Expert advisory services and proven resources to support place-based community investment funds.
Our Purpose
We facilitate and accelerate the emergence of place-based, community-centric investment funds that catalyze community projects and support local wealth building.
Fundamenta Community Capital L3C aims to remove critical barriers that stifle or stall the creation of more inclusive and cooperative fund structures. By providing foundational support services for local community funds, we help build the economic infrastructure that powers thriving communities and that democratizes access to capital.
Our Services
We serve mission-driven, place-based, small and mid-sized community funds that aim to provide access to capital and investment opportunities for greater circulation of wealth within a community.
Each community investment fund is a unique experiment that needs to be designed to meet community goals and to engage local stakeholders. We work with founding teams to move through complexity to implementation. We customize our services to meet the specific needs of each community, drawing on extensive experience and proven tools.
Fund Design + Launch
We provide expert advisory services and proven resources that allow the founding team of a community fund to design and launch their fund with confidence.
In our work with emerging funds, we provide hands-on guidance and support for:
- Fund Design
- Investment Thesis, Operational Structure, and Regulatory Compliance
- Financial Modeling & Forecasting
- Portfolio design and forecasting; operations budget and cash flow management
- Innovative, Mission-oriented Deal Structuring
- Ownership and capital structures to align financial and impact goals
- Investment Pipeline Development Strategy
- Who/what will you invest in?
- Communications & Outreach Strategy
- Who are your investors and how will you reach them?
We customize our services to meet emerging funds where they are. We can connect teams to expert legal and other services. A prerequisite for working with us is a dedicated and committed local team.
Fund Fundamentals + Management
We enable transformative & democratic community wealth-building through simplified fund management.
We are developing a platform to provide ongoing back office fund management and investor relations support, to ensure efficient, informative, compliant fund operations.
Our goal is to support fund managers as they move through their first round of fundraising and investments so that they can focus on the work of activating their communities and local investors.
Fund Design + Launch
Fund Fundamentals + Management
Team
Janice Shade and Hélène Lesterlin have joined forces in service of building regenerative economic ecosystems that center democratic access to capital.
As champions of thriving local economies, they each bring deep commitment, diverse skills, systems thinking, and a global network of collaborators to this initiative. With methodologies, tools, inspiration, and applied knowledge that come from decades of combined experience, they draw from the realms of: community wealth building; cooperatives; social equity and racial justice work; lean startup innovation and design; entrepreneur coaching; capital ecosystem optimization; financial systems innovation; venture capital; community engagement strategies; and Just Transition.
Why are we doing this?
The Challenge
Place-based and mission-driven community funds are relatively complex for their size, requiring a robust set of services to provide adequate compliance and management.
These funds are often seeking to build inclusion and access into the heart of their models, engaging non-accredited community investors alongside accredited and local institutional investors, which can lead to complexity. They often require unique and sophisticated securities offerings, cap table/investor relations management systems, and governance structures. This inherent complexity – and its associated cost – has long been a formidable barrier to the formation of more truly inclusive community investment funds. Generally, nascent or smaller-scale funds have a hard time navigating the set-up of their structures, and are not able to afford in-house ongoing fund management.
Our Solution
Fundamenta provides a secure foundation for emerging and early stage funds.
We’ve developed proven expertise, tools, and resources specifically for this niche to accompany community fund managers as they design their funds, launch, and grow. Once launched, we provide a suite of fund fundamentals and compliance processes, so that fund managers can focus their efforts on their core mission of engaging investors and supporting the businesses and communities they care about. We can provide efficiencies through economies of scale by spreading operating costs across many funds, making our support tailored, accessible, and right-sized.