As the Bay Area’s community foundation, we are committed to using all of our tools to reimagine and rebuild communities with greater racial equity and economic inclusion. While the core of our work is grantmaking, there is a critical and motivating role we play leveraging our reputation, relationships, and commitments through the Bay Area Community Impact Fund.
This is not just a loan fund, but a way to catalyze partners and resources for Bay Area communities. The Bay Area Community Impact Fund often plays a catalytic role that encourages additional investments into a project or organization, or that supports a larger scale or faster speed of impact.
For example, in August we announced our largest-ever loan from the Bay Area Community Impact Fund, $5 million to the Bay’s Future Fund, part of the Partnership for the Bay’s Future Family of Loan Funds. This loan exemplifies the role that our loans play in particular toward our all-in housing approach.
Through the Bay Area Community Impact Fund, we invested in the Partnership for the Bay’s Future Family of Loan Funds. In addition to the investment, what is more important is that we set up and continue to manage the infrastructure for the Partnership, including administering policy-focused grantmaking and capacity building for Bay Area local governments that complement the loan funding offered by the Partnership.
By creating the Partnership for the Bay’s Future and working with key partners such as LISC, which manages the Partnership’s Family of Loan Funds, we make it possible for more partners to invest in the fund and in necessary policy to ensure equitable housing in the region. We put our expertise and resources where our values are, and we put our reputation out there, showing commitment to the project and drawing in others to do the same. Most recently, we supported LISC in closing an additional $25 million investment from JPMorgan Chase and Ford Foundation as well as $150 million from Facebook targeting housing for those who earn an extremely low income. SFF and other investors will help the Partnership for the Bay’s Future reach its ambitious goal to preserve and produce more than 8,000 homes in the Bay Area by 2029.
Our initiative and partnership-building in the Partnership for the Bay’s Future is one example of our catalytic role, and there are many others over the lifetime of the Bay Area Community Impact Fund. We measure our impact by evaluating how our investments close critical funding gaps or provide early working capital for projects, such as our investments in Mission Economic Development Agency, Oakland Community Land Trust, and Greenlining Institute, among others.
We know low-cost capital is critical, but this is more than making loans. It is about using our full range of tools – reputational leverage, grants, and relationships – to see through the full vision of a more equitable Bay Area and to bring partners along with us.
