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Tim Draimin

Social Innovation Europe Initiative Launched in Brussels :: wbc-inco.net - 0 views

  • On March 16 and 17, 2011, Social Innovation Europe was launched in Brussels. Funded by the European Commission, Social Innovation Europe will create a dynamic, entrepreneurial and innovative new Europe. The time has come for Europe to embrace the broad concept of innovation and set an example globally. By 2014, Social Innovation Europe will have become the meeting place - virtual and real - for social innovators, entrepreneurs, non-profit organisations, policy makers and anyone else who is inspired by social innovation in Europe. Through a series of gatherings, and a new online resource, Social Innovation Europe will: connect projects and people who can share experiences and learn from each other; develop an easily accessible resource bank - so you can find about other projects, organisations and ways of working; develop a resource bank of up to date policies at local and national levels and provide information on funding opportunities; facilitate new relationships between civil society, governments, public sector institutions and relevant private sector bodies develop concrete recommendations in financing and in upscaling/mainstreaming of social innovation in Europe Download the conference report.
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    Social Innovation goes mainstream in Europe as European Union launches SI Europe March 2011 conference with presentations by Geoff Mulgan, Vickie Cammack of Tyze, many others including José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission. His speech included: SPEECH/11/190 José Manuel Durão Barroso President of the European Commission Europe leading social innovation Social Innovation Europe initiative Brussels, 17 March 2011 Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a pleasure to be here and see all of you around this very important issue - how to pursue our dialogue on social innovation. I would like to thank Geoff Mulgan and Diogo Vasconcelos for their kind invitation and also to congratulate them together with Louise Pulford for having won the call to set up the pilot initiative "Social innovation Europe". I also would like to thank DG enterprise for having organised this launch event today. As you know the Commission is fully involved. Lázsló Andor was with you yesterday. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn will be with you today, so this idea of innovation is indeed a major issue for the Commission I am proud to lead. Europe has a long and strong tradition of social innovation: from the workplace to hospices, and from the cooperative movement to microfinance. We have always been a continent of creative social entrepreneurs who have designed systems to enhance education, health, social inclusion and the well-being of citizens. By nature social innovation is an ever-evolving field to keep pace with fast-changing challenges in society. But what concretely do we mean by social innovation? I think it is important to recognise that this concept is not yet fully accepted in the political debate. I think social innovation is about meeting the unmet social needs and improving social outcomes. It is about tapping into the creativity of charities, associations and social entrepreneurs to find new ways of meeting pressing social needs, which are not adequately met
Nabeel Ahmed

Explaining the Long-term Single Bottom Line (June 24, 2011) | Opinion Blog | Stanford S... - 0 views

  • As the United Nations Global Compact and other development organizations have recognized, big companies can play a pivotal role in raising living standards around the world. Given that their largest shareholders often expect these companies to generate the highest possible rates of return, what’s the best way for them to benefit society as well? Our new working paper offers an answer that may seem counterintuitive at first: Publicly owned companies will be most effective in creating social benefit when they 1) plan for a long time horizon and 2) focus on a single bottom line. The long time horizon is the key here, since several years may pass before the effects of social initiatives feed back into profits. But we’ve found that they do feed back in so many important ways that profit-maximizing companies have an obligation to take investments in social initiatives seriously.
  • One might also argue that double- and triple-bottom lines help to promote transparency and accountability for social benefits, especially in emerging economies. Yet investments that satisfy double- and triple-bottom lines in the short term may not be built for long-term sustainability. Moreover, evaluating and reporting social investments with the same criteria as other investments offers a kind of transparency that we think shareholders will value in any economy.  For most large public companies, we believe that targeting the long-term single bottom line offers clear benefits for executives, shareholders, and, most importantly, for society as a whole.
Tim Draimin

Big Society Bank Bank Delayed - 1 views

  • Big Society Bank delayed until 2012
  • Big Lottery has had to step in and start funding some social enterprise projects as Big Society Bank will not be open for business in July
  • In a twist of irony for a government that has set itself targets for ‘thickets’ of bureaucracy, dealings with European regulators over the state aid rules, along with ongoing talks with British high-street banks have pushed back the launch of Big Society Bank. This emerged from remarks made by Sir Ron Cohen, the Cabinet Office’s adviser on funding social projects, at the Public Administration Committee’s (PASC) meeting, ‘Smaller government, bigger society’ which met on Tuesday, 14 June 2011.
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  • The full transcript of the proceedings can be viewed online and provides a very helpful update on all the key issues surrounding Social Impact Bonds and Big Society Bank.[i]
  • Background to Big Society bank
  • Stephen Bubb’s comprehensive article ‘A new financial landscape’ in Caritas, March 2011  sets out the gestation and remit of what has been a long-awaited social investment bank and a useful summary can be found in the chapter 5 (page 37) of the Cabinet Office’s report, Growing the Social Investment market: A vision and strategy.[ii]
  • State aid legislation and other hold-ups
  • Cohen told the PASC that the Big Society Bank’s opening target of July 2011 would be missed “by a matter of some months” because of delays from the Cabinet Office in steering it through the complexities of EU state aid in financing public service provision legislation (in place to prevent the warping of the rules of competition between member countries). He said he encountered exactly the same thing with Bridges Ventures, his own organisation, and that he was confident that not only would the necessary permissions be given but that “the EU will turn out to be a big proponent of social investment.”
  • He also explained that the other complications was that the government had no agreement with UK banks the £200m of funding they had agreed on as part of the Project Merlin settlement, and that these details were still being sorted out.
  • In the meantime and agreement has been signed with Big Lottery so that it could fund some of the projects that Big Society Bank would eventually take over.
  • Long-term delivery  
  • When he was reminded that nine out of ten new enterprises end in failure, he countered with the response that everything ‘involves a risk’ and that failure in social enterprise was a form of philanthropy anyway. However, Cohen is a seasoned venture financier who does not set out to lose money. He added: “we see our objective as getting the social sector going. We have to preserve the value of our capital in doing it but we don’t have to maximise its value – we would like to be proactive.”   Cohen was confident of the Social Enterprise Bank’s long-term viability, explaining that real success could take ten or 20 years to materialise with cash positivity projected in seven years’ time.
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    Update on the status of the Big Society Bank, reviewing challenges it faces leading to Big Lottery stepping in...
Tim Draimin

Impact Capital is the New Venture Capital | Entrepreneur the Arts - 1 views

  • Impact Capital is the New Venture Capital
  • By Sir Ronald Cohen
  • Broadly speaking, capitalism does not deal with its social consequences. Even as communities grow richer on average, so the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” increases. For example, since the mid-1970s, both the USA and UK have actually become less equal rather than more equal. In the long post-war boom many governments did make significant headway in ameliorating the consequences of social inequality. This can be seen in levels of investment in areas such as health and in critical performance measures such as life expectancy. Nevertheless, governments, despite their best efforts and even in the best of times, have not been able to resolve all social problems.
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  • Commentators on one side of the political spectrum attribute this failure to the lack of resources available to the state and to the state’s reluctance or inability to act appropriately. Commentators on the other side attribute government’s shortcomings to the inherent inefficiency of the state itself. The truth is that the political process, which focuses on short-term gains, does not favor long-term, preventative investment of the type required to address major social problems.
  • The social sector, which is also called the voluntary, non-profit or third sector, has done its best, with the support of philanthropic donations and government, to address the social problems that fall through the gaps in government provision.
  • Some argue that the social sector’s problem is that it is significantly under-resourced. Others argue that the insufficiency of resources is in part a consequence of the sector’s reliance upon philanthropy — from foundations and from individual donors — that can be unpredictable. Both critiques may be correct: the social sector has a problem in accessing capital, often because of a lack of a reliable revenue stream, and, as a consequence, it is inefficient, especially in respect of building sustainable organizations, securing funding and utilizing assets to support large-scale activity.
  • Recent moves to make the social sector more efficient, by focusing on improvements to the management of both the donors and the recipients of grants, are an important development. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation applies rigorous criteria to the assessment of the performance of organizations in receipt of its grant funding. Michael Dell’s philanthropic work is similarly rigorous. Their goal, according to Harvard professors Robert Kaplan and Allen Grossman, is, essentially, “to find and fund the Microsofts and Dells of the non-profit sector.”
  • In fact, such moves are more necessary than ever, as deficit-ridden governments seek to pass greater responsibility onto the shoulders of the social sector. An example of this is the UK Coalition Government’s strategic objective to foster the “Big Society.” In essence, the Big Society agenda seeks to pass a significant portion of responsibility for social cohesion back to the community via the voluntary sector, and, at the same time, to confer greater legitimacy upon such community work and to provide incentives and support for it. However, the social sector as currently constituted is unlikely to be able to address the scale of the social need; or, to put it another way, to meet the scale of the social challenge.
  • This is where social entrepreneurs come in. We know that entrepreneurs create jobs and foster innovation. In that sense, they already make a substantial social contribution. But entrepreneurs have special qualities that could make a significant beneficial impact were they to be applied to social issues. The entrepreneurial mindset embraces leadership, vision, the ability to attract talented people, drive, focus, perseverance, self-confidence, optimism, competitiveness and ambition. To these one might add an appetite for taking informed risks, an unwavering focus on results, a willingness to take responsibility, a grounded sense of realism, astute judgment of opportunities and people, and a fascination with the field of enterprise in question. The engagement of entrepreneurs in the social sector, bringing in their wake high expectations of performance, accountability and innovation, could lead to significantly increased social impact.
  • Could the social sector be transformed to allow the emergence of entrepreneurs from within its own ranks and attract social entrepreneurs and capital on a large scale? The answer is yes, provided that we can create an effective system to support social entrepreneurship, by linking the social sector to the capital markets and introducing new financial instruments that enable entrepreneurs to make beneficial social impact while also making adequate financial returns for investors. Given these conditions, it is possible that social entrepreneurs and impact investors will significantly fill the gap between social need and current government and social-sector provision. Indeed, were social enterprise to achieve significant scale, it would transform the social sector and lead to a new contract between government, the capital markets and citizens.
  • In this process, charitable, institutional and private investors, attracted by the combination of social as well as financial returns, would bring into being a new asset class: impact investment. In a recent report, JP Morgan came to the conclusion that impact investments already constitute an emerging asset class: “In a world where government resources and charitable donations are insufficient to address the world’s social problems, impact investing offers a new alternative for channeling large-scale private capital for social benefit. With increasing numbers of investors rejecting the notion that they face a binary choice between investing for maximum risk-adjusted returns or donating for social purpose, the impact investment market is now at a significant turning point as it enters the mainstream… We argue that impact investments are emerging as an alternative asset class.”
  • This new asset class requires a specific set of investment and risk-management skills; it demands organizational structures to accommodate these skills; it must be serviced by industry organizations and associations; and it must encourage the development of standardized metrics, benchmarks and even ratings. As has been observed by the impact-investment firm Bridges Ventures in the UK, such an asset class should provide welcome diversification for capital markets: at times of economic stress, price-sensitive business models appropriate to lower income neighborhoods can prove more resilient and also find wider applications in the mainstream market as both margins and consumer spending power are squeezed.
  • Not surprisingly, politicians as well as academics, entrepreneurs and investors are paying increasingly close attention to these developments. In the US and in the UK, and now also in Canada and Australia, steps are being taken to provide social entrepreneurs with access to the same kinds of resources as business entrepreneurs. The USA’s Social Innovation Fund ($173 million) and the Investing in Innovation Fund ($644 million) are notable examples; as is the proposed creation of the UK’s Big Society Bank. In Canada, the Federal Government recently received the report of the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance, whose recommendations include requiring public and private foundations to devote a proportion of their funds to mission-related investments; clarifying fiduciary obligations so that pension funds and others can invest in social programs; introducing new financial instruments for social enterprise; and marshalling government support for social enterprise, directly through seed investment and business support services and indirectly through fiscal engineering.
  • How likely is it that such steps will succeed? In answering this question, we would do well to consider that the global economy faced a similar moment of challenge and opportunity in the 1970s and 1980s, when many of the most familiar names in the post-war corporate world started to decline and shed jobs, among them General Motors, American Motors, Courtaulds, ICI, Smith Corona, Olivetti, US Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Kodak and International Harvester. The question then was: what would take their place?
  • What took their place was a new wave of business enterprise helped by venture investing, mostly focused on high-tech industries. This is the wave that brought us Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Sun Microsystems and Genentech. The hi-tech wave has since swept the world, taking us into the embrace of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook and ushering in a communications and information revolution based on global access to information from multiple sources. It has thereby profoundly changed global culture.
  • Just as hi-tech business enterprise and venture capital, working in tandem, have attracted increasing numbers of talented risk-takers since the 1970s, so social enterprise and impact investment are now attracting a new generation of talented and committed innovators seeking to combine new approaches to achieving social returns. Social enterprise and impact investing, in short, look like the wave of the future.
  • About Sir Ronald Cohen Sir Ronald Cohen is chairman of Bridges Ventures and The Portland Trust. He chaired the UK’s Social Investment Task Force and the Commission on Unclaimed Assets and he is a founder-director of Social Finance. Until 2005, he was executive chairman of Apax Partners Worldwide LLP, which he co-founded in 1972.
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    Sir Ronald Cohen's overview of the emergence of the impact investing space, including references to Canada the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance.
Peter Deitz

There's a long road ahead for social impact bonds - Third Sector blog | Blogs | Third S... - 0 views

  • Will the social impact bond ever attract commercial capital? At least one professional investor believes it eventually will - although he doesn't think it will be quick or easy. The social impact bond was introduced last year as a means of funding early interventions on reducing reoffending, drug use, the number of children in care. The model for the social impact bond is that  investors gives charities money to carry out a long-term payment-by-contract. In exchange, they get any profits the contract generates. In theory, the benefits go to both sides. If the contract works, the investor can make a large return on his money. In the meantime, the charity has a guaranteed income and the freedom to work on its project. However a key question yet to be answered is whether it will really prove attractive to investors.
Peter Deitz

FT.com / UK / Politics & policy - Failure warning over Big Society Bank role - 1 views

  • It remains unclear whether the banks expect a normal commercial return on their money; want to establish that the cash is a long-term loan not a grant; or whether “commercial terms” means they want some return but accept that it will fall well short of a commercial one.
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    It'll be interesting to see what happens with the Big Society Bank.
adamspence

Sustainable Stock Exchanges - Official Home - 0 views

  • The Sustainable Stock Exchanges is an initiative aimed at exploring how exchanges can work together with investors, regulators, and companies to enhance corporate transparency, and ultimately performance, on ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) issues and encourage responsible long-term approaches to investment.
Tim Draimin

Proposal weds investors and charities - 0 views

  • Imagine if charities had to operate like companies in the private sector. They would need to raise capital from investors in order to carry out their work and investors would get returns if the charity produced results. But this isn’t just a hypothetical scenario – it’s exactly what is being proposed under a new type of philanthropy called ‘social impact bonds’ or ‘pay-for-success bonds’.
  • This pay-for-success model certainly sounds promising, but there are some potential issues that may emerge when profit-focused investments are combined with socially-focused charitable activities.
  • One is the tendency to help beneficiaries most likely to achieve a positive outcome. Sticking with the prison reform example, charities might try to maximize their outcomes by helping mostly or only those prisoners who will be the easiest to integrate back into society. The prisoners with the more complex and time-intensive reform challenges will not be helped because the risk to investors is too high. Charities that work with the hardest to help will continue to struggle to find funders who will support their costly and long-term work – important as it may be.
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  • Another potential barrier to this pay-for-success approach is that the funding to pay investors their return ultimately comes from government. These investments are not necessarily creating a new pot of money. Rather, they’re transferring the risk from taxpayers to private investors. In the past, government funding for social projects would pay for everything upfront, regardless of outcomes. Now, under impact bonds, they will only pay for results from non-profits after they have been achieved. So, are pay-for-success bonds a truly revolutionary way to fund charitable work, or is it just government funding repackaged?
  • espite potential shortcomings, these pay-for-success bonds are forcing people to rethink how the not-for-profit sector operates and funds its work. Applying private sector principles to charities is not necessarily a bad thing – many non-profits can benefit from working more efficiently and measuring their results. But whether these new bonds are the mechanism that will transform philanthropy remains to be seen.
Tim Draimin

FT.com / UK - Crisis and disasters boost zeal for reform - 1 views

  • Crisis and disasters boost zeal for reformBy Patrick Jenkins, Banking Editor Published: June 15 2011 16:43 | Last updated: June 15 2011 16:43
  • All this has given the concept of sustainable finance momentum over the past year. The values of sustainability – a longer-term horizon and a greater focus on the counterparties with which banks do business – are becoming mainstream.
  • A minority in the banking world has long specialised in “ethical” behaviour, restricting investments to a “whitelist” of companies deemed to act responsibly. But the environmental disasters in particular have been a spur to such institutions, says Joachim Straehle, chief executive of Bank Sarasin, whose predecessors turned the Swiss institution into a “sustainable bank” after a domestic chemical disaster 25 years ago.
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  • “We have a sustainable matrix system that allows us to invest in high-impact sectors like oil only if the company is exceptionally sustainable,” Mr Straehle says.
  • It remains to be seen how permanent that caution is, but the political shift away from nuclear in Europe, particularly in Germany, could restrain European banks from funding such projects further afield.
  • This may just be current pragmatism, but it reflects homegrown changes in business strategies by banks with international reach.
  • For example, in recent months mainstream British banks have been drawn, sometimes screaming, into doing more to assist the broader society. The so-called Project Merlin agreement between the big UK banks was centred on government lending targets, but it also bound the banks into several other do-good projects that are more ambitious in their scope than standard government-sponsored financing initiatives.
  • The biggest idea is the creation of a £2.5bn ($4.1bn) private equity-style Business Growth Fund to kick-start small business investment, while a further £200m has been committed to the Big Society Bank, a project conceived by David Cameron, UK prime minister, to support regional development ventures.
  • There is a theoretical promise of commercial returns for the banks, but few expect them to be generous.
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    Financial Times reporting on pressure building on banks post crisis
Tim Draimin

White paper on Opening up Public Services - Evolution not revolution | 2020 PSH - 0 views

  • White paper on Opening up Public Services – Evolution not revolution
  • After months of waiting, the White Paper on Opening up Public Services has finally been published. In its advance billing it had been variously referred to as the Big Society strategy, the next leap forward on public services, and the missing narrative on public service reform.  Clearly the Big Society radicals lost the argument about what this should be about, because revolutionary it is not.  This is less about chaos and more about cohesion.
  • There is a noticeable switch in tone in this White Paper from earlier Coalition policy announcements. Out has gone the hyperbole to be replaced with a more considered, and reasonable argument. So evolutionary is this that it explicitly builds on New Labour policy developments, such as academies, foundation trusts and individual budgets. Even the narrative now has distinct echoes of New Labour circa 2005, with the emphasis on modernisation, choice, commissioning reform and competition. Its primary purpose is to establish a policy framework, based on a set of guiding principles, within which public service reform will develop. Much of the focus is therefore on seeking to retrofit existing policy and reforms into these principles.
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  • Some specific observations:  No such thing as the Big Society? – considering that at one stage this was supposed to give policy substance to the Big Society, it is striking how absent the Big Society is from the White Paper. That’s one cut it didn’t make.  I did a control search and only came across one Big Society reference in the whole report, and this was not to the idea but to the Big Society bank. So this leaves an obvious question about how central the Big Society now will be to the Government? One practical effect of there being no Big Society strand is that the tenor of the White Paper is much more consumerist, gone appears to be the emphasis on social citizenship and responsibility.  This leaves a big gap because, as our Commission on 2020 Public Services argued, the big challenges of the future will need to be met through citizens and the state working together to create better social outcomes.  Very few concrete proposals – This is about direction of travel, rather than specific proposals. In fact, there are very few concrete proposals. Instead this is much more like a Green Paper in which general propositions are put out for consultation, with the question being what specific policy changes would these require? This is clearly a long way from what some of the Big Society evangelists had originally wanted to see.  No short term wins for the voluntary sector – Earlier in the year there had been speculation that the White Paper might contain some specific guarantees for the voluntary sector to help offset the consequences of Council grant cuts.  But, whilst there are warm words for the role of the voluntary sector, and some new development money and support to help develop social social enterprises, there is no specific commitment to, for example, a quota of Council services to be subject to voluntary sector right to bid.   Diversity of provision – the boldest statement in the White Paper is that there is no case for monopoly state provision of services, except for the special cases of defence, criminal justice and policing.  The case is made for all public services to be run on the basis of autonomous institutions such as Academies and Foundation Trusts, which could be run by businesses, mutuals or social enterprises.  However, there are no specific proposals to apply this to any particular service area.  Local government is the big winner – this is the most pro-local government policy paper to have been published by the Coalition.  Whereas, the distinct impression in previous policy developments on public service reform has been that local government was being sidestepped, now it is much more central to the Coalition’s plans for decentralisation.  The principle of decentralisation which is set out in the white paper bears some similarity with the subsidiarity principle developed in the 1990s by the European Union, under which decisions should be devolved to the lowest possible level of government.  The new twist to this is the emphasis in the white paper on establishing neighbourhood councils in urban areas to mirror parishes and to be responsible for the same types of very local, community and public space services.  But the White Paper also makes the case for more powers and greater financial autonomy for local authorities and, in one of its few specific proposals, also recommends that skills funding should pass to some Councils, something which cities like Manchester have been strongly pushing for.
  • As Nick Timmins noted in the FT today, there are a number of tensions within the White Paper, which are not even acknowledged, let alone resolved.  He cited the principle of promoting diversity whilst at the same time needing to guard against failure, a weakness of successive health reforms and a particularly current concern given the collapse of Southern Cross.   But this isn’t the half of it. Other questions which the White Paper doesn’t confront, but which a credible reform plan would have to resolve, include:  Service integration vs institutional autonomy – how can local government integrate services in the way that the white paper suggests, whilst at the same time vertical service silos are being strengthened through the promotion of institutional autonomy in schools, hospitals, and now in every other service?  Consumerism vs social citizenship – how can a consumerist approach to public services help strengthen the co-productive relationship which there will need to be between citizens and services to meet the social challenges of 2020 and beyond?  Ideas vs practice – how can the Coalition move from exhortation to implementation? The White Paper may contain a framework of principles but it does not set out a convincing strategy as to how reforms based on these could be implemented.  Over the coming weeks we at 2020 will be analysing the Coalition’s reform agenda in more detail and looking to see where the opportunities exist for developing better social productivity practice.  Please let us have your comments and ideas.  Ben Lucas
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    New proposals on mutualizing public services in the UK
Tim Draimin

Mayor rolls out finance options for nonprofits | Crain's New York Business - 0 views

  • Mayor rolls out finance options for nonprofits A new bonding authority would extend low-cost, tax-exempt financing for nonprofits' expansion and facility upgrades.
  • Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has long been considered a patron of nonprofits, took steps on Thursday to unleash the growth potential of that community by announcing the formation of a new entity committed to helping the city's 501(c) organizations gain access to low-cost, tax-exempt financing to expand or upgrade facilities.
  • The New York City Industrial Development Agency, which previously issued tax-exempt bond financing on behalf of nonprofits for various capital projects, has had its hands tied, unable to do that job since its authority was rescinded by the state Legislature in January 2008.
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  • In the interim, nonprofits seeking to grow their operations have been stuck in a state of arrested development.
  • Elizabeth Berger, president of the Downtown Alliance, which supports economic development in lower Manhattan, welcomed the mayor's announcement as a necessary step in enabling nonprofits to play their part in promoting the city's economic vitality.
  • According to the mayor's office, more than 13 organizations have gone to out-of-state funding sources for assistance in financing capital projects totaling more than $337 million since June 2009. The administration also estimates nonprofits have at least 20 shovel-ready capital projects stuck in the development pipeline with a combined price tag of more than $400 million.
  • While the city's nonprofits don't enjoy quite the same cachet in terms of revenue-generating potential as either financial services or leisure and hospitality, the group exceeds both sectors with respect to employment. While the other sectors employ approximately 434,000 and 320,000, respectively, the more than 42,000 health, human services and cultural nonprofit (HHSC) organizations throughout the five boroughs support approximately 470,000 employees, according to the mayor's office. That sector is the largest private employer in city—employing more than 15% of New York's non-governmental work force.
  • “New York City is home to tens of thousands of nonprofits that are looking to expand, create jobs or move into new facilities, but for the past few years they have faced more expensive financing costs, while some have had to forgo expansion altogether,” Mr. Bloomberg said, in a statement. “This new entity will make it easier and more inexpensive for our critical nonprofit sector to grow and expand.”
  • “At a time when many not-for-profits are struggling to make ends meet amid the nation's fiscal woes, this new issuer will serve to strengthen and support an increasingly important sector in our city's economy,” Ms. Berger said in the mayor's office statement. “In lower Manhattan, not-for-profits represent a vital and growing sector, and this action recognizes their value.”
  • Capital projects and investment in expansion and facilities upgrades have been curtailed as the volatile economy takes a toll on nonprofits struggling to make up for reductions in funding support. “For over three years, nonprofits like ours have faced far too many obstacles in obtaining financing to grow and expand,” Sisi Kamal, chief financial and operating officer at the Friends Seminary School, said in the statement. “The ability to locally access necessary financing in an efficient and cost-effective manner would be a significant investment in the future of our organization and that of many others serving the residents of New York City.”The administration said the new entity, a local development corporation, will open in the next four to six months and that financing requests will be based on board approval. The five borough presidents, in conjunction with the comptroller, will be charged with nominating directors to serve on the board.
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    Bloomberg simplifies non-profit access to financing with new entity to help orgs gain access to low-cost, tax-exempt financing.
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