OZ Investing for Community Impact, With Allivate Impact Capital

How can the Opportunity Zone incentive catalyze community impact-oriented investing?

Allivate Impact Capital’s co-founders, Noelle St.Clair Lentz and Doug Schaeffer, join the show to discuss how investing for impact can catalyze positive community outcomes, and lead to lucrative financial returns for investors.

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Episode Highlights

• Background on Allivate Impact Capital, and its mission of elevating communities, alleviating poverty, and activating entrepreneurial ecosystems through innovative capital solutions.
• What the Community Reinvestment Act is, and how it encourages banks to make catalyzing investments in low-income neighborhoods.
• How Opportunity Zones sometimes (but not always) overlaps with CRA investing.
• Details on the $100 million national commercial real estate Qualified Opportunity Fund that Allivate Impact Capital has recently launched, seeded with $25 million.
• Examples of catalyzing impact investments that Woodforest has made to date.
• How Opportunity Zone investments are creating positive impact in local communities, countering the negative narrative that is prevalent in the media.
• Takeaways from the Opportunity Zone stakeholder meeting with EIG and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).
• Why the fund-of-funds structure and the Community Dynamism Fund proposed in the reform legislation would be great improvements to the Opportunity Zones policy.
• Why headline risk has prevented Opportunity Zones from becoming more institutionalized.

Featured On This Episode

• Woodforest OZ Fund Recognized As A Leading OZ Fund In The Forbes’ OZ 20 (PR Newswire)
• Woodforest National Bank Wins Global Innovation Award (PR Newswire)
• Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) (Treasury OCC)
• Ep #18: Measuring Impact in Opportunity Zones, with USIIA’s OZ Framework (OpportunityDb)
• Historic Hotel Reopens In Selma, AL, Creating 45 New Jobs, With Investment From Woodforest (PR Newswire)
• Woodforest Closes Over $1.3 Million OZ Equity Investment In Sharswood Ridge Project (PR Newswire)
• New Legislation Would Extend and Improve Opportunity Zones (OpportunityDb)
• Alex Flachsbart (Opportunity Alabama)

Today’s Guests: Noelle St.Clair Lentz & Doug Schaeffer, Allivate Impact Capital

• Noelle St.Clair Lentz on LinkedIn
• Doug Schaeffer on LinkedIn
• Allivate Impact Capital

About The Opportunity Zones Podcast

Hosted by OpportunityDb.com founder Jimmy Atkinson, The Opportunity Zones Podcast features guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in opportunity zones.