Podcast: Steven Moe, purpose-driven lawyer and quiet revolutionary (edited excerpt)
Here's an edited snippet of the podcast, or listen to the full episode here.
Vincent
"Let's start with one of the things you're involved in, Community Finance. You're the chair of that. What's the kaupapa of that organisation?"
Steven
"Community Finance is really close to my heart. It's been going a couple of years now. James Palmer is the CEO there and he had this idea, or this vision, that the fact that there's currently 23,500 families on the emergency housing list is not good enough. So how can we get more finance and more funding available for community housing providers to be able to build the housing so that they can have somewhere to live? So that's essentially it. I describe it as almost like a dating app between philanthropic investors and community housing providers. The investors have the money, the community housing providers need the money. We're kind of there in the middle."
Vincent
"Does that funding go into organisations building new houses or is it buying existing properties?"
Steven
"It’s building new houses. So these are names that will be familiar to you, like Salvation Army down here in Christchurch and the Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust. We've had a number of projects in Auckland, but also this one down here that was a $14 million development. It's a national organisation and we're really lucky to have KiwiSaver funders who've gotten behind us, like Simplicity, Pathfinder, Generate, as well as others who support the kaupapa, the purpose."
Vincent
"I'm curious about the motivation of Community Finance as an impact fund. Are your investors prepared to trade off a lower return for some sort of social impact? Is that how it works?"
Steven
"Each of the projects are going to have their own pricing, their own financial dynamics. But I would say most of the projects are actually returning a really good level of return, financial return. So it's not actually a massive concession that the investors are making. But you're right, and it's a really good point to highlight, think about a term deposit with a mainstream bank. You're getting financial return, but that's pretty much it. By contrast, this impact investing, you're getting financial return, and you've now got a hundred families living in the houses that were built. So it's a different conception or a different way of thinking about the investment. And I think that is definitely a big factor as to why investors would be interested in this sort of an offering.”
Vincent
Does climate factor into the way that community housing funds and the way that your partners will build, design and build?
Steven
I think it has to because you can't look at any one of the wicked problems in our world on its own. There's an interconnection which is going on. So if we divorce it and say, well, we're just tackling social housing, we'll let those other people look at climate, I think we're really missing the boat. So in our case, what we're looking for from the build providers is at least a six Homestar rating. So the point of that is that you're going to have a cheaper to run house, the power bill will be less. You know, it's going to be warmer. It's going to be better for the family, for the children growing up and there's not going to be mould in the rooms. There's some bad housing stock out there. So if we could have these houses actually be a much higher quality, that has impacts for the climate as well.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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