Our Portfolio
Baltimore Pump House
Commerce, Culture & Craft
Developers: American Communities Trust, Baltimore Food Hub
Economic Impact: Analysis in progress
Remaining Development Cost Needed: $17.2 million (raised $10 mm)
Anticipated Delivery: Phase 3, June 2021
Focus: Small Business | Job Creation
Description: A large-scale, multi-phase, $27 million historic renovation and adaptive reuse project. This old municipal pumping station is being built as a 46,000 square foot destination for commerce, culture & craft. Leases include teaching and production kitchens, artisanal gelato manufacturing, a 12,000 square-foot restaurant, first-class event space, and millwork production, with classes for hobbyists and do-it-yourself homeowners. This project is a rare and innovative instance of traditional business and retail returning to a historically disinvested black and brown neighborhood for the first time in 50 years. Even more, we are proud to share that it is entirely resident-guided.
Explore the plan: Summary | Prospectus | Rendering
Last Mile Park
Developers: American Communities Trust, New Broadway East Community Association
Economic Impact: Analysis in progress
Remaining Development Cost Needed: $700,000 (raised $300,000)
Anticipated Delivery: Spring 2021
Focus: Neighborhood Connections | Green Infrastructure | Public Art
Description: Baltimore City’s most significant recent cultural landmark to date. With NMTC from Harbor Bank, this site will be named Harbor Bank Last Mile Park, neatly bridging Harbor Bank’s legacies south and north of the railroad tracks to create one community. It is the Pilot Site for East Baltimore’s one-mile urban ecological and public art trail that loops through Amtrak’s eight overpasses bordering Broadway East and EBDI. It’s defining feature includes permanent artistic light installations by the internationally renowned design form, Thurlow Small.
Explore the plan: Last Mile Park Overview
Housing Rehabilitation and Infill
(Seven blocks around Baltimore Food Hub)
Developers: American Communities Trust, New Broadway East Community Association, and a growing coalition of large and small, for-profit, and non-profit housing developers
Economic Impact: Analysis in progress
Remaining Development Cost Needed: $36 million (raised $587K)
Anticipated Delivery: 2020-2022
Focus: Healthy Homes I > 51% ownership Rate
Description: ACT is spearheading a broad coalition of housing developers — market-rate, nonprofit, large and small — to implement a comprehensive urban design and housing rehabilitation strategy that builds wealth for legacy residents. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP prepared the strategy under the direction of the New Broadway East Community Association and with facilitation from ACT. Using the connection that Last Mile Park creates, the coalition is helping to establish one community that integrates with Eager Park and comes a natural and complementary extension of the 1100 unites of new housing that have come online and are coming online between 2016 and 2021. With a focus on single-family (owner-occupied) and multi-family (ownership and rental), the Coalition is building a vibrant residential neighborhood with a strong commercial and retail core that offers positive pedestrian activity and retail experiences after 5pm. The initial goal is to develop 150 homes and demolish 50 vacants.
Explore the plan: Housing Rehabilitation v.2 | Housing Support Services
Broadway East Greenprint
Developers: The 6th Branch, New Broadway East Community Association, American Communities Trust Economic
Economic Impact: Analysis in progress
Remaining Development Cost Needed: TBD based on design and lot (raised $138K)
Anticipated Delivery: Plan completed in Summer 2020, Two implementation projects to be delivered in Spring 2021
Focus: Green Jobs | Green Streets | Green Neighborhoods
Description: A plan to green more than 500 city-owned vacant lots and design green street infrastructure for each street in Broadway East. Residents led the planning and design process to incorporate greening, green infrastructure and park enhancements into the network of neighborhood streets and city-owned vacant lots. Through a comprehensive approach to environmental improvement, the residents are refreshing their look, creating their brand, and building wealth for generations to come. ACT wrote the grant for this project and provides technical assistance and support.
Explore the plan: Greenprint
Greening North Wolfe Street
Developers: American Communities Trust, New Broadway East Community Association, The 6th Branch, Blue Water Baltimore, and North Wolfe Street residents
Economic Impact: Analysis in progress
Remaining Development Cost Needed: $200,000 (raised $200,000)
Anticipated Delivery: Spring 2021
Focus: Green Streets
Description: In November 2019, Bloomberg Philanthropies approved a proposal from ACT and the New Broadway East Community Association to green the east and west sides of the North Wolfe Street Corridor from East Hoffman Street to North Avenue. Many tree boxes on North Wofle Street are empty are paved over or the trees were cut down due to illness. Transforming this corridor will be an important first step in building momentum for developing and deploying a green streets design for all of Broadway East. The project will enhance the neighborhood with 60 trees, tree pits, planters, and shrubs. A Broadway East Green Team will care for the new plantings, as we work to build pathways into green careers.
Explore the plan: Greening Five Blocks
Castellini Group
Location: Clayton County, GA
Description: ACT is carrying out community benefits work for the Castellini Group of Companies’ new 177,297 square-foot refrigerated produce processing and distribution facility just south of downtown Atlanta in Clayton County, Georgia. The facility will serve as the Southeastern U.S. operations base for Castellini. The office space with be LEED Certified and the processing facility will employ many green features to increase efficiency and reduce energy usage. The project received $40.7 million in New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocation. It is estimated that this project will create 300 permanent jobs with health and retirement benefits to the area, which has an unemployment rate 1.98 times the national average. Low-income people will hold 40% of the permanent jobs. In addition, 360 construction jobs are expected to be created.
The Center
Location: Baltimore, MD
Description: The Centre at 10 E. North Avenue is a project of Jubilee Baltimore, an $18 million project converting a 67,000-sf vacant building into a center for arts and innovation in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. This building will contain restaurant space, 200 jewelry-makers, the film programs of Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Center for Neighborhoods, a collaborative work space for nonprofits that serve Baltimore neighborhoods. ACT supported The Centre with a predevelopment loan.
Clinica Esperanza
Location: Providence, RI
Description: Clinica Esperanza is a public health clinic in Providence, RI that provides free, high quality medical care to uninsured adults. All of the clinic’s care is provided by volunteers, leveraging altruism of 50+ medical professionals and partnering with medical schools, hospitals and community organizations. The clinic provides continuous primary care to almost 1,500 enrolled patients and serves thousands more through a walk in clinic, health screens and health education programs. ACT has supported Clinica Esperanza for a number of years with grants and technical assistance as part of its community benefits strategy for The Plant at 60 Valley Street.
Jonas Hubbard Growth Opportunity Center
Location: St. Louis, MO
Description: The Carr Square Tenant Management Association in St. Louis owns the historic Carr School, a beautiful but distressed early-20th-century building that has been a vacant community eyesore since it closed in 1983. Carr Square engaged ACT to develop a feasibility study for restoring and reusing the school as a hub for small businesses and entrepreneurship in this North St. Louis community, focusing on the areas of public health, life sciences, and food as generators of jobs and economic opportunity. The new facility will be called the Jonas Hubbard Growth Opportunity Center.
Howard County Food Hub
Location: Howard County, MD
Description: Maryland has the potential to invest in infrastructure to grow its local food economy. Howard County and the Horizon Foundation engaged ACT to carry out a study of Central Maryland’s food system, and to create a development model for a Food Hub that would include a a kitchen incubator and an aggregator/distributor of regionally sourced food. These components fulfill the related goals of supporting regional farmers, building the regional food economy, stimulating local economic development, and creating jobs for Howard County and Maryland.
Kensington Renewal
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Description: Kensington Renewal is a not-for-profit community development corporation located in Philadelphia. The organization grew out of residents’ efforts to renovate vacant properties for homeownership. Over time, Kensington Renewal’s work has expanded to stabilizing vacant lots, reducing commercial vacancy, supporting small businesses, and improving the image of the community through projects to make the area cleaner, greener and safer. ACT is providing strategic planning and capacity building services for Kensington Renewal, so that the organization can do more to serve its community.
The Kitchen at Findlay Market
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Description: Findlay Market is an anchor of fresh food and community in the Over the Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati serving over a million customers a year. ACT is assisting Findlay Market in developing an 8,000 square-foot kitchen incubator in order to provide important facilities and programs to culinary entrepreneurs and market vendors.
Meals on Wheels
Location: Tarrant County, TX
Description: Meals On Wheels, Inc. of Tarrant County is set to construct a new 63,000-square-foot facility that will provide an additional 500,000 meals each year to the community. The new facility will also provide a volunteer training center for the 4,000+ meal-delivery volunteers the organization heavily relies on. ACT has partnered with local organizations to extend workforce development programming to Veterans. This additional programming will provide additional job creation and workforce training for residents in the Dallas-Fort Worth community.
Mercantile Block
Location: Providence, RI
Description: Completed in 2010, the Mercantile Block in Providence, RI is the third of arts organization AS220’s development projects in Providence’s Downcity Arts District. The Mercantile Block consists of market-rate, first-floor commercial space that supports affordable artist studios and nonprofit office space upstairs, providing space for nonprofit tenants such as College Visions and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. It is home to 22 live/work artist studios and 24,900 SF of commercial space that includes AS220’s print shop, darkroom and media arts lab, and fabrication and electronics lab. Collectively known as the AS220 Industries, the facilities provide access to equipment, education and other resources to artists and entrepreneurs. In partnership with National Trust Community Investment Corporation, ACT carried out an assessment of job creation, quality and accessibility at the Mercantile Block in August 2015.
Roving Radish
Location: Howard County, MD
Description: Howard County and the Horizon Foundation engaged ACT to help develop a mobile market program that would serve multiple goals of sourcing food locally, providing food access to low-income residents of Howard County, and providing educational resources on healthy eating. The Roving Radish launched in 2014 and completed a successful pilot season. The Roving Radish sells affordable healthy meal kits sourced from regional farms. The meal kit include two recipes to prepare two meals for a family of four. In its first season the Roving Radish sold 1,452 meal kits, serving 450 households, with 45% of meal kits sold to individuals who self identified as low-income.
Santana Textiles
Location: Edinburg, TX
Description: ACT is carrying out community benefits work for a new facility developed for Santana Textiles, a Brazilian denim manufacturer. The 33-acre facility in Edinburg, TX will hire up to 300 employees. Texas officials have estimated that the project eventually will invest roughly $170 million into the region. ACT will be partnering with local organizations and universities to assist with funding for workforce development and training for future Santana Textile’s employees.
Targeted Spend, Local Impact
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Description: Targeted Spend, Local Impact is an initiative focused on West Philadelphia as a pilot location to analyze the potential of anchor institution procurement, and to develop new approaches for using demand-side strategies coupled with supply-side interventions to stimulate local economic development. ACT partnered with Drexel University on this project and it has received funding from the Surdna Foundation for the analysis phase.
Triad Community Kitchen
Location: Winston Salem, NC
Description: Triad Community Kitchen is a program of Second Harvest Food Bank of North-West North Carolina that provides culinary arts training, life skills training and employment assistance to unemployed/underemployed individuals; provides over 300,000 nutritionally balanced meals to hunger relief efforts of the Food Bank; and engages in social enterprise business units that seek to provide “real world” work experience and opportunities for students. ACT is assisting Triad in financing and developing its next project–full-service restaurant, caterer and artisanal retail shop with the primary objective of providing employment opportunities for the under and unemployed graduates from the culinary training program.
Urban Action Community Development
Description: Urban Action Community Development (UACD) is a seasoned financier of challenging, catalytic projects located in low-income areas. Since 2007, UACD has successfully deployed $140 MM of New Market Tax Credit (NMTC) allocation into projects that stabilize and strengthen neighborhoods. Since 2008, UACD has worked with ACT to deliver community benefits to its projects. ACT carries out a combination of community fund administration, local technical assistance, and community engagement in order to maximize the local impact of UACD’s investments.
Wake 60
Location: Winston Salem, NC
Description: The Wake 60’s Building is part of the former RJ Reynolds tobacco production and warehouse buildings located in historic Winston-Salem, NC. The Wake Forest School of Medicine will occupy 168,000 square feet of academic classrooms, labs and administrative offices. The remaining 115,250 square feet of space will be available for lease to companies interested in establishing state-of-the-art wet and dry laboratories, clinical research facilities, computational research or offices within close proximity to Wake Forest Innovations, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centers and Wake Forest University. ACT will carry out community benefits work related to Wake 60, continuing our engagement and building our relationships with local organizations in Winston-Salem.
Wexford Science & Technology
Description: Wexford Science & Technology, a national developer of university research parks, engaged ACT to help maximize the local impact of the parks Wexford develops and the companies in those parks. ACT is working on the ground at each project location, building community-based relationships and developing local investment strategies. ACT’s work includes drafting community benefits agreements, coordinating TIF agreements, identifying local and MBE/WBE vendors, and forging local support and funding partnerships. At the same time, ACT is helping to develop better processes for community benefits evaluation and reporting. The result is a stronger community impact strategy, a more prominent profile within project markets, and projects that contribute toward the strengthening of communities.