Since 1985, Boston Community Loan Fund (the Loan Fund) has provided critical help to organizations serving low-income people by providing loan capital and technical expertise.

Community-based organizations need loan capital. The Loan Fund supplies capital - more than $150 million in the past 5 years - to projects and organizations that might otherwise not be financed. The measure of the Loan Fund's effectiveness is that it funds projects that often were not able to secure loans from traditional financial institutions, yet it maintains an extraordinary lending record with total losses of less than one-third of one percent.

The Loan Fund makes loans based on its assessment of the borrower's capabilities, the Loan Fund's knowledge of the community and its evaluation of the community impact of the project. The Loan Fund provides technical assistance to its borrowers before, during and after a loan is made to ensure the project's success.

Most of our loans have been used to expand affordable housing. In recent years, the Loan Fund has also made loans to organizations providing services that are important to the community, such as construction loans for day care centers and working capital for social service providers. In addition to our borrower base of metropolitan Boston, we currently have projects in Somerville, Woburn, Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester, Salem, Natick and Waltham as well as affordable housing loans on Cape Cod.

In the past 20 years, the Loan Fund has:

• lent more than $210 million to projects that build healthy communities where low-income people live and work
• experienced loan losses of less than one tenth of one percent
• created or preserved more than 8,200 units of affordable housing
• approved non-housing loans supporting:
  • commercial development
  • child care facilities
  • youth service organizations
  • environmental preservation
  • Massachusetts' first inner city, low-income assisted living facility
  • a teen pregnancy prevention program