Page 8 RAIN March/April 1985 the lenders to name their terms·. So if you were interested in lending money to ICE's revolving loan fund, you would tell us how much you wanted to lend, for how long a time, at what rate of interest, what repayment 'schedule, and if you. have any special conditions on the use of the fund or preference about urban/rural, housing/bu~iness~ or whatever, you would identify those, and as long as we feel that the terms you have set are workable, given our knowledge of what kinds of capital we can put to use, we would accept the loan. Many loans go to groups that we have provided technical assistance to, but that's not a requirement. ... There have been insfan~es where a group will come in, and we will require technical assistance, not necessarily from ourselves, as one of the conditions for making the loan, if we feel that the group is a solid group and it's a viable project, but it seems clear that they need assist- · ance or training to carry that project off successfully. So thafs part of a long evaluation process.. ..· To date, we have not lost any money, and we've never been a day late in a payment to a lender. ' To date, we have not lost any money, and we've never been a day late in a payment to a lender, which is not to say that there haven't been occasions where borrowers have been late in their payments to us. There have been som~, but we've never been a day late in a payment to a lender. · RAINt,How big is the loan fund? Matthei: At this point the loan fund amounts to ,about a milliqn and a half. We're expecting it to double this year. The last two years it's increased by about a half a million each year.... · This is still largely wor~ of mouth growth. We're out and around in the field of socially responsible.investing and expanding and there are these conferences and things now, so'there is more exposure of that sort, but we've never done a promotional mailing on the fund itself. We've never undertaken a capitalization drive...·. You know, as I indicated, the loan fund, which was essentially conceived as a resource to support the technical assistance program, has emerged into a whole program of it~ own. We moved from simple operation of our own loan fund to working with a number of individual groups to identify potential sources of capitpl in their own community and help them approach tho~e sources. We found that our participation as a third party advocate, broker, whatever you want to call it, could be very helpful in moving money from local lenders to local borrowers .. . . [We can contribut~] a familiarity with the issues and the language of finance, which some corpmunity groups have and many do not. After the community group has, described their community, their needs, their project, and their capital needs [to the potential lenders], we come in and say, "These SQcial problems that the group has presented to you this morning are not unique to Portland, they exist in other communities around the country and frankly theire getting worse," and tell one or two stories, but then say, "But I'm not here to talk to you about social problems because I know you share my - concern with the problems they have described or none of us would be here together to meet with them today. Let me talk to you about whether there's a financially as · well as socially responsible investment opportunity for your institution in this projed. Now, what are the traditional concerns of investors? They are: one, two, three, four, five. Let's deal, one by one, with the wa.y in which these community investment opportunities address those investor concerns." We'll go·through that and make that kind of a presentation. Well that's not only informative in a helpful way, but it's also reassuring to the prospective lender tqat someone in this pool u.nderstands what their concerns are and is conversant . with the language of finance.... So, ·we've found that our as~istance with~ community group can be very.much worth their while and a little bit of time and a minor expense on their part in getting that -money moving and setting a precedent. And we found that as we becam~ a more active lender and began assisting groups to mobilize comn:mnity investment capital, the word tei:i-qs to get out. You w_ork with one group in a.city and they score and it doesn't take long before every other housing group in the city knows about this and they're saying, "Aha, $400,000 at three to eight percent. Where are they gefting this? How can I get it?" You know, that's exciting, but it also is an opportunity that begins to create its own problem. The prospei:tive lender who is interested and willing to meet with the first group or two to go through one of these sessions, is not able or willing or interested in meeting with 20 or 30 or 40 groups on the same basis. You can do it once or twice but you can't do it over and over in that same format without overburdening the lender.... When it comes to placing investments, there's an effic~enCy of scale in a decentralized -program. So what we found was, the more our activity in community investment expanded, the moi:e we began to see, in certain areas, growing numbers of prospective lenders and borrowers, and the obvious need for some , kind of coordinating mechanism there. We did not feel that it was possible for us to play that role in this comm~nity and that community to the degree that it could and should be played, or that it was·appropriate.... In a community investment program there are certain '
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