Our Investments

This investment provides capital for affordable housing development loans in the Atlanta, GA region, with a focus on supporting under-resourced developers. While ANDP serves communities across Georgia, it prioritizes high-risk neighborhoods in south metro Atlanta that continue to face limited access to quality affordable housing, capital disinvestment, and gentrification pressures. SCF’s loan will support ANDP’s bridge, predevelopment, and construction financing to local nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing developers, with proven success in developments within low-income neighborhoods. By expanding access to low-interest loans, this capital strengthens ANDP’s ability to combat housing instability and foster healthier, more resilient communities where Atlanta families can thrive.

This program targets “growth businesses” in Texas operated by women and minorities by utilizing flexible underwriting criteria (i.e. lower credit scores, lower LTV, smaller businesses, lower net worth, etc.) and intensive technical assistance. The goal of this program is to address long-standing wealth gaps and financing disparities for the most underserved populations. SCF has targeted a portion of its funds to be lent to BCL’s “Tranche 1” businesses which typically are newer enterprises with less track record and that require the most flexible underwriting parameters to qualify for loans. BCL is headquartered in Dallas with an office in Austin and it serves all of Texas.

This private equity fund was created to invest in (acquire or recapitalize) growth-stage, privately held companies located in rural and other underserved sectors of the US. These are the areas where growth equity capital is scarce yet necessary to compliment the debt capital that has sustained many of these companies. BHGCF will focus its national investment scope in the Northeast & Mid-Atlantic regions. BHGCF invests in small, middle-market companies—the growth engine that drives the rural economy and helps generate job growth. This is the first fund for Blue Highway Capital, a women-led partnership that also seeks to support women-led companies through its investments.

BCF provides working capital and flexible financing to help historically underserved small businesses—B2B firms— participate in corporate and government contracting supply chains. BCF’s loans help businesses fulfill contracts and invest in growth, in addition to their hands-on technical assistance, financial coaching, and back-office support that prepares businesses for procurement success. BCF partners with national corporations to support economic growth and resiliency in communities across the U.S and to ensure small businesses can benefit from the economic opportunities that come from these partnerships

This program targets to increase Fahe’s affordable housing and community facility development lending capacity across Appalachia. Fahe manages its own community serving loan programs, as well as deploys resources to its membership network of 50+ entities in 6 Appalachian states. This service region has been experiencing a chronic economic depression, with poverty rates that are double and with incomes that are half the national rates. This is coupled with a loss of its historic economic drivers (i.e. mining) causing high permanent job losses and vast under-investment to address long-standing social and economic challenges. FAHE’s work and investments seeks to counter these trends by supporting organizations that are building healthier and more connected rural communities.

SCF invested in FINCA International (FI) shortly after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 and to provide loan capital for micro-businesses in Haiti to support recovery efforts. Loans averaging $170 are issued to extremely poor women individually or as part of “village banking group loans” where members’ loan performance is tied together. Haiti is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world—more than half of its population lives on less than $2 a day. Haiti was one of FINCA’s highest risk and most underfunded Affiliate micro-loan programs given its long-standing political instability, faltering economy, and the destruction and destabilization caused by the earthquake in 2010.

GASBF is a new investment vehicle created to enhance and streamline large-scale capital raising for Grameen America Inc.’s (GAI) US-based small-business microloan program for low-income women. Organizationally, GAI’s targeted capital growth will enable it to achieve both corporate and branch-level financial sustainability by 2020. Programmatically, increased funding allows GAI to significantly increase its lending to low-income, female small-business owners characterized as having no source of affordable capital and no access to the banking system or financial education. Borrowers receive starting loans of $1,500 with no collateral requirements. The loans are structured as a group loan with five other friend or family borrowers, each with an individual loan. GAI’s program goals and outcomes include increasing business income, growing personal savings, asset building, credit building, increasing employment, and building more educated entrepreneurs. SCF’s capital has funded 370 loans totaling over $970,000 (2.8x its investment).

SCF provided $66,000 in seed capital for its $100,000 prototype mortgage fund. The Habitat Michigan Fund provides mortgages to people earning 60%-80% below AMI and the ACMP used a securitization structure to vastly reduce capital raising needs and to expedite the payback mortgage funds to Habitat Michigan Fund to 30-90 days, as opposed to the standard 20 to 30-year mortgage payback structure. This facilitates rapid re-use of funds for further home building and purchase activity. ACMP partners included Cinnaire and Michigan State Housing Development Authority and SCF required a matching investment of $34,000 from Habitat for Humanity Michigan.

Hamilton Hills is a two-phase development of an 88-unit LIHTC affordable multifamily community with community spaces, located on 3.6 acres in Atlanta, GA. The final development provides one to three bedrooms priced at 50%-60% of area median income, helping to meet the region’s growing demand for affordable housing, especially those serving lower income families. SCF invested in the second phase of the project, providing site acquisition capital to the project developer Gorman & Company, a nationally recognized LIHTC affordable housing developer. The project moved successfully into its construction phase, with SCF exiting the project in June of 2025.

Hope Credit Union (HCU) is a CDFI designated as a low-income serving credit union by the National Credit Union Administration. HCU’s core function is to provide affordable credit and to advance financial equity for low-income and underserved communities. HCU works in some of the highest poverty areas of the country—75% of their branches are located in high-poverty areas and 2/3 of all nationally-identified persistent poverty counties exist within their service area. HCU delivers on its mission: 47% of its business loans are made to minority- and women-led businesses; 67% of consumer loans were made in economically-distressed areas; 87% of home mortgages were made to first-time homeowners; and, their loans have resulted in food becoming available for purchase for 14,000 people living in food deserts. SCF’s investment provides general support to the organization to grow its array of critical loan programs benefitting low-income and underserved populations.

Lendistry—one of the nation’s only fintech certified CDFIs and a minority-led organization—creates economic opportunity and fosters sustainable growth for small business owners, particularly those not well served by traditional financial markets. In today’s financial landscape, small businesses face mounting barriers to securing capital, as many banks have scaled back or eliminated their small business lending programs and consolidation among community banks has further reduced options for entrepreneurs. During the height of COVID-19 pandemic, Lendistry’s underwent exponential growth by leveraging its tech-enabled financial platform to managing third-party COVID-related loan and grant programs. As the pandemic wanes and markets normalize, SCF’s investment capital provided support for Lendistry to transition back into doing direct lending.

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This program provides micro- to small-business loans of up to $25,000, deployed across LiftFund’s 13-state southern region service area. LiftUp uses LiftFund’s unique MMS risk modeling platform, which is based on over 10 years of loan performance data, to assess borrower eligibility. This program targets to serve emerging small businesses that may have less track record and sophisticated systems and likely have difficulties producing traditional forms of documentation needed to complete a loan process. The LiftUp program was funded by SCF’s earlier loan (2017-2019) and was created as an outgrowth of its prototype Promise Loan program developed to serve clients that LiftFund was unable to service using its existing platform of loan programs.

This capital provides disaster recovery loans to small businesses located within FEMA designated disaster areas in seven southern coastal states of the US (Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina). In recent years, these states have experienced increased occurrences of climate-related large-scale disasters. These disasters severely affect the business community which slows recovery efforts as general resources and services remain in low supply post-disaster as well as community economic development can be stagnated if these businesses are hampered in reopening and growing as needed (40% of businesses never reopen after a disaster). These loan funds will be used for up to 3 years post disaster designation to assist with the immediate business disaster response and recovery within the affected regions.

At the same time the LiftUp modification was being negotiated (see above LiftFund profile), Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, Texas in August 2017. The business community in Houston and surrounding communities—a core marketplace for LiftFund—were devastated. SCF responded by becoming one of the first funders of LiftFund’s new rapid-response disaster recovery fund by providing an additional $100,000 in loan capital for this program. This program created a suite of post-emergency loan relief and new loan programs with high flexibility, no interest, and rapid deployment timelines to assist small businesses to quickly rebuild and recover after this catastrophic hurricane. The Fund’s Impact Profile Two years after the the Fund was launched its impacts were: - $7.2 million in business relief funding - 322 small business owners lifted - 47% women-owned; 72% entrepreneurs of color - Established a strong coalition of 50+ community partners - 40 Take Action Now workshops and resource fairs; 619 workshop attendees - New partnership with U.S EDA on future effort to develop disaster preparedness toolkits for small businesses in the Gulf Coast