Enterprise Community Partners

Enterprise Community Partners works nationwide to create and advocate for affordable homes in thriving communities linked to good schools, jobs, transit and health care. With this award, Enterprise -- in partnership with the Chicago Metropolitan Area Planning agency, the Metropolitan Planning Council, and Chicago Fair Housing Alliance – convenes county, municipal, and public housing administrators to highlight best practices in fair housing. The meeting will help to develop an Affirmatively Fair Housing Plan and will highlight the economic and social benefits of advancing place-based equity. The meeting sustains efforts to advance a unified vision for fair housing in the seven-county Chicago metropolitan region.

Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) is a national intermediary that funds, finances, manages, and builds affordable housing to expand opportunity for low- and moderate-income people in communities across the country. Grant funds support the Make Room campaign to build awareness of the rental affordability crisis in the United States and to integrate Enterprise’s state and local policy initiatives into the effort. The campaign aims to expand the constituency pressing for more affordable rental housing to include networks of individuals in the public, private and philanthropic sectors, who can effect change; it also seeks to to promote greater opportunity, health and well-being for rent-burdened families. To support local partners in addressing rental affordability crises in their communities, Enterprise is providing the tools and strategies needed to make the case for more resources and for policies to increase the availability of affordable rental housing.

The vision of Enterprise Community Partners is for every person to one day have an affordable home in a vibrant community, a mission it has pursued for more than 30 years, raising nearly $16 billion to help build or preserve 320,000 affordable homes and create more than half a million jobs nationwide. Enterprise Community Partners, in partnership with Folio Investing, will launch an online community investment marketplace, enabling individual and institutional impact investors to easily find and provide capital to mission-driven financial intermediaries known as Community Development Financial Institutions. By providing a sophisticated and fully functional site for purchasing regulated securities issued by these institutions, this innovative marketplace should efficiently unlock capital from new and more investors, enabling more resources to flow to activities aimed at strengthening low-income and underserved communities across the United States.

Enterprise Community Partners works to create opportunity for low- and moderate-income people by advocating for, investing in, and leveraging financial resources to create and preserve safe, healthy, affordable homes in thriving communities. This grant supports ECP to develop and launch a seven-year national call-to-action campaign to create and engage a broad-based constituency that will advocate for and raise new resources to help ensure that all families have a home that is affordable and promotes economic opportunity. ECP will staff, manage, and launch the campaign, including developing creative concepts and collateral material.

Energy efficiency improvements of affordable rental housing result in lower energy and water costs, reduced carbon emissions, and improved indoor living environments. Enterprise Community Partners is among the nation’s top ten financiers of affordable rental housing and has been actively working for nearly a decade to incorporate more environmentally-conscious practices into how that housing is built and managed. Enterprise will use this grant to investigate the feasibility of a new social venture dedicated to the delivery of high-quality energy efficiency services and products to the affordable rental housing sector.