Advance

Small businesses & nonprofits respond to COVID-19

Small businesses & nonprofits respond to COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis has forced small businesses and nonprofits around the world, including our Advance borrowers, to forget business as usual and respond in creative ways to best serve their community and survive—quickly. From delivering essential household goods and locally sourced food to staying connected with families by livestreaming nature walks, these businesses and organizations demonstrate the flexibility, resilience, and heart that make small businesses critical for communities to thrive.

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Finding the way back through evidence-based holistic treatment

Finding the way back through evidence-based holistic treatment

The Way Back uses trauma-informed care in its client activities—clinical groups, education groups, mindfulness meditation, relapse prevention groups, codependency groups, anger management, emotional regulation, and individual psychotherapy. “We are training men to be better fathers, better husbands, better employees, to stay out of prison, to work, to communicate,” says The Way Back Executive Director Chris Thomas, a licensed therapist who has been sober for 25 years. “Men are an important part of family structure, and addiction is a family disease.”

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AdvanceHER: Unlocking opportunities for women and girls in San Diego and abroad

AdvanceHER: Unlocking opportunities for women and girls in San Diego and abroad

In our quest to increase economic opportunity for underestimated groups, we knew we’d want to emphasize supporting women and girls. With a diverse and largely female team, empowering more women has always felt natural to us. We’ve long wanted to connect the resources and needs of our community in new intentional ways that make a real impact on gender inequality.

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Closing education gaps with creative capital

Closing education gaps with creative capital

Our flexible, personalized financing approach allowed us to provide Friends of Willow Tree a $100,000 bridge loan that they used for expenses at the start of the school year, keeping the program affordable and accessible for their majority low-income students.

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Developing community with creative capital

Developing community with creative capital

When we first met Kris Schlesser, founder of LuckyBolt, he was six years into a quest to make the perfect breakfast burrito easily accessible to professionals on the go, and had been financing the business with high-interest credit cards and microloans.

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Borrower Spotlight: LuckyBolt

Borrower Spotlight: LuckyBolt

The $250,000 loan from Mission Driven Finance enables LuckyBolt to expand from a shared commissary kitchen to their own commercial kitchen and storefront.

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