Connecting Community and Investment for a Better Chicago

Real estate development projects and small businesses in these communities often face funding challenges for many reasons: Systemic racism and historic disinvestment, perceived risk, limited assets, constrained development capacity, and other obstacles that prevent projects from meeting “traditional” financial benchmarks to secure funding.

The Desk translates these challenges into opportunities by identifying creative solutions to close funding gaps for transformative community development. Specifically, the Desk leverages private market expertise and knowledge of financial markets to put community projects in a position to attract access to needed capital.