Candid: Community Ownership for Community Power Fund announces launch

Candid shares the news of the Community Ownership for Community Power Fund launch, new initiative to support the California community ownership ecosystem.

“The Community Ownership for Community Power (COCP) Fund has announced the launch of a $22 million initiative with foundation commitments totaling more than $10 million.

The four-year initiative aims to drive the community ownership movement—including community land trusts, housing cooperatives, and other shared equity models—across California. According to COCP Fund, community ownership is recognized as one of the key strategies to permanently address the crisis of housing affordability in the state yet has been underfunded.

Launched with commitments from the California Endowment, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the James Irvine Foundation, Great Communities Collaborative at the San Francisco Foundation, and the Weingart Foundation, the fund seeks to position community ownership as a more widely accessible strategy through grantmaking, support for community ownership groups, and a community-governed integrated capital acquisition fund for real estate.”

“Community ownership organizations need support with sustained investments from philanthropy. When philanthropy partners with community groups to lead the way and move resources at a larger scale, it moves the priorities in the right direction and allows us to do so much more. We hope to see the COCP Fund become the first of many funds that foundationally support this work with long-term capital resources and communities at the helm.”

SFCLT Executive Director Saki Bailey