Community Vision Capital & Consulting

Community Vision Capital & Consulting is a community development financial institution that provides affordable financial products and consultant services to nonprofit organizations throughout Northern California. It has expertise in community development, nonprofit management, and financial analysis, and specializes in increasing the sustainability of organizations that are facing displacement or considering facility projects — services that are particularly important given the high cost of real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Continued support for the consulting and training programs of Community Vision helps advance the Performing Arts Program’s overall strategic framework.

The Northern California Community Loan Fund is a nonprofit that provides financial expertise and loan capital to organizations serving low-income communities in Northern and central California. The fund’s mission is to promote economic justice and alleviate poverty by increasing the financial resilience and sustainability of community-based nonprofits and enterprises. Through a variety of workshops and one-on-one engagements, the fund helps organizations understand their financial position and business models, offers audit preparation and advice on budgeting, and assesses their debt capacity.

The Northern California Community Loan Fund (NCCLF) provides technical assistance, grants, and low-interest loans for facility projects of Bay Area organizations. In 2003 and 2004, the Foundation awarded NCCLF a total of $3.5 million to provide individual technical assistance and grants to eighteen performing arts facility projects in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Vallejo, and Sonoma. The foundation has augmented this support with general operating grants most recently, including $250,000 in 2007. With this organizational effectiveness grant NCCLF will hire the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) to conduct a strategic planning process resulting in a business plan to guide the organization through 2011. CFED worked with NCCLF in 2004 to create a strategic plan that took the group through 2009 and now Executive Director Mary Rogier and Board Chair Ann Cameron seek to engage the same consultancy because the previous experience successfully enabled NCCLF to achieve programmatic growth over the past five years. The proposed strategy review is particularly timely due to the current turmoil in the financial markets. Fifty percent of NCCLF’s investment dollars in their loan pool come from the banking industry and there is greater risk of non profit borrowers not being able to repay their loans due to the restrictions on access to credit. It is imperative that NCCLF take a moment at this juncture to answers some key questions about its capacity to increase loan amounts, extending services into the Central Valley, how to grow its capital base, which of the many opportunities it is considering does it make most sense to pursue given financial limitations? This strategic planning process will address these issues. (Organizational Effectiveness $30,0000; 50% of project budget).