What is Community Investment?
Community investment is a strategy of using available resources to create a brighter future for a given community. The process may involve financial investment by large corporations, local business people, or even private citizens and grass roots organizations. In many cases, successfully investing in communities involves a combination of all these resources. An underlying principle of community investment is that taking steps to better the physical facilities, educational opportunities, or options for employment today will result in substantial rewards for everyone concerned in the future. By making the investment today, there are small immediate awards for the business, such as tax breaks or other privileges offered by the local government. At the same time, the community investing provided a platform that made the community more attractive to potential residents and in general improved the quality of life for everyone. Many textile companies in the United States employed this formul
Past definitions of ‘community investment’ have tended to define it in terms of particular types of project. Earlier research for the JRF, for example, defined food co-ops and foyers as community investment but not tenant consultation and estate caretakers. However, a foyer may have no community investment value if the area is already well served by foyers, whilst hiring caretakers working for a resident services organisation to look after an estate could represent investment in the community. This research found that the common thread in community investment was the formation of more sustainable communities. The study found associations involved in the following broad range of activities: • Making adult skills a priority; • Enabling wider access to information and communications technology; • Getting people into work; • Assisting welfare to work; • Keeping money in the neighbourhood; • Supporting and promoting enterprise; • Tackling anti-social behaviour; • Developing the role of neig
Community investing is doing just what the name says – investing in the community by investing in lower-income communities both domestically and internationally. The most common type of community investment is to take capital from individual investors and serve communities that have been overlooked by traditional financial services. By providing the much-needed capital that these communities do not have, community investing pours into those who have been denied access to financial services and opens up the doors for these people to purchase houses, begin small businesses within the community, and have access to childcare and affordable healthcare. Community Investment Institutions (CIIs) provide many important services in addition to loans such as education, mentoring, technical support and the creation of relationships between families, nonprofits and small businesses.
