Investing Local Money to Support Local Communities
A new organization has created a fund to do just that
Perhaps you’ve heard this: When we spend money at locally owned businesses, more of those dollars stay in the community. That’s kind of the idea behind Local Return, a nonprofit organization that has established a Rhode Island investment fund to benefit areas of Rhode Island that have not benefited from traditional investing.
One of the four founders of Local Return – Jessica David – happens to live in East Greenwich so we sat down with her recently to learn more about the fund, called the Diversified Community Investment Fund.
She and the other founders – Josh Daly, Raul Figueroa, and Lisa Raiola – have experience working on projects meant to help poorer communities. David, for instance, worked for the Rhode Island Foundation for many years.
“All of us had worked on various initiatives that were supposed to address these issues but it didn’t really happen,” she said. “We were like, why is this not working? Our hypothesis was that it was really about wealth and ownership and assets. And that usually everything that’s done is about programmatic intervention – sort of like, top-down interventions. It wasn’t really about on-the-ground ownership.”