.
The Boston Ujima Project is a core example of such a capital fund, which practices direct democracy by its member-investors at a one investment, one vote ratio.
Many communities seek to gain control over land and stave off predatory housing market investors through PI. This can be done through pools of capital dedicated to purchasing land and taking it off the market, like the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.
Like enterprise financing funds, these projects establish community governance in how the capital is deployed, including residents, tenants, grassroots organizations, and other nontraditional stakeholders.
Several different types of PI projects turn real estate development into opportunities for long term wealth preservation and community autonomy. Trust-based models, like the Kensington Corridor Trust, preserve land for the long term by taking buildings or entire blocks off the speculative market, placing the rights to its use in the hands of community leaders, and serving as a capital vehicle that can reinvest rental revenue into adding new properties to the trust.
Single-project development models, like Market Creek Plaza, establish community working groups to determine the use and goal of the development (and often provide ownership stakes through community investment shares).
Traditional community development vehicles like Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and Community Development Corporations (CDCs) can utilize governance models that constitute GCEI.
For example, Thunder Valley CDC represents a Native-led development organization serving the Oglala Lakota Tribe’s Pine Ridge Reservation, capitalizing housing and commercial developments as well as a wide range of community projects. The governance structure is based on its community-led board and its founding by activists in the community.
Alternative Ownership Enterprises (AOEs) are firms that significantly shift economic value and decision-making power toward the non-investor stakeholders they impact, such as workers, producers, consumers, community members, or even a non-financial purpose.
Now, we are supporting investors to deploy capital into the ecosystem of intermediaries and deals. Join us in documenting best practices for AOEs and in unlocking more capital for this field.
Learn moreInvestment into communities is one of the most dominant forces in shaping lives, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and working class communities. But even mission-aligned capital is largely out of the control of those whom it affects.
There are many initiatives around the U.S. that are charting a new way for how to invest so as to shift that dynamic, placing communities at the fulcrum of control and agency. We call this practice Participatory Investment (which we refer to in the report as Grassroots Community Engaged Investment), or the process of investing with meaningful input, decision-making power, and/or ownership from grassroots stakeholders.
Learn about Participatory Investment and the many projects around the country that are leading this movement in this foundational report.
