TBF donors who now have access to recoverable grant portfolios
Social Finance partnered with the Boston Foundation (TBF) to curate impact-first investment portfolios, which enable TBF donor-advised fund (DAF) holders to support local organizations that are advancing equity in Greater Boston via recoverable grants. Recoverable grants are impact-first investments made to mission-driven organizations with revenue-generating programs—they are similar to loans, but more flexible and borrower-friendly.
Goals
Advance equity in Greater Boston: Mobilize capital to repair harm caused by systemic and structural inequalities in the region, including closing racial wealth gaps.
Cultivate donor alignment: Create new opportunities for donors to deploy capital to high-impact organizations advancing TBF’s strategic vision.
Engage donors: Build awareness of impact-first investments with donors as a tool for having more impact today with the portion of their DAF invested for the long term.
Provide new impact-first investment offerings: Curate thematic portfolios for donors of all account sizes to easily support diversified sets of pre-vetted, local organizations via recoverable grants.
Recoverable grants increase your charitable mileage by giving you a chance to recycle capital. While making modest grants periodically, I got frustrated seeing money sitting in our DAF account and wanted to make a bigger impact sooner.TBF Recoverable Grant Portfolios Donor
The Work
Donor Education and Engagement: Engaged donors through focus groups and educational events and developed training materials and resources to facilitate outreach by TBF relationship managers.
Portfolio Curation: Sourced and vetted impact-first investment opportunities, beginning with a landscape scan of more than 80 potential opportunities in Greater Boston. Through our vetting process, we identified nine financial intermediaries serving Greater Boston with strong financial and impact track records and packaged these opportunities into four thematic portfolios that would allow DAF donors to direct capital to the issues they care about most.
Opportunity Distribution: Developed a white-label platform for TBF donors to browse the recoverable grant portfolios and initiate the transaction process.
Structuring and Execution: Supported TBF in mapping processes to efficiently pool capital from donors and deploy recoverable grants to recipient organizations.
Program Sustainability: Facilitated a process to identify TBF’s business model goals and conducted a business modeling exercise to quantify costs and potential revenue from ongoing program operations.
Financial and Impact Reporting: Mapped processes for collecting and analyzing data from recoverable grant recipient organizations to regularly assess and report on program impact and financial performance.
Portfolios Overview
We’re really excited about recoverable grants because they unleash flexible, low-cost capital, allowing us to provide capital to businesses that otherwise don’t have access to it.Glynn Lloyd, Executive Director of MCCI, Recoverable Grant Recipient
This engagement further expanded TBF donors’ charitable toolkit, challenging the traditional binary paradigm of “giving from” and “investing” DAFs.
Recoverable grants allow our donors to support the impact areas they care about most with the potential to recover those charitable dollars in the future and reuse them. It’s a game changer.
Kate Guedj
Senior Vice President and Chief Philanthropy Officer, The Boston Foundation
The Boston Foundation partnered with Social Finance to launch a comprehensive impact-first investment offering for its donor-advised fund (DAF) holders.
Social Finance provided program design and implementation support to the Boston Foundation to vet and launch four impact-first investment portfolios.
Portfolio Organizations
Ascendus seeks to provide low-to-moderate income (LMI) business owners with access to capital and financial education. They seek to serve three main demographic groups: women, Latinx, and Black entrepreneurs.
Capital Good Fund helps people fix their finances and break the cycle of poverty by offering small loans and personalized financial coaching to families. Their mission is to create pathways out of poverty and advance a green economy through inclusive financial services.
JFF Ventures Fund invests in early-stage technology companies that help low-to-middle-wage earners find, secure, and prepare for jobs that lead to economic advancement.
Local Enterprise Assistance Fund (LEAF) focuses on community-owned natural food cooperatives, low-income cooperative housing developments, community land trusts, and worker-owned firms and other community-based enterprises.
Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Boston helps forge vibrant, resilient communities across America by working with a vast network of community-based partners to make investments in housing, businesses, jobs, education, safety, and health.
Mill Cities Community Investments (MCCI) strives to break down economic and racial inequality by growing the assets and wealth of historically disinvested individuals and their communities.
Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation (MHIC) provides innovative financing for affordable housing and community development throughout New England by lending to affordable housing developers and small businesses and facilitating investments into community development via tax credits.
Massachusetts Housing Partnership (MHP) works with communities to create innovative policy and financing solutions that provide affordable homes and better lives for the people of Massachusetts.
Sunwealth changes the way we invest in renewable energy by focusing on community-based projects on rooftops, parking lots, and open spaces in the built environment to bring solar energy to low-income communities and underserved markets.
Website Notices
All information is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute, and should not be construed or used as an offer to sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy, interest or shares in the fund described above. No offer or solicitation may be made prior to the delivery offering documents, which will contain additional information including disclosures relating to risk factors and conflicts of interest. If you have any questions, please contact Social Finance at info@socialfinance.org.
![Two residents of Boston standing in front of a building.](https://socialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/LISC-Nikia-Londy-and-Baron-Langston_Vertullo-Building-scaled-e1678303484902-1000x1000.jpg")
