7) A Grassroots Community Engaged Investment Approach to Housing Investment

Housing access and affordability remains a key issue for many communities, and unsurprisingly is one of the most pressing areas of grassroots mobilization. It is also an area where impact-oriented investors have sought to support and develop affordable housing and fund real estate projects that stabilize neighborhoods. There have been many successes within these investments, but rarely do these mission-driven investors provide residents and other community members an opportunity to shape the investment process.

Grassroots Community Engaged Investment (GCEI), the practice of investment with input and governance from grassroots stakeholders, is an answer to the imbalance of power in investment decision making. As explored in Transform Finance’s 2021 report on GCEI, models of sharing power, ownership, and governance have proliferated across community development investment. GCEI is being used to build equitable place-based economies, which includes housing investments. In this session, Curt Lyon of Transform Finance will explore the potential for GCEI to provide greater alignment between the capital of mission-driven investors and the communities they serve, detail several models of GCEI focusing specifically on housing, and discuss the potential for other models to be applied to the housing sector.