Cooperative Fund of the Northeast

CFNE’s mission is to work for economic, social, and racial justice by advancing community based, cooperative, and democratically owned or managed enterprises with a preference to assisting cooperatives in low-income communities by: ● Providing financial products at reasonable rates; ● Developing business skills; and ● Offering an investment opportunity that promotes socially conscious enterprises Our vision is of economic justice for all through thriving cooperative enterprises. CFNE was founded in 1975 by cooperative developers to address the need for debt products suited to the shared ownership model of food co-ops. Food co-ops were thriving, as communities across the northeast embraced a community-owned model for healthy food access. However, the shared ownership structure that provided so many benefits to workers and communities also posed barriers to accessing capital from conventional sources, a dynamic that remains true today. Over the decades since we launched, CFNE has grown to a staff of 15, located in 6 states across the northeast. In 2021 we changed our name from the Cooperative Fund of New England to Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, reflecting our staff expansion into New York state. Our borrower portfolio expanded to include co-ops beyond the food sector, such as housing, resident-owned communities (ROCs), worker co-ops, consumer and producer co-ops, and a small number of nonprofits and land trusts. And we have increasingly incorporated a racial justice lens into our work, resulting in Racial Justice becoming the North Star (key strategic goal) of our strategic plan in 2020.