Our Process
CSF offers patient capital through a range of investment vehicles.
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Our process begins when a co-op fills out and submits a Capital Needs Survey. This survey allows CSF to gather preliminary information about your co-op, community land trust or solidarity organization and its capital needs, to determine if we may be a good fit for working together.
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Once you submit this form, a club liaison will contact you in about a week with next steps.
The CSF membership discusses the survey and decides whether to invite a co-op to apply for a loan. (If a co-op is not invited to apply for a loan, we will still follow up to offer feedback and additional resources.)
One of the members of our evaluation team then becomes assigned as liaison to the applying co-op. The co-op must then complete a loan application, which is a more involved process and requires more details about the business, organization and finances. After the loan application is submitted, CSF will invite the co-op to present at one of CSF's board meetings, and vote whether to enter into an investment agreement with the applying organization or whether the application could use some tweaking before continuing forward.