Non-profits

Boy Scouts Circle Ten Council – Camp Wisdom

September 28, 2012 by

For over 100 years the Dallas-headquartered Circle Ten Council of the Boy Scouts of America has utilized outdoor instruction in woodcraft to cultivate leadership skills, independent thinking and good citizenship among the region’s youth. However, the most disadvantaged youths often struggle to participate in scouting, because the volunteer time required to establish and maintain typical grassroots Boy Scout infrastructure cannot be provided by the single parents raising so many of these children. In response, Circle Ten has long been committed to an outreach program to serve underprivileged boys, ScoutReach, which provides financial and human resources to help poorer boys participate in scouting. Last year over 8,400 of the 54,000 Boy Scouts in the Dallas region, nearly 1 in 6, were assisted by the ScoutReach program.

The social and community benefits of scouting flow from the Scout Method, a time-tested program of informal education and character development that the hinges upon the intrinsic appeal of the outdoors to young men. The Scout Method develops in participants individual initiative, self-reliance, collaborative skills, and, in general, encourages young men to achieve their full physical, intellectual, social and spiritual potential. Empirical research suggests that men who were Boy Scouts are less likely to drop out of high school, substantially more likely to graduate from college, and go on to earn higher incomes when compared to the population at large.

Within metropolitan Dallas, the ScoutReach program targets underprivileged young men, bringing the benefits of participation in Boy Scouts to those individuals most at risk of becoming anti-social, unproductive members of society. However, several years of participation in scouting is typically required for these benefits to be realized. Boy Scout statistics indicate that 85% of scouts who go camping in their first year will continue in scouting for another year. By contrast, retention rates among those who do not camp in their first year are appreciably lower, with only 50% continuing to participate for another year. Bolstering Circle Ten’s camping capacity and improving the camping experience is therefore crucial to the effectiveness of the ScoutReach program.

Located on 371 acres just 11 miles from downtown Dallas, Camp Wisdom is the primary campground for scouts participating via the ScoutReach program. Camp Wisdom also serves as a venue for the Boy Scouts’ school-based Learning for Life character-building leadership program and is home to nearly four dozen campsites, rifle and archery ranges, a fully-stocked lake, an outdoor amphitheater, and a high-ropes fitness challenge course. Camp Wisdom’s last round of infrastructure improvements occurred decades ago.

Circle Ten Council hired Crescent Growth Capital to structure and execute a $5.7 million NMTC financing to help fund badly-needed facility and infrastructure upgrades. With a program including construction of a new leadership conference center, to double teaching capacity and replace an antiquated 1940s-era dining hall, the Camp Wisdom improvements will not only be utilized by the Boy Scouts but will also be available for use by outside organizations, such as the Dallas Independent School District.

In the course of successfully closing the NMTC financing for Camp Wisdom, CGC located a Dallas-based multinational corporation to act as the tax credit investor on the transaction. The willingness of this firm to invest at an appreciably higher price than the going market rate resulted in a net benefit to the Boy Scouts of nearly 20% of the value of the New Markets Tax Credit financing, a significant improvement over the 12-13% common to NMTC financings of this size.

Consequently, CGC was able to effect over $1 million in subsidy for the Circle Ten Council in service of their plans for Camp Wisdom, improving retention rates among ScoutReach participants, better integrating the facility with the surrounding highly-distressed low income community, and bringing the benefits of scouting to more individuals far sooner than would otherwise be the case.

University of the Incarnate Word – Eastside Vision Clinic

September 14, 2012 by

San Antonio’s Eastside neighbohood has long struggled economically, with metro San Antonio income growth and investment largely occuring at the urban periphery. San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro’s administration has pledged to focus attention and resources on the Eastside, an area familiar to Crescent Growth Capital through its involvement in structuring the Healy-Murphy transaction, which closed in April 2011. More recently CGC was able to recommence catalyzing needed investment on the Eastside, thanks to an invitation received from its past client, the University of the Incarnate Word, to execute a $10 million NMTC financing to help fund the Eastside Center for Vision Science & Health Care.

The Eastside Center promises to remedy an acute need for eyecare, as well as support better targeting of social services. Currently, there is only one eye care specialist maintaining a practice on the Eastside, a sprawling neighborhood of 170,000 residents. Partnerships with other Eastside social service providers and educational institutions will be implemented, such that activities ranging from literacy assessments to internships for students at a nearby community college, St. Philip’s, will transpire within the new facility.

The Eastside Center itself will be a 30,000 square-foot, new-build public health facility dedicated to bringing badly-needed vision care to the disadvantaged population of the Eastside. Approximately 50,000 patients will be treated annually, with all insurances accepted, including Medicare and Medicaid, and with a sliding fee schedule in place to permit treatment for even the uninsured. The vision clinic will build upon UIW’s pre-existing expertise in providing optometry services to impoverished minority populations, employ 50 permanent staff and generate the additional pedestrian and vehicular traffic essential to bolstering aggregate market demand for new retail establishments on the Eastside.

St. Mary’s University

June 28, 2012 by

Founded in 1852, St. Mary’s University was the first institution of higher learning established in San Antonio. St. Mary’s is the oldest Catholic university in Texas and is a nationally-recognized liberal arts institution with a student population of nearly 4,000 of all faiths and socio-economic backgrounds. St. Mary’s is a federally-designated “Hispanic Serving Institution” with a 70% student minority population. Furthermore, 45% of the student body are first generation college attendees.

Located in the heart of San Antonio’s predominately Hispanic Westside, St. Mary’s is one of the largest employers in the neighborhood and boasts a long history of neighborhood engagement. The university’s students, staff, and faculty are committed to community service. The Westside neighborhood suffers from poverty, high unemployment and poor health on the part of its inhabitants. In 2007, the university established a task force to work with community leaders and local business proprietors in order to develop a comprehensive plan suited to the Westside’s specific needs. The task force identified a targeted area consisting of seven census tracts; all are low-income, and six are severely distressed.

The resulting St. Mary’s Neighborhood Revitalization Project, part of the school’s five-year strategic plan, commits the university to working on the revitalization of the areas surrounding the main campus and to be actively involved in community outreach, development and improvement. The Neighborhood Revitalization Project has three chief components: the Neighborhood Resource Center, the Sports Complex, and the renovation of St. Louis Hall.

The Neighborhood Resource Center component of St. Mary’s Neighborhood Revitalization Project will provide desperately needed technical assistance and microgrants to struggling businesses and residents in the neighborhood.

The sports complex component will combat endemic obesity among the poor Hispanic population of the Westside by providing access to state-of-the-art recreational facilities. The new complex will also generate significant new tax revenues for local government, in recognition of which Bexar County has set aside $6 million to help fund the facility.

The final component of the university’s revitalization project, the renovation of historic St. Louis Hall, preserves for future generations one of the most significant buildings remaining on the Westside and the centerpiece of St. Mary’s University.

In June 2012, Crescent Growth Capital accomplished a financial closing on a $12 million Qualified Equity Investment, providing St. Mary’s University with a significant New Markets Tax Credit benefit. This NMTC financing, the first of two that are projected, will keep St. Mary’s Neighborhood Revitalization Project on track by compensating for city budget cuts that threatened the Neighborhood Resource Center with closure, as well as by alleviating pressure on alumni donors and the university’s endowment.

San Antonio Food Bank

June 20, 2012 by

Founded in 1980, the San Antonio Food Bank (“SAFB”) is a non-profit organization that serves as a clearinghouse, receiving and storing donated food, fresh produce, and other groceries. SAFB distributes these items in manageable quantities to over 500 independent partner agencies that help people in need. However, SAFB’s activities are not limited to distributing food to street-level food kitchens; the food bank also encourages better nutrition throughout the region via additional services, and operates programs to help individuals escape the poverty that produces chronic hunger.

San Antonio Food Bank’s activities meaningfully improve the lives of thousands throughout the organization’s sixteen-county service area. Every week, 58,000 people receive food as a consequence of SAFB’s programs. SAFB directly operates three community kitchens in the area, including the facility located at San Antonio’s Haven For Hope homelessness social service campus. The food bank sponsors initiatives targeting seniors and children, and, using repurposed beer trucks, delivers perishable fresh foods to partner agencies that lack refrigeration facilities onsite.

The region served by SAFB struggles with an average 20.5% poverty rate, with correspondingly high rates of food insecurity. San Antonio’s Bexar County is burdened by a 25.1% poverty rate, and 32.5% of residents within the highly-distressed low income census tract housing SAFB’s facility live in poverty. The poverty rate is known to closely approximate rates of food insecurity; individuals below the poverty line face painful trade-offs every day, with half reporting that they often have to choose between paying rent and buying food.

The now-financed SAFB expansion project will double the size of the facility, to 204,000 square feet, and will bring a significant benefit to the region. The project will create 105 direct FTE jobs and 50 construction jobs, with most permanent jobs in facility operations (warehousing, truck drivers). A direct economic impact of $50 million for the Bexar County economy is anticipated. Freezer space will triple in size, permitting SAFB to accept an additional 7 million lbs/year of high-quality, protein-rich foods. Annual fresh produce capacity will also triple, to 81 million lbs/year, and the expansion will accommodate an additional 41,600 hours of volunteer labor a year. Notably, SAFB’s new facility will permit the food bank to accept donations from an additional 20 grocery stores operated by local chain HEB, meaning that all 44 regional HEB stores would participate in donating short-shelf items to SAFB.

Currently, forty-five percent of all donations are perishable, and this proportion will grow as best practices demand that those suffering from food insecurity receive nutritionally beneficial assistance. Encouraging a healthy San Antonio is, along with feeding the hungry and ameliorating poverty, a key element of SAFB’s mission. Increasing the amount of space available to store perishables meaningfully aids this ongoing initiative, especially since the food bank’s service area suffers from above-average rates of obesity and diabetes. Within Bexar County itself, 65.8% of adults are overweight or obese, and 15.6% of residents are diabetic, twice the national average. Promoting the consumption of fresh foods, including plentiful servings of fruits and vegetables, also reinforces federal government policies designed to encourage fresh food consumption and eliminate food deserts.

In recent years, non-profits such as SAFB have experienced increasing difficulty in fundraising, due to the nation’s weak economic recovery from the Great Recession. The $27 million NMTC financing structured by Crescent Growth Capital for the San Antonio Food Bank will generate upwards of $4 million in bottom-line subsidy for the facility expansion.

Significantly, this benefit lets SAFB continue to direct all monetary contributions it receives toward supporting ongoing operations and programming. For instance, funding for SAFB’s continuing efforts at nutrition education will not diminish. Ongoing programming, such as the Summer Food Service Program for children and the Healthy Options Program for the Elderly (“HOPE”), will receive more resources.

Absent the NMTC financing, the timetable to complete the expansion would have been highly uncertain, held hostage by the limited amount of philanthropic dollars available within SAFB’s sixteen-county service region, and the food bank’s programming would doubtless have suffered greatly as resources would have been diverted from operations to help finance the facility expansion.

Daughters of Charity Health Centers

December 30, 2011 by

With so many of the working poor lacking health insurance, supporting the provision of means-tested primary care translates into both socioeconomic advancement and the proactive management of chronic conditions before they produce real disability. Though the passage of healthcare reform should dramatically reduce the number of uninsured Americans, at last resulting in insurance coverage for the working poor, adequate access to primary care constitutes the next challenge confronting residents of low-income communities.

Crescent Growth Capital helped address the issue of access by structuring and closing in September and December 2009 two New Markets Tax Credit qualified equity investments totaling $13.5 million on behalf of Daughters of Charity Health Services of New Orleans. Operated according to the best practices “medical home” healthcare delivery model – where teams of nurses, physician assistants and doctors collaborate to deliver for patients coordinated, comprehensive treatment regimes – the two new health clinics financed in the transaction annually accommodate tens of thousands of additional primary care visits. The majority of the clinics’ clientele come from minority populations, and approximately 80% of patients are without health insurance. Fees are charged on a sliding scale, according to payment ability. Thanks to the new clinics, countless minor illnesses are being addressed prior to metastasizing, and many additional chronic conditions are being successfully managed. A significant and measurable improvement in community health is underway.

Crescent Growth Capital also secured valuable additional project funding by preparing and submitting Historic Preservation Certification Applications (Parts 1, 2 & 3), taking advantage of Daughters of Charity’s rehabilitation of the historic former St. Cecilia Elementary School. CGC solicited tax credit investor proposals and advised DCSNO through financial closing to generate an additional $1 million in gross tax credit equity, derived from the successful classification of over $4 million as Qualified Rehabilitation Expenses. Financial closing for this state historic tax credit transaction occurred in December of 2011.

Non-profits

Contact Us

Footer