Data from Initiative for a Competitive Inner City shows what every mayor knows: that regional economic growth doesn’t ripple in to the inner city. So that’s where we start: in the communities where jobs and capital are scarce, but enterprise is alive and well.

Next Street drives the expansion of successful companies that are already significant employers in low- and moderate-income areas. We help them strengthen their organizations, set the right growth strategies and market themselves. We help them get growth capital – sometimes from the same banks that said No before.

Next Street invests in urban companies’ potential…and helps them realize it. We are one of a handful of for-profit Community Development Financial Institutions specializing in small business lending. In practice, most CDFIs direct the majority of their capital to housing and real estate lending. For the growing companies we serve, Next Street provides business and financial expertise available nowhere else.

In an era when the private sector seems to have abdicated low-income areas to public and nonprofit actors, Next Street has a new approach to urban economic development: actual economic development.

We are the private sector stepping up.