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November 2024

Nov 25

Tapestry Community Capital to receive $3M as a CMHC Housing Supply Challenge finalist

By Affordable Housing, News

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Housing Supply Challenge has named Tapestry Community Capital a finalist, awarding the organization a $3 million prize to scale up Canada’s community finance market for affordable housing. 

Tapestry works with charities, nonprofits and cooperatives, including 19 affordable housing providers, to support them in raising capital using a tool called community bonds. Housing organizations issue community bonds — which can be purchased by anyone in and beyond their communities — to finance any part of the development process. Community bonds allow these providers to take control of their financing, since they can set their bond terms to align with their project timelines, rather than relying on grant cycles or accepting terms offered by commercial lenders. 

The investment vehicle also allows organizations to engage everyday Canadians in solving the housing crisis via their investments — and to offer returns directly to their communities, making community bonds a local economic development tool, too. 

Ryan Collins-Swartz, Tapestry’s Co-Executive Director, says: “Canadians witness the effects of our broken housing system daily, but feel powerless to make a difference. It doesn’t have to be this way. By investing in community bonds, people across the country are directly funding affordable housing for their neighbours. Tapestry is working to make community bonds mainstream, empowering thousands of Canadians to help solve the housing crisis. We’re grateful to the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge for its support, which will accelerate this work.” 

A group photo of 13 members of the Tapestry Community Capital team.

The Tapestry Community Capital team.

With the Housing Supply Challenge prize, Tapestry will continue its work on three key initiatives: 

  • A new pooled community bond fund: In 2025, Tapestry will launch a $30 million investment fund, which will pool capital to invest across community bonds across the country, helping them reach targets faster and more reliably. This will be especially important for rural and remote communities which may not have the population density or the local wealth to support an entire community bond raise. The fund will also allow institutional investors to participate in the community bond market by making the large investments needed to justify their due diligence processes without crowding out everyday community investors in individual campaigns. 
  • An improved back-end experience for issuers and investors: Tapestry is building a new version of its investment management system, with features that will significantly streamline the process of preparing to sell community bonds. In the future, Tapestry plans to convert this technology into a public-facing marketplace, where investors can browse and easily purchase community bonds from across the country on one central platform. 
  • Building cross-sector support for community investing: Tapestry is inviting representatives from across financial institutions, governments, academia, the nonprofit sector, and more to join and shape a coalition committed to moving the community bond sector forward. This means bringing awareness of the model to their respective communities and strategizing ways to remove barriers to community bond issuers and investors.

About Tapestry Community Capital 

Tapestry is a nonprofit organization supporting community bond issuers across Canada. While Tapestry focuses on affordable housing, it also supports nonprofits and cooperatives in raising capital to purchase community arts venues, build community-owned renewable energy infrastructure, and more. Launched six years ago, to date Tapestry has helped issuers raise over $110 million from more than 4,000 community investors, and is set to double that raised amount in the next two years via affordable housing community bonds. Learn more at tapestrycapital.ca. 

About the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge 

The Housing Supply Challenge is a $300-million commitment over five years, which invites citizens, stakeholders and housing experts to propose solutions to the barriers to new housing supply. Round 5 of the Challenge aims to increase the adoption of transformative, system-level solutions that enable the quicker delivery of both community and market housing. Learn about the other Round 5 finalists on the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge website. 

Media contact:

Kylie Adair
Communications Lead, Tapestry Community Capital
kylie@tapestrycapital.ca
613-601-5636 

Nov 14

Do you need a big audience to successfully raise community bonds?

By Affordable Housing, Education

This is a feature from Tapestry’s newsletter, The Thread. To receive bi-weekly deep dives into non-profit and co-op financing, subscribe at tapestrycapital.ca/newsletter.

Lindsay Harris wants Propolis Housing Cooperative, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2020 to build affordable homes in Kamloops, to end the housing crisis in one of Canada’s most expensive provinces. “We really see our vision as an organization for the long term,” she tells us. “In the future, we want to be owning and operating a network of multifamily buildings in the community.”

Of course, building a six-storey co-op building on Kamloops’ north shore, with 50 units ranging from bachelor to three-bedroom, plus commercial space on the ground floor, isn’t cheap. Propolis had a hard time qualifying for bank loans, as well as the funding programs offered through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporations. It didn’t yet have a community of supporters, so to speak.

So how did Propolis, in the span of just four years, go from incorporating as a brand-new organization to clearing 90% of a $1.1 million community bond campaign, and eventually buying the land for that co-op?

They talked to everybody

In the early stages of their campaign, Propolis did some planning with Tapestry Community Capital to understand who their organization was connected to, and whether they might invest in — or spread the word about — their bonds. For instance, together we identified a network in local food security, an issue that unfortunately dovetails with the housing crisis. They’re also connected local businesses around the building site, with an interest economic development. And much more.

But it’s also meant having a lot of conversations across the table at a farmer’s market, at big community events, and in one-on-one conversations. Everyone on the team has to be able to explain both the project and the concept of community bonds in a deep and thoughtful way. “We didn’t have an existing mailing list of supporters when we started the campaign,” Lindsay says. “We were introducing ourselves to them, as a new organization, at the same time.”

They kept their campaign open-ended

Propolis held their first investor consultations in early 2023, and launched the campaign in early June of that year. Lindsay says if she could go back, she would start the community engagement process years earlier. Trying to explain who Propolis is and the bond campaign at once isn’t something she’d do again.

But by keeping their campaign open for over a year, Propolis has been able to continue selling bonds and using them to repay two short-term loans they needed to purchase the property back in March 2024. While this approach doesn’t work for every organization — it can be better to give supporters a deadline, to convey urgency — it’s worked well for Propolis to build relationships over time.

Propolis is close to 90% of its target raise, but Lindsay and the rest of the team aren’t slacking off. “Just yesterday, I went and did a big long presentation to the Kamloops Adult Learner society about the housing crisis, talking about the solutions that Propolis is doing,” Lindsay says. “It’s not actually a process that stops.”

Take the next step and bring your project to life

If you are interested in using Community Bonds to finance your next project, our Tapestry team can help you. We have the expertise, staff and technology to make your bond campaign a success.

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