Healthy Corner Stores Network

BALLE, or the Business Alliance for Living, Local Economies, is hosting a webinar on April 10, 2012 that might be of interest to some of you in the Healthy Corner Stores Network.

• $135,000 in multiple small loans to local businesses from fellow community members
• A $400,000 loan to the Chatham Marketplace, a local food co-op. In this case, Bringing it Home Chatham, LLC — an initiative the Slow Money North Carolina founders established — brought together 16 individual investors to help the Co-op refinance a balloon loan, locking in a lower interest rate and reducing monthly payments by a third for the Co-op while providing lenders a better return on their investment than they could get through a savings account or a CD.

It didn’t take all that long to line up 16 lenders. The folks who had helped start the Marketplace met and suggested names. It was a community effort and one-by-one people agreed to participate. The loan was attractive to investors who wanted to make their money work in their home community. Many of them had already made micro-loans through Slow Money NC and they felt confident their funds would be repaid. And, they would be getting a better return on the Marketplace loan than they would from a savings account or CD.

The loan was also a very good deal for Chatham Marketplace. It locked in a much lower interest rate, reducing the grocery’s monthly payment by 1/3. That means a savings of about $2500 a month – no small change for any food enterprise in these times.

Join us to experience Slow Money North Carolina’s passion for facilitating peer-to-peer local investments, including more details on how they made the Chatham Marketplace loan work, and additional loans that have connected local investors with local businesses.

In response to a burgeoning interest in using health impact assessment (HIA) as a tool to factor health into policy decisions, for the first time policymakers, public health professionals, community-based organizations, researchers, and elected and appointed officials from across the country will gather to hear the latest on how HIA is being, and can be, used to inform policy decisions in areas such as planning, transportation, housing, agriculture, energy, education and the environment. The deadline to submit abstracts and session topics is January 18, 2012. A limited number of scholarships are also available. The meeting is being organized by The California Endowment, the National Network of Public Health Institutes, and the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts with assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For more information click here.

The three-day event will have over 100 sessions and workshops focused on building safe, healthy, and more livable communities. The program also includes opportunities to learn and share strategies to address equity and environmental justice issues and features tours of local model projects in and around the San Diego region. For more information and to register visit their website, www.newpartners.org.