New Fund Helps Communities Own the Land Beneath Their Homes, Helping Keep Housing Affordable for Generations

Cal Wellness’s first-ever PRI to a community land ownership strategy joins First Citizens Bank commitment, bringing COCP’s Integrated Capital Fund closer to its $7 million phased launch milestone on the path to a $20 million fund.

OAKLAND, CA – As housing costs continue to rise beyond the reach of working families in California, the Community Ownership for Community Power (COCP) Fund is gaining momentum behind an innovative approach: helping communities buy and hold land so homes remain permanently affordable and local residents have more control over the future of their neighborhoods.

Today, the fund announced a major milestone toward that vision. The California Wellness Foundation has committed a $1 million program-related investment to COCP’s Integrated Capital Fund, joining a $2 million commitment from First Citizens Bank. Together, the commitments represent the fund’s first foundation and first bank investors, validating an innovative financing model and bringing the fund closer to its $7 million launch goal. The fund expects to begin investing in community ownership projects across California later this year. 

“Having both a first-in foundation and a first-in bank is a pivotal moment for COCP. When the California Wellness Foundation and First Citizens Bank commit side by side, they signal to the whole field that community-governed finance – and community ownership of land and housing – is real, viable, and ready to scale. That kind of leadership opens the door for others to follow,” shared Emily Duma, Director of Housing Justice, Common Counsel Foundation, the home of the COCP Fund. “It shows that a fund built by and with community can attract the serious resources this work demands.”

The COCP Integrated Capital Fund is one of California’s first community-governed capital funds, co-designed and co-governed with community ownership organizations across the state. The fund provides capital for flexible, below-market, mission-aligned financing to community ownership organizations, such as community land trusts (CLTs) and cooperative housing models. 

The goal is not only to address the housing crisis, but for communities most impacted by displacement and corporate land and housing grabs to have promising tools to hold sustained power over land use, development, and stewardship decisions. The fund aims to expand the stock of permanently affordable housing held outside speculative markets, and show that it is possible to build non-extractive finance and scalable capital. 

For The California Wellness Foundation, this commitment reflects an emerging theme of supporting community ownership as a health equity strategy. The foundation sees expanding access to capital as critical to the wellbeing of all Californians. As part of Cal Wellness’ commitment to support health with all its tools, not just grants, the foundation is making a program-related investment in this fund so that it can make a more meaningful contribution to the significant sums required to buy land, and to help make the investment more attractive to other investors. The investment (in this case, a long-term, interest-free loan) is the foundation’s first program-related investment to a community land trust-related strategy where residents and community groups have greater control over what happens to their neighborhoods.

“At Cal Wellness, we aim to build models that not only address today’s challenges but also create a blueprint for greater impact over time,” said Javier Hernandez, Cal Wellness’ director of investments. “We want our investment in the Community Ownership for Community Power Fund to demonstrate a pathway for additional partners and capital to scale up community-led ownership, preserve affordability, and strengthen community wellbeing across California.”

First Citizens Bank supports lending and investment in affordable housing and community development, working alongside community partners to deliver tailored solutions that help local communities grow and thrive. The bank’s commitment to the COCP Fund through this long-term, low-interest loan, and the overarching community land trust strategy reflects its legacy of strength and stability over the long term.

“First Citizens Bank’s planned investment in the COCP Fund underscores our commitment to strengthening local economies where we live and work,” said Fiona Hsu, Head of Community Development Finance for First Citizens Bank. “We are pleased to serve as an anchor investor, helping expand access to affordable housing opportunities for communities across California for years to come.” 

What this capital makes possible is best seen in the projects already moving through COCP’s pipeline: 

• Bridge financing for a community land trust that allows them time to work with resident buyers who earn 80% of Area Median Income (AMI) to secure individualized mortgage financing through an innovative shared-equity ownership model.
• A community land trust seeking long-term financing as part of a mixed-use development that will create approximately 60 affordable housing units serving households earning between 30% and 60% of AMI, with a long-term pathway from affordable rental housing to community-controlled homeownership.
• Financing a community land trust to repay acquisition debt and expand properties by adding one to two accessory dwelling units, a project focused on households earning approximately 70–80% of AMI, creating additional affordable homeownership opportunities as part of a longer-term vision for cooperative ownership. 
• A community land trust seeking to co-purchase a fourplex with its current tenants to preserve long-term affordability and prevent displacement by acquiring the property before it can be sold to a for-profit developer.

These examples illustrate the kind of community-rooted acquisition, rehabilitation, and development the Integrated Capital Fund is designed to unlock.

Through a holistic approach that pairs grantmaking, ecosystem support, and integrated capital, the Community Ownership for Community Power Fund is building the systems-change infrastructure for this vision. Designed to raise $20 to $25 million in total capital for property acquisition and stewardship by 2027 with long-term ambitions of $100 million or more, the fund offers a scalable pathway to embed non-extractive, community-governed finance across California. 

To date, COCP has disbursed $6.6 million in core support grants to 30 organizations, seeded by an initial $10 million in philanthropic commitments from partners including The California Endowment, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the James Irvine Foundation, among several additional California and national philanthropic partners.

About the Community Ownership for Community Power Fund

The Community Ownership for Community Power (COCP) Fund is a statewide initiative of Common Counsel Foundation that brings together leading community ownership organizations and philanthropic partners to grow community control of land and housing across California. COCP advances a holistic approach, combining multi-year core support grants, ecosystem building, and integrated capital, to strengthen the capacity of BIPOC-led community land trusts, housing cooperatives, and related organizations to acquire, govern, and sustain permanently affordable housing. 

Common Counsel Foundation has nearly 40 years serving as a nimble and creative partner for donors, foundations and social justice movement formations, with both the relationships and technical skills to build the infrastructure that our visionary partners need for their transformative work. More at commoncounsel.org

For media inquiries, please contact Jen Thom, [email protected]