Several weeks ago, the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation awarded RecoveryPark a $1,000,000 grant. This award is testament to the vision and drive of our collaboration and Erb Family Foundation’s insight in how best to promote an important project that will change the landscape of the City of Detroit in very positive ways.
Erb is providing serious impact investment dollars and laying the framework for other foundations to join their efforts to create jobs, build community, protect and enhance the environment and build a sustainable financial model for others to emulate.
Impact investing refers to investments made based on the practice of assessing not only the financial return on investment, but also the social and environmental impacts of the investment that happen in the course of the operations of the business and the consumption of the product or service which the business creates. An impact investor (Erb Family Foundation) seeks to create social good or improve the health of the environment, as well as achieve financial returns for the funded project.
“While the Foundation has made a couple of other million dollar grants, we consider this to be our largest to date. We view it as seed capital to accelerate a viable land use strategy to improve water quality while meeting social needs and producing economic benefit,” said John Erb, the foundation’s president. “Detroit needs bold efforts that are sensitive to this triple bottom line, and we believe this project is a great demonstration.”
RecoveryPark is on the frontier of putting Detroit’s assets – open space, available buildings, infrastructure and access to water into productive use. Coupled with the city’s biggest asset, its citizens, RecoveryPark looks at bridging these into sustainable agriculture and local food manufacturing opportunities to bring thousands of jobs back into out city. We also promote healthy lifestyles, walkable neighborhoods and quality of life options that will define how we see Detroit and Detroiter’s.
Over the next 60 days, the RecoveryPark team will be meeting with foundations and lenders to discuss their participation in our project. Just as RecoveryPark has matured through community engagement – so too will it mature financially from additional impact investment. We encourage other bold leaders to join Erb Family Foundation in support of RecoveryPark. Together we will build a “recovering community without walls.”
Click here to be introduced to RecoveryPark
Click here to be introduced to UofM, Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
Source: RecoveryPark
