Capital + services for businesses that employ working-class people in working-class places equals impact, says Damien Dwin of Washington, DC-based private lender Lafayette Square. “Increasing the number of high-quality jobs – good income and benefits – is really the first step in shared prosperity,” Dwin said on this week’s Agents of Impact Call.
Lafayette Square’s goals, he said, “meet the moment in terms of creating jobs for working class people in working class places, and seeing that employees are centered and receive better benefits because it’s good for the enterprise.”
Other featured plays in ImpactAlpha’s growing “Playbook for shared prosperity” are tools to manage – and preserve – homeownership as a vehicle for intergenerational wealth, and community-embedded insurance to help residents weather emergencies and capture the economic value of their own climate resilience efforts.
Homeownership preservation
Daniel Smith has built Keepingly, a digital platform for first-time and low-income homeowners to track and document the maintenance of their properties. Charlie Sidoti’s InnSure helps climate-vulnerable communities identify and mitigate risks that may spike premiums and lead to the loss of coverage.
InnSure is experimenting with “community embedded insurance” – group purchases through homeowners associations or municipal governments that can improve access to insurance and lower premium. “Right now about 50% or more of catastrophe risk is uninsured,” Sidoti said. “What we’re trying to do is really think about how risk financing is done in a way that closes that protection gap.”
Beyond economic security comes empowerment. Home, Smith said, “is not just the place where you feel good at. It’s the place where, hey, you need to be able to take out the equity. You need to be able to take out a loan, you need to be able to send your kids to school. We need to be thinking of your home like that.”
Targeted universalism
Pathways to shared prosperity can bring communities together. “One of the issues we look at is how do we do this equitably across races,” said Andrea Levere of Capitalize Good. “How do we broaden those categories so we have benefits that accrue to everyone but don’t forget the specific barriers that exist because of race.”
Just as sidewalk curb cuts designed for wheelchairs help parents with strollers and delivery people with carts, so solutions that lift communities of color also benefit white communities and the broader economy. Capitalize Good is helping even nonprofit businesses tap capital markets for flexible and long-term capital.
Such philanthropic equity, or “enterprise capital,” Levere says, could “unleash nonprofit power and potential to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all.”
