As part of our process of assembling stories for our 30th Anniversary Publication, FJC contacted a number of longtime partners to ask how critical stages of their organization’s life cycle were affected by FJC’s support. We were blown away by the detailed, specificity of their responses!
For reasons of space, we condensed their testimonials in our publication, and we present them in full here.
In 2003, FJC helped Civic Builders close a critical financing gap for our first turnkey development project, Bronx Charter School for the Arts. FJC provided the equity piece alongside a larger commercial bank loan, giving us the capital we needed to complete the project.
Civic Builders had been founded just a year earlier, in 2002, with a mission to remove real estate as a barrier to great schools. Today, Civic is the nation’s leading nonprofit lender and developer of public charter schools, having supported more than 100 schools and surpassed $2 billion in investment in charter school facilities nationwide.
At such an early stage in Civic Builders’ history, we needed a partner willing to take a chance on a new organization and help solve a financing challenge that traditional capital alone could not. FJC’s support enabled us to complete our first development project and helped establish Civic as a true real estate developer dedicated to serving charter schools, laying the foundation for more than two decades of impact in the education sector.
—David Umansky, CEO, Civic Builders
