Our Mission
Pacific Community Ventures supports small business owners and their communities in the fight for economic, racial, and gender justice. We work side-by-side with growing small business leaders and solopreneurs through our integrated model: combining impact-first Restorative Capital and Pro Bono Business Advising with our Good Jobs Innovation Lab that propels thriving communities with equitable jobs. Pacific Community Ventures is a 501c3 nonprofit impact investor and community development financial institution (CDFI).
Centering Civil Rights In Impact Investing
PCV pursues racial and economic justice by building financial products that center around small business owners’ needs. When COVID-19 hit, demand for PCV’s advising and capital grew almost 10,000%. While many banks and CDFIs stopped lending, and while many BIPOC business owners were excluded from Federal recovery programs, PCV kept lending open, without interruption, and rapidly responded to its clients by providing loan forbearances. PCV also increased flexibility in its lending criteria, accepting businesses with only partial revenues and doing away with minimum credit scores to qualify. Through 2021, 84% of PCV’s loan capital has gone to women- and/or BIPOC-owned businesses, and 85% has gone to small businesses located in economically distressed areas.
PCV is one of America’s first impact investors, aligning capital with justice initiatives and to work for communities of color against hundreds of years of systemic racism. Over the last two decades we helped shepherd the growing impact investing movement, launching the Impact Investing Policy Collaborative, advising the GIIN on the first and subsequent sets of IRIS impact metrics, and in providing research support to the U.S. National Advisory Board on Impact Investing, the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force, and the White House Impact Economy Summit.
Since our start, we’ve helped thousands of the small businesses who are the heartbeat and character of their communities grow and create tens of thousands of jobs in neighborhoods that need them most.
Our Theory of Change
We’ve been driven to empower small businesses and help impact investors more effectively invest in underserved communities since our founding in 1998. PCV has always had a theory of change to drive our work and strategy, and after evolving our mission in 2016 to more explicitly focus on creating quality jobs and rigorously measuring those results we decided to publish it for all to see. The ultimate success of any Theory of Change lies in its ability to demonstrate progress on the achievement of outcomes. For more than 20 years, we’ve impacted the lives of thousands of small business owners who have created and grown tens of thousands of jobs. We invested close to $100 million of capital and pro bono advising hours in quality-job-creating companies, and influenced a growing pool of tens of billions in impact investment capital supporting progress toward 15 of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Our Values
We at Pacific Community Ventures try to live our values in our work and in our daily lives. As an organization, our values are:
- We come from a place of yes
- We live our mission
- We are open and transparent
- We seek collaboration
- We act with empathy