Hallbar Green Community Bonds
HÅLLBAR Green Community Bonds provide impact investors with social, environmental, and financial returns, by providing funding to projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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Many impact investors already know “The Community Bond is an innovation in social finance that allows a nonprofit or charity to leverage its community of supporters to pursue its mission, build its resiliency, and create more vibrant communities.”
But many may not know that the first Community Bonds were modelled on a community financed renewable energy project called Windshare.
HÅLLBAR bonds combine Windshare’s model of direct investment in environmental impact, with the non-profit requirements inherent to Community Bonds, to create what we call the HÅLLBAR Green Community Bond.
HÅLLBAR bonds use community finance to invest specifically in financially viable projects that reduce GhG emissions so we can get to net-zero and beyond.
Become a community investor. Register below to be notified next time HÅLLBAR Green Bonds are available.
FAQ
Most frequent questions and answers
Community Bonds are a social finance investment tool. Investments are made by community investors, in projects managed by nonprofit organizations.
They are like interest paying loans made by individual investors to non-profit organizations for a specific purpose. Non-profits pool these loans together to finance and manage large projects like wind turbines, community centres, biogas plants. Interest is paid to investors on a regular basis over a set term. At the end of the term, the loan is either repaid, or renewed for another term.
Over the last decade, governments and social purpose organizations have been responding to the growing need for social and environmental services by developing and using innovative finance tools to both grow the base of community assets, and expand programming.
Community Bonds help non-profits and charities grow their services with support from their communities so they don’t have to rely on grants and donations alone.
Green bonds are regular bonds issued by sovereign, private and for-profit companies to invest in projects they deem to be environmental.
An issue with these types of investments is that in most jurisdictions, “green” is not defined and investments do not need to be disclosed to investors. As such, green bonds can be used to “greenwash” activities that may not meet investor expectations.
Another issue is that regular green bonds can be used to create “islands of sustainability” where an otherwise dirty issuer may seek to access impact investments for a specific project, only to redirect the savings into more polluting. For example, a coal miner switching to battery powered vehicles could redirect the resulting fuel savings into expanded coal mining operations.
HÅLLBAR Green Community Bonds combine the best of both worlds.
As Community Bonds, they are managed entirely by a non-profit organization, and they meet exacting disclosure and specificity requirements.
As green bonds, they are investments in projects with positive environmental outcomes.
HÅLLBAR bonds are impact investments in both non-profit organizations, and environmental stewardship.
No investment is 100% safe, not even government bonds. However, bond-financed projects by HÅLLBAR.ORG are chosen to be as safe as possible.
All bonds issued by HÅLLBAR are secured by highly marketable real estate, meaning that if a project fails the asset can be sold to repay investors.
Our bonds also meet strict structure and disclosure requirements required by regulators.
Which is to say that our bonds are not designed to be “high risk, high return” investments. They are designed to be “safe” investments that deliver multi-outcome environmental, social, and financial returns.
