I began at LEAF in 2019 with a background in the CDFI sector, working with one group which aimed to be a bridge between CDFIs and institutional investors, to bring more of that kind of funding into the CDFI space. So social impact investing has been my background, along with a couple of years in grad school for city planning.

I think co-ops are something that has always interested me because they align with my political values. In grad school, it was housing and land co-ops, land trusts, limited equity co-ops that really caught my interest as a promising solution to address gentrification and the other externalities affecting cities. Such as Philadelphia, where I was living at the time before relocating to Boston. LEAF had always been on my radar as one of the few groups at the intersection of community development, finance, and co-op development. Luckily for me, they had an opening right around the time my family moved to Boston.

They were actually a case study in my planning course because of their novel model for an urban land trust. And now it’s a pleasure that I get to work with some of these folks on a regular basis after having read about them.

LEAF was originally founded in 1982 as an affiliate of the ICA Group, one of the leading national co-op developers. Our current executive director came in about 15 years ago to keep the core focus on worker co-ops but to extend our involvement with food co-ops and housing co-ops, for example. Today food co-ops are the biggest single segment of our portfolio, with worker co-ops and small businesses a fairly close second. Housing co-ops and land trusts rank third in our mix but also the fastest-growing.

Well, everything on our balance sheet has been growing, but housing of course is more capital intensive. The food retail sector lately has been very active and successful throughout the pandemic, but pressures on the sector — the mainstreaming of health foods, Whole Foods stores popping up everywhere — are also increasing.

One of our advantages at LEAF is that although we concentrate on the organizational structures — shared ownership models — which is a fairly narrow universe, we have become very broad in our geographical reach. We now have clients in 27 states — which is wider than the more conventional, locally-focused CDFIs of our size might have.

Yes — it’s a more regionally focused offering, a very high-touch kind of consulting that works in Massachusetts with co-ops but also with other small businesses and social enterprises aligned with our vision of economic and racial justice.

Certainly — it put everybody on their back foot for a while, so we had a surge in demand for help with things like PPP applications and documentation, as well as providing support to our existing clients.

Yes, and you know what’s interesting: over 90 percent of our investors renew their investment at the end of their term. It is a long-term patient investment with a return which we think is comparable with the other sorts of low-risk, fixed income investments. For most of our investors it is just a piece of their overall portfolio, and they do tend to stick around.

I’d say we have a kind of flexibility due to the fact that we’re a bit different in our funding structure than many community loan funds. We have a very diversified and large group of somewhat smaller-dollar individuals — direct investors — that are rare to see in a CDFI of our size. We are accountable to these individuals, who expect LEAF to be creative in finding ways to support the cooperative economy.

Yes, because more conventional lenders are often founded by bankers and bring traditional ideas about things like a personal guarantee requirement, which have historically been a significant barrier for cooperatives — which don’t have an individual owner — to accessing loan capital. But LEAF and other co-op lenders make a choice not to require those guarantees and accept the greater level of risk that comes with that, and have developed a specific expertise working with cooperatives to manage that risk. When you look back at our whole founding vision, this approach was actually kind of built into things — our interest in offering bespoke financing products and features to serve a different set of priorities.

In Bloomington, Indiana, we’re working with a co-op housing group to renovate a 5,000-square-foot dilapidated mansion — a huge place in rough condition — thanks to new zoning regulations in the city that allow cooperatives to house more individuals in properties zoned for single-family use.

So the Bloomington group is renovating it into what will be an 18-bedroom housing co-op. Not just for students but for young families needing affordable housing, with a shared commercial-grade kitchen and a bike repair station open to the community.

Zoning laws are changing in lots of places. Across the board, we’re seeing a lot of creativity and technical innovation in terms of legal and regulatory frameworks aimed at supporting shared ownership.