Community Service Projects

CDAs hosting businesses will naturally expect a balanced complement of commercial businesses and needed public service activities that can't pay for themselves or give a commercial return to investors. The latter include basic services in health, education, civil and legal rights, conservation, improved roads and other infrastructure. Such public services can hardly wait years for commercial wealth to spill over onto them through taxes or other transfers. To help achieve this balance under the proposed investment program, WilmaFund is working work with WILMA and nonprofit organizations in its network to raise grants for CDAs, to help them launch public service activities that directly improve the lives of their members. Such grants will have significant and immediate leverage on community welfare, as illustrated by these examples:

• Investment in a solar-power distributorship is complemented by grants to set up a technical school to teach the local teenagers how to maintain solar home systems.
• Investment in a commercial mushroom business is complemented by grants to complete a school for HIV/AIDS orphans, on premises adjoining the mushroom barns. Students will in turn provide the part-time labor needed to tend the mushroom houses as they earn incomes to pay their school fees.
• Investment in a food processing company, focused on exports, creates opportunities for groups of CDA members to set up and run retail food shops in their neighborhoods.

While WilmaFund may, under its charter, raise grant funds to support such public service projects, it will not commingle such grants for charity with equity in the financing of any enterprise. Equity investments will be used to finance enterprises that produce "private goods" and can logically be financed as for-profit entities, while grants for charity will be used to finance social enterprises that produce "public goods" that can only be sustained by public support.

In addition, venture philanthropists can make tax-deductible grants to WILMA designated for direct investment in any Community Enterprise LLC or in WilmaFund's portfolio as a whole. Such grants to WilmaFund add to its net worth and help to speed its mission.