The Northern California Community Loan Fund, or NCCLF, a nonprofit lender and technical assistance and consulting provider based in San Francisco whose mission is to fund “socially responsible investments that revitalize Northern California communities,” in October presented a new non-profit loan scoring system that “measures impact in real-time.”
Significance
One of the many challenges of rating true impact of impacting investments is formulating a robust and transparent way of scoring impact consistently across products, whether those are made by social enterprises or are used as vehicles for funding impacting investments. A way to address this issue is to look at how other organizations, private or public, are designing and implementing their own scoring methodology.
NCCLF measures impact to four broad stakeholders: Community, Borrower, Beneficiaries, Financing. It uses the resulting impact scores to, for example, exclude or review loans with higher credit risk against high social impacts in low-income communities with historically low investment.
NCCLF’s scoring impact methodology was presented at the 2016 Opportunity Finance Network Conference in Atlanta.
Source: NCCLF
