Boston Impact Initiative’s Impact Director, Aliana Pineiro was interviewed alongside entrepreneur and owner of CASABE Fruit Store & Deli, Wendy Luzon for a segment about Hispanic Heritage Month on Chronicle 5 on Sept 16th.

Watch here

SCI’s mission is to strengthen communities by connecting diverse individuals and organizations through civic engagement initiatives. SCI provides communities with skills and tools to engage citizens to make a difference, with a priority on promoting youth success and healthy communities. In 2021, they recognized Betty Francisco for leveraging her social capital in support of healthy, equitable communities. Watch here. 

Beantown Builders is a Brockton-based general contracting firm that specializes in residential remodeling projects in the Greater Boston area. The company works with first-time homebuyers who take 203K loans to remodel the homes, which are often distressed properties. In 2021, BII made a loan to Beantown Builders to support company growth. Learn more

Caribbean Integration Community Development (CICD) is a non-profit housing and community development organization that creates and maintains affordable housing in areas of Boston with large numbers of people of Caribbean descent. The organization’s first affordable housing development is Cote Village in Mattapan, which will be permanently affordable and meet LEED Silver Sustainability Standards. In 2021, BII extended a line of credit to CICD to smooth cash flows and facilitate its growth. Learn more

Message From Our President

Dear Friends,

When BII first launched our pilot fund in 2013, there was no such thing as a racial justice lens in impact investing. What a long way we’ve come since then! With eight years and over 60 investments under our belts, we’ve learned a great deal about what it takes to invest to close the racial wealth divide in our communities. Over the past few years and especially in 2020, that’s emerged as a central thesis for many funds in Massachusetts and throughout the nation.

Today, our fund and the entrepreneurs we’ve invested in continue to thrive, despite the challenges of COVID-19. Our Integrated Capital Fund-Building Cohort members are well on their way to launching their own place-based funds. So now our work is about transforming the field so that closing the racial wealth divide becomes integral to any community-focused investing strategy. That means sharing what we’ve learned about how to source, diligence, structure and manage investments based on the principles of economic justice. It includes helping to rebalance the relationship between financial and impact returns so entrepreneurs are rewarded for the social and ecological impact they create. And it includes exploring innovative governance structures that disaggregate capital from power so that the patterns of the past aren’t recreated in the funds of the future.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been working closely with our Board on identifying a new leader for the organization with the skills, passion and relationships to take BII into the future. We feel enormously fortunate to have found that leader in Betty Francisco, who I am honored to announce as BII’s incoming CEO.

If you haven’t crossed paths with Betty yet, you probably will soon enough. Betty comes to us from Compass Working Capital where she has served as General Counsel for the last 3½ years. She is also the co-founder of Amplify Latinx and sits on the boards of BILH, the Boston Foundation and Nellie Mae Education Foundation, among others. Boston Magazine named her as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Boston in 2020 and 2018, and the Boston Business Journal named her as one of the 2020 Power 50 – Extraordinary Year Extraordinary People. Betty is no stranger to BII, as we’ve been blessed to have her serving on BII’s Investment Committee since January 2019.

Since the onset of COVID-19, Betty has been a force of nature on behalf of entrepreneurs of color who have disproportionately endured the ravages of COVID-19 on their economic well-being. I’ve witnessed her light a fire underneath lenders and angel investors, technical assistance providers and researchers, philanthropists and policymakers to take action to correct structural inequities in our communities. Betty will begin her tenure as CEO on May 17^th, when she’ll bring that passion and dedication to BII as a platform from which she can continue to build multi-stakeholder partnerships and collaborations throughout our state and beyond.

I will continue in my role as Board President to partner with Betty in transitioning BII into its next stage of growth. Please join me in welcoming our new CEO.

Warmly,

Deborah Frieze
Founder and President

Dear Friends,

Boston Impact Initiative condemns the racially motivated murders in Atlanta on March 16th. This act is another case of the uniquely American plague of mass shootings, which tragically occurred again just days later in Boulder. But the Atlanta attack was a mass shooting mixed with white supremacy – something that we also witnessed in Charleston in 2015, Pittsburgh in 2018, and El Paso in 2019. We stand with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in their grief, and we lift up the experiences of women, for whom this violence is appalling yet its misogynist roots are familiar. For the AAPI community, this is another horrific incident in a long history of being targeted, excluded, and scapegoated in this country.

For me, I feel a personal connection with the AAPI community. My grandmother, Fredisvinda, came to the U.S. from the Philippines as a war bride in 1951. The U.S. held the Philippines as a colony from 1898 to 1946 and maintained an enormous naval base there until 1992. My American grandfather was in the U.S. Navy during WWII, stationed at Subic Bay.

When my grandparents moved back to the States with their daughters, they settled in Pennsylvania and my grandmother made her new home despite being faced with anti-Asian sentiment. This harassment ranged from neighbors protesting when my grandparents purchased their house to people yelling “Die, Japs!” and making machine-gun noises when my grandmother was out with her daughters. But my grandmother loved the U.S. She was the first in her family to emigrate and she encouraged many Filipino relatives to become U.S. citizens by serving in the U.S. Navy.

I am sharing this personal story to say that the people who were murdered on March 16th, most of them Asian-American women, each had their own story. And like my grandmother, many were striving for a decent life despite the anti-Asian harassment and violence perpetuated by their neighbors and the government.

At BII, we are standing in solidarity with the AAPI community in the Boston area, which has suffered harassment, economic hardship, and lack of access to capital, especially in the last year. Here are some organizations that are doing exceptional work in Eastern MA. Please join us in supporting them.

• Chinatown Community Land Trust
• Chinese Progressive Association
• The Boston Foundation Asian Community Fund
• VietAID

Sincerely,

Aliana Pineiro

Impact Director, Boston Impact Initaitive

BII Fund was named one of Integrated Capital Investing’s Transformative 25 List by founder Jen Astone
The list spotlights twenty-five “myth-busters and courageous innovations” transforming finance for
people and the planet. BII Founder, Deborah Frieze was interviewed for this honor. Read the interview
here.

Caraballo Accounting provides accounting and HR services and training to Latinx small business owners in Eastern MA. Through cultural competence and Spanish-language instruction, they address barriers for local entrepreneurs looking to launch, grow, and expand their businesses. Owner Franklin Caraballo has partnered with various local Latinx organizations to address the need for advisory support and small- business coaching in the region. He currently serves the communities of Lowell, Lawrence, and Worcester. In 2021, BII made a loan for expanding the team and building out its online training platform.

Learn more about Caraballo Accounting

The Chelsea Business Foundation is a nonprofit organization that invests in the development of the business community in Chelsea, MA and fosters increased access to resources for Chelsea’s Latino business community and other small businesses. Its goal is to create an engaged community by hosting events and providing resources, technical assistance, and financial support. CBF is an enabler for small business owners to grow and scale their businesses. In 2020, BII provided a loan and a line of credit to Chelsea Business Foundation to support its technical assistance for small businesses.

Learn more about Chelsea Business Foundation