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
Since our founding in 1998, Pacific Community Ventures has worked to empower small businesses and help impact-first investors more effectively invest in underserved communities. In 2022, PCV launched the Good Jobs Innovation Lab as an impact research and product development program wrapping around our small business lending and business advising programs to support BIPOC and other systematically excluded and underestimated small business owners for the creation of high quality jobs in low-income areas. Out of this organizational realignment, PCV launched a new Theory of Change detailing the causal connection between the resources PCV activates through our work supporting entrepreneurs and the impact we aim to achieve through our programs – the eradication of market failures that disadvantage small business owners and contribute to the racial wealth gap. The Theory of Change further serves as a roadmaps to the Lab’s Research Agenda.
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