The Case for Staying Close with BlueHub Capital’s Elyse Cherry
About this episode
Elyse Cherry discusses how BlueHub Capital integrates community health and food access to build sustainable neighborhoods.
In Brockton, Massachusetts, a Cape Verdean grocery store sits next door to a community health center. They're side by side on purpose. When BlueHub Capital looked at the neighborhood, it saw residents wrestling with food and health and decided those weren't two problems but one, so it financed the store and the clinic together and put them within a few steps of each other. A small decision. It also explains how an organization stays alive for forty years. Elyse Cherry co-founded BlueHub in 1985 with $3,500 and a single idea: build healthy communities where people of limited income live and work. The idea has never changed. Almost everything else has. Over four decades the organization has run a loan fund, a venture fund, a utility-cost company, a foreclosure-relief program, and a one-percent loan to cover the cost of citizenship. Cherry separates the why from the how. The why is fixed. The how gets reinvented whenever the work demands it. Which raises the obvious question: how do you know when to change the how? Cherry's answer isn't vision or instinct. It's location. BlueHub keeps its offices inside the neighborhoods it serves, because the people who live there understand what…
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