To the Editor:
The news of the Genesis Community Loan Fund leaving Damariscotta as reported in the LCN on Nov 21, 2014 prompted me to clarify CEI’s move to Brunswick, as reported in the LCN Aug. 28, 2013 – and to offer this bit of history and concept of community investing.
Coastal Enterprises Inc., headquartered in Wiscasset for over 30 years, will continue to maintain an office in Wiscasset, making loans and investments in Lincoln County, counseling businesses, and working with the Lincoln County Commissioners and planning office to the extent we are needed.
Over the years CEI has mobilize $45 million in support of a variety of enterprises and projects that create jobs, support natural resources ventures in farms, fish and forests, provide affordable housing or access to child care, and help contribute to the region’s economic self-sufficiency. We will continue all of this activity.
With respect to the Genesis Community Loan Fund and their earlier history and founding, I want to add the important role Midcoast churches – and particularly Lincoln County churches – played in its formation. CEI helped organize the Genesis Fund in the early 1990s with support from the Lily Endowment based in Indianapolis.
This was a national demonstration of the Endowment’s American Religious History department in which more than 20 organizations nation-wide participated. The Ford Foundation also stepped up with grant funds to further capitalize the demonstration.
The demonstration aimed to forge partnerships between churches, their respective judicatory endowments, and parishioners, and community development corporations like CEI. Historically, the concept of the such corporations was rooted in the civil rights era of the ’60s and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to create opportunities through investment in rural regions and urban neighborhoods left out of the economic mainstream.
Community development corporations are typically private, nonprofit investment companies organized to raise public and private funds for job-creating economic and affordable housing development. The Lily Endowment demonstration sought to inspire churches to steer some of their own endowment resources to these entities for the benefit of those at the margins of the economy.
Many voices from the religious community came together to design and launch the program, which included developing a nine-unit transitional housing project in Wiscasset, and, the formation of the Genesis Fund.
The Rev. Richard Hall of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church [retired] in Wiscasset, the Rev. John Ineson, then of St. Andrews Church [retired], in Newcastle, John Chapman of Damariscotta, a lay member of the American Baptist Church in Damariscotta, and several other Midcoast clergy, banded together to submit the grant.
Religious institutions here in Maine, nationally and internationally of all persuasions have been active in ways to invest some of their resources to community projects. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a project of the National Council of Churches, has advocated for greater accountability of corporations and financial institutions to responsible behavior in products and countries and communities where they do business – and to community investing.
Today more than ever, especially after the 2008 financial meltdown, individual and institutional investors are paying closer attention to what’s been called “impact investing” – applying investment criteria that judges companies accountable to environmental, equity and governance behavior, or “ESG” as it’s commonly referred to.
There’s a growing consciousness among people with the resources, those who want to make a difference with their funds, to have a positive impact on society.
Hopefully, initiatives like CEI, Genesis, and other community-building enterprises, can and will serve the important role of aggregating investment capital for impact on social, economic and environmental returns. The stakes today, with climate change or income inequality – are higher than ever.
(Ed Note: Ron Phillips is CEI’s Chief Executive Officer.)
