Olamina

 

Olamina seeks to address the historic lack of access to capital in American communities — namely Black and Native communities, who have faced decades of disinvestment and intentional extraction.

Launched by Candide Group in 2019, Olamina provides impact-oriented loans to a variety of women- and BIPOC-led private debt providers. These organizations include such as CDFIs, non-profit loan funds, and other institutions, which invest in critical community staples including small business development, worker cooperatives, and low-income housing.


Current Fund Size

$40M

Impact Thesis

Olamina seeks to build tangible and sustainable community wealth by investing in access to asset-building, high-quality jobs, and self-determination for low-income communities. At Candide Group we've seen huge demand from both sides of this equation — investors who want to apply a social and racial justice lens to their work, and community organizations committed to racial justice that have been systematically excluded and need a lower cost of capital, with flexible terms. We launched Olamina to bridge that gap.

Olamina believes that organizations which are led by people from the communities they serve are ultimately able to manage resources and risk more effectively. At the time of investment, 100% of Olamina’s borrowers were led by women and people of color. We will also provide non-financial capital, such as access to networks, as part of our investment strategy. Unlike traditional loan funds, community borrowers are placed at the center of Olamina’s governance and design of solutions. At the same time, we seek to honor all stakeholders within the fund through participation in profits and through our Community Advisory Board, which advises on the fund strategy, reviews opportunities, and participates on the Credit Committee. Please see our FAQs to learn more about our approach. 

 

General Investment Strategy

Olamina focuses on senior unsecured loans of between $1M and $4M to CDFIs and other loan funds, and between $500k and $1M in direct loans to companies and other organizations. In some cases, Olamina may lend to CDFIs through intermediaries who have expertise around a specific community and are able to spur additional investments to smaller CDFIs in their network.

Team

Leslie Lindo (she/her)

Managing Director

Leticia Corona (she/her)

Portfolio Manager

 

FAQs

  • Sticking with Candide Group’s affinity for literary characters, Olamina’s namesake is Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. Set in California in the 2020s — where society has largely collapsed due to climate change, growing wealth and racial inequality, and corporate greed — the novel centers on a young woman of color who possesses what Butler dubbed hyperempathy or "sharing" – the ability to feel pain and other sensations she witnesses. Olamina boldly leads her community to search for a better future in the midst of their dystopian reality. Fittingly, Olamina has its origins in the African-Yoruban language, meaning “this is my wealth.”

  • The impact investing field is actively discussing the gaps in many of our systems, specifically the financial system, as a result of systemic racism. Potential noteholders are looking to invest in local communities with institutions that have an established track record of repayment to investors, low default rates, and the ability to work in collaboration with the communities they serve. Foundations and Donor Advised Funds (amongst others) have significant appetite for loans and investments that could be activated towards social and racial justice. CDFIs and private funds are seeking patient and flexible capital to fund their loan programs, to serve low- to moderate-income communities who have been historically excluded and abused by the financial system. The Fund will provide CDFIs with capital that meets these needs and offers noteholders a way to support these organizations in a low-risk, high-impact way.

  • We are grateful to members of the Pritzker family who are the donor advisors to the initial investments made by ImpactAssets in Olamina. We collaborated with them in creating both the structure and values of Olamina including the Community Advisory Board. It was important to us all that we created Olamina as a vehicle to invite others to participate and also engage in deeper conversations with investors on what a return ("interest") should be when we are investing in social justice and to whom that return should accrue. The Fund will manage risk with the aim of capital preservation to serve social and racial justice for the long term. We are under no illusions that launching this fund would not have been possible without the family's willingness to fund the start-up costs to allow us the time we needed to research and develop Olamina rooted in values.  You can learn about our experience through various articles.

    When we are investing in communities that have experienced historic extraction, systemic racism and predatory practices, what is considered “reasonable return” to investors must be redefined beyond mere financial return and oriented first toward social return.* Our hope is that we can encourage the field to talk more concretely about what it means to invest in social justice, especially when discussing restoration and repair. 

  • The fund is intentional in who it choses as service partners and from what communities those service partners are based. We are committed to getting outside of our “Bay Area bubble” and spending more time in community learning about the intersectionality of issues that racism and white supremacy upholds.

  • CDFIs have been doing their work quietly and consistently for the last thirty years in significantly disadvantaged communities, supporting a wide variety of businesses owned by women and people of color. In 2001, the Brookings Institute wrote that CDFIs helped prove that gender and race are not reliable indicators of financial performance. The financial system has been built centering race and gender as adverse indicators of financial performance, from racial covenants in loan agreements in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, redlining, or the market failure within venture capital funding that allocated 2.2% of $85B to women founders and <1% or women of color founders in 2018. Since this study came out, CDFIs continued to grow and weathered the great recession despite lending to populations that the traditional financial market deemed risky. They have been flowing capital to the most impacted for many years and have been disproving the systems assumptions. They have work to do around ecosystem building and how they think about community wealth but in reality, CDFIs are some of the first social justice funders.

  • We seek to honor all stakeholders within the Fund through community participation in profits and a Community Advisory Board.

    Decisions on loans are made by the Credit Committee. The Credit Committee is comprised of the Managing Director and the two founding partners of Candide, Morgan Simon and Aner Ben-Ami and Community Advisory Board members. The Community Advisory Board members also have a veto vote in that no loans can be made without their consent.

  • If you know of investors interested in contributing to the fund — or know awesome CDFIs, funds, and/or social enterprises that are rooted in racial and economic justice — we’d love for you to introduce us directly.

Ecosystem Partners

 Current Loan Clients

Community Advisory Board

Olamina is structured to close the funding gap for organizations led by and for community members. We value community relationships as a risk mitigant, and the importance of community representation when serving people. We also value models that place the community at the center of governance and the design of solutions. 

As part of the governance for Olamina, we have built-in stakeholder representation through a Community Advisory Board, which advises on strategy, reviews opportunities from a community wealth building perspective, and participates in credit decisions as part of the Credit Committee, which approves all loans. We are also interested in shifting the power dynamics embedded within our current financial system. This diverse group of individuals not only contributes to the decision-making of who we fund, but also whose financial contribution we accept in support of our communities.

Service Providers

 Olamina Newsfeed