Recently the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington (CFSWW), celebrated the four-decade-long success of their charitable forces and the lives impacted by these acts of goodwill. Since its opening in 1984, the CFSWW has distributed $311 million in total grants, continuing its overarching goal of making the community a better place.
However, the CFSWW’s work is far from finished, looking to find new ways to evolve and extend the level of their non-profit reach while widening the impact they can make on their community. This is why the CFSWW recently announced the launch of its SWIIFT (Southwest Washington Impact Investment Fund for Transformation) Initiative, intending to maximize philanthropic capital so that these Southwest Washington communities can not only sustain but flourish.
To learn more about the SWIIFT Initiative, we sat down and spoke with Matt Morton, the President of the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington.
“I was named President back in April of 2022,” says Morton. “I’m originally from Washington in the southern Puget Sound area. I’ve spent since 1996 working and living in Portland directing a charitable portfolio with Meyer Memorial Trust. I had acquired a bunch of nonprofit experience prior to entering philanthropy”.
Luckily, Morton would eventually find his way back home to Washington working for the CFSWW, whose original main focus was creating a community foundation to establish charitable resources for the community.
“Our goal is to create a thriving and just Southwest Washington,” says Morton. “That means, regardless of where you’re at in these three counties, you should be able to thrive on your own terms.”
From here, our conversation pivoted to the SWIIFT Initiative.
“In the philanthropic world this is not a new concept, but it is new in Southwest Washington,” says Morton. “It began with some field of interest funds around five years ago where we had some flexibility and, at the time, we knew there was a specific need for housing, and some of these organizations needed just a little bit of resources at the front end that they could then pay back when they were receiving developer fees for certain projects.”
By experimenting with this loan strategy with charitable dollars, Morton and his team quickly realized that by utilizing impact investing there existed both financial returns from these low-interest loans and also greater social good.
“This was a unique space that we knew the CFSWW could fit in,” says Morton. “If we could use our resources for high-impact low-interest loans then that could activate a part of our non-profit community that has yet to enter into the complexity of the housing development space.”
So, how does the SWIIFT Initiative work? Pretty simply. First, donors will invest in the SWIIFT Initiative. Then, low-interest loans will go out to nonprofits for high-impact projects. This should allow organizations to deliver services promptly while scaling programs faster. Then, repaid loans are returned to SWIIFT to be recycled for more philanthropic work, or, after a five-year period, charitable dollars can be returned to DAF for future grantmaking.
“The plan is to begin to make loans in Q4 of this year,” says Morton. “Given the interest on both the donor and nonprofit sides, I think there’s a readiness and an interest for the area to take on this great social tool. Just experimenting the last five years we’ve had zero defaults on these loans. They’ve all been paid back. Our flexibility has not been taken advantage of and most of the loans have actually been paid back early.”
In terms of who qualifies for these loans, Morton communicated how the decision-making framework for this process is currently being put into place, including building a specific committee with strong around-the-table representation to best determine who qualifies. Of course, risk will be taken into account, but so will relationships, community needs, and other important factors.
“Our goal is to have this SWIIFT Initiative in the tens of millions,” says Morton. “We want to look back in ten years and say to ourselves that we really took it upon ourselves to create local solutions that leveraged our incredibly generous community to unlock bigger money through the affordable housing fund, from the state, or other philanthropic giving.”
To get involved with the SWIIFT Initiative, visit www.cfsww.org/swiift/ to learn more about the process, the vision, and the goals that will help both serve and grow the community of Southwest Washington.
