The Clare Foundation has proudly announced the investment of significant funds into the Community Housing Funding Agency’s (CHFA) Social Bonds, marking major milestones for social investment, community housing and impact investment in New Zealand.
CHFA brings together leading philanthropic organisations, charities, fund managers and the government in a partnership to efficiently raise money to support lending for community and affordable housing. It then issues the first ever domestic Social Bonds to the capital markets, particularly fund managers and KiwiSaver providers, to allow it to continue to scale, and recycle its philanthropic, bank and government funding. This is designed to enable it to deliver billions of dollars over time, reflecting the housing crisis is a multi-billion-dollar issue.
Alice Montague, Clare CEO says, “The social bonds model has been proven as a hugely effective way to have a long lasting impact on social housing crisis, and we are very pleased to be investing in the future of affordable housing for families in Aotearoa.”
CHFA was established by social enterprise Community Finance in 2024 aided by concessionary catalytic capital personally provided by Clare founder Anna Stuck. It aggregates the leading community and affordable housing providers in the country to help them secure long-term, lower-cost finance. Community Finance launched CHFA as a natural next step in response to growing demand from the community housing sector for its lending services. Moving to an affordable housing aggregation model was the logical upgrade needed for New Zealand.
“There is a lot of talk about solving New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit and housing crisis, but this is not just theory – this is real system change in action,” says CHFA Chief Executive James Palmer. “CHFA is demonstrating what can be achieved when financial innovation is matched with strong community, business and government partnerships.”
Hundreds of homes are already being funded by CHFA across the country, and its lending pipeline continues to grow, with homes being financed in Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington, Rotorua, Hawkes Bay, Tauranga, Hamilton, Auckland and Northland.
Find out more about CHFA here.