Hi, and welcome to Awarepreneurs, the world's longest-running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm Paul Zelizer, your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Elise Jarrett, and our topic is economic development leading through uncertain times. Elyse Cherry has served as the CEO of BlueHub Capital since 1997. Under Cherry's leadership, BlueHub has invested over $3.2 billion, leveraged an additional $16.1 billion, and built a national tax credit practice to finance affordable housing, health centers, schools, and other community facilities, create jobs, benchmark and drive down energy and utility costs. Elise, thanks for doing that great work and thanks for being here on Awarepreneurs.

Well, thanks very much, Paul. We very much appreciate your interest in this field and your willingness to make it available to your viewers, or actually listeners, I guess.

Listeners, yeah. So Elise, this whole idea, going back to the beginning, take us back to what brought you into community finance and economic development in the first place.

Well, that's a long time ago. We have to go back to 1985. I was a young associate at my law firm, then known known as Hale and Dorr, now Wilmer Hale. And I was in the real estate finance and development area. And a group of friends came to me and said, there's this new thing emerging called community development loan funds, and we want you to be a part of it. And the idea really was that if we could take downtown expertise with respect to capital and development and zoning and so forth and combine that with community values, that we could actually assist communities and individuals in restoring their neighborhoods. And at the time, local neighborhoods were suffering from what we then called gentrification, meaning that people could no longer afford to live there, were having to move out, and home prices were going up, and richer folks were coming in. And, you know, I wasn't so sure at the time that it actually would work.

And my friend said, you're the only one with the expertise since you're the real estate lawyer and we're your friends. So that was a pretty compelling argument. And What I said was, okay, but then this has to be a success. This can't be one of those, oh, we gave it a good try things, right? We really have to work at this and we have to make it grow, right? We can't just be a small marginal organization. And everybody agreed. So we began.

And was that— I know you're in Boston now. Was that in the Boston area when you started?

Yes, it was. And in fact, we started what we then called Boston Community Loan Fund in Boston's neighborhoods. Alone. We had $3,500 from the Old South Church meetinghouse. And I sometimes say not enough gray hair to know that you couldn't do anything with $3,500. So we just began. And over the years, we grew and grew and grew. By 1997, when I actually came in to lead the organization full-time, I had been on the board ahead of that and chairing the board and so forth.

We were at about $30 million of lending. And now, as you indicated earlier, between the funds that we've put out, the funds that our partners have put out, we're approaching $20 billion. We've also moved from being a single business line to multiple business lines, and we've moved from Boston to being a national economic development organization. I think we are currently functioning in 46 states and the District of Columbia.

Wow, that's amazing. So one of the questions— we're a gritty social entrepreneur impact investor podcast— and one of the questions people always want me to ask is, take us back to your early capital. Like, How do you get started with the money that starts to get the flywheel effect going? So, here you are, not enough gray hair to know you shouldn't do this, right? And you start getting going. Where did that $3,500 was, you know, a small drop in the bucket, but where did you start to build that $20 million of capital that actually got you doing some more interesting projects?