Living Cities Blended Catalyst Fund 2021 Annual Report

This report summarizes Living Cities Blended Catalyst Fund’s (BCF) activities during its sixth year of operations, from July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021 (FY21).

During this fiscal year, the BCF Team fully committed the Fund as of March 31, 2021 reaching 26 investments totaling $33.5MM. The latter half of the BCF investments have been aligned with the iterated investment thesis we articulated in 2018, which was to focus on closing racial wealth gaps, and specifically to lend to organizations and intermediaries that are:

1. Managed and/or owned by people of color.
2. Finding alternative ways of creating income and wealth-building opportunities for people of color, primarily by providing increased access to capital. This includes entities that have created alternative underwriting methodologies to create a more inclusive credit box; that are providing more flexible capital, with different types of terms and through alternative fund structures; and that are providing advisory services, technical assistance, and other types of support to entrepreneurs of color.
3. Building the ecosystem for entrepreneurs and managers of color.

Additionally, the Living Cities Catalyst Funds were named to the ImpactAssets 50 (IA50), an impact investing showcase featuring fund managers that deliver social, environmental, and financial returns, for the tenth consecutive year in February 2021. The IA50 is the first open-source, publicly published database of exceptional impact investing fund managers. Living Cities has been included in the IA50 every year since IA50’s inception.