CDFI Funding Boosts Craft Breweries and Struggling Neighborhoods
East Lake Street bisects south Minneapolis, anchoring some of the city’s grittier neighborhoods. Newaygo, a small riverside community in western Michigan, has long relied on tourism—a dependency that hurt the town considerably during the Great Recession. And Yonkers, N.Y., less than half an hour by train from New York’s Grand Central Station, has flirted with insolvency on and off since 1975 amid stubborn economic woes.
Yet today, all three are home to thriving craft breweries—Eastlake Craft Brewery in Minneapolis, Newaygo Brewing Co. and Yonkers Brewing Co.—that pledged to provide an economic spark to their communities in order to receive early stage funding from Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI's).
“We had a building, a business plan, and a lot of motivation, but when we needed to build the brewhouse, traditional banks wouldn’t get behind us,” says Nick Looman, Newaygo Brewing’s president, who spent summers in Newaygo as a kid and left an administrative job at an automotive supplier to move there and open the brewery with his wife and brother. “Northern Initiatives, however, gave us a $50,000 loan that was the boost we needed to get the ball rolling.”
This story is from the #118 (November 2016) edition of BeerAdvocate magazine.
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This story is from the #118 (November 2016) edition of BeerAdvocate magazine.
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