History

The South Shore of Chicago is a far cry from the outer shores of Vancouver Island. Yet it is there, in a largely African-American inner-city neighbourhood, where we must travel to find the genesis of Ecotrust Canada Capital.  

Chicago is the headquarters of ShoreBank Corporation, North America’s first community development and environmental bank. Ron Grzywinski and three friends founded the bank on a simple, though radical, idea in 1973: bankers as activists for social change.

“It was a time of ‘red lining’ African-American neighbourhoods,” explains Grzywinski, ShoreBank chairman and a member of Ecotrust Canada’s board of directors. “Banks actually had maps on which they had drawn red lines and would not lend within those areas.”  

ShoreBank began investing in poor neighbourhoods coping with disinvestment, discrimination and even urban riots. The bank succeeded (its total assets are worth about $1.8 billion today) and went on to set up a rural counterpart in Arkansas at the behest of Bill Clinton, governor at the time. By the 1990s, it expanded westward and into sustainable development, establishing an eco-bank and nonprofit subsidiary with Ecotrust (US) in the Pacific Northwest. 

In 1999, with the aid and expertise of ShoreBank Enterprise Pacific, Ecotrust Canada began lending in communities struggling with declining resource industries, high unemployment and depopulation in coastal British Columbia. One of its first loans was to Iisaak Forest Resources, an eco-forestry company controlled by local First Nations in Clayoquot Sound. 

Ecotrust Canada offered non-bank, higher-risk loans to entrepreneurs, cooperatives and non-profit groups that were environmentally and socially responsible or that promoted development in rural and Aboriginal communities. Lenders looked at a business’s triple-bottom line, assessing whether an entrepreneur promoted economic opportunities, protected the environment and fostered social equity. In contrast, Grzywinski points out, conventional banks look more at their own financial bottom line and not community development needs.

By 2006, Ecotrust Canada provided some 70 loans to entrepreneurs totalling more than $7 million. That year Ecotrust Canada formed a wholly-owned subsidiary called the Ecotrust Canada Capital Corporation to deliver its community development lending, expand its business lending and broker capital for ventures in the ecoforestry and green energy sectors.

Like its parent nonprofit, Ecotrust Canada Capital is committed to its socially driven mission to finance the conservation economy.

Whether you are in the inner city of Chicago or a rural town on Vancouver Island, Ecotrust Canada Capital realizes that everyone needs access to capital to turn their progressive ideas into profitable enterprises. “It’s about the democratization of credit,” Grzywinski says.


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