Communities Unlimited

CU's Environmental Services Program works with small population community environmental management systems: community drinking water systems; wastewater systems; and solid waste management systems through on-site technical assistance, training, publications, and financing. With a current staff of over 50 highly trained professional technical assistance providers, CU Environmental Services supports efforts to provide access to safe drinking water for everyone and environmentally-responsible waste disposal within an ever-changing regulatory environment in the communities that are provided technical assistance and training. Our technical assistance focuses on building local capacity of governing board members, environmental operators, and other system staff so that they will develop and maintain the capability to adequately manage and operate their environmental management systems. All of CU Environmental Services' technical assistance and training is focused on achieving national environmental system outcomes. As a regional partner of the national Rural Community Assistance Partnership, (RCAP), CU serves as the Southern RCAP partner in providing environmental technical assistance and training throughout a seven-state region of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Additionally, CU Environmental Services supports other RCAP regional partners in other regions of the country with access to their CDFI community environmental lending. During fiscal year 2023, CU Environmental Services provided onsite assistance to 715 small communities and rural environmental systems. CU's environmental staff experienced a record year in leveraging over $174 million in construction financing to improve community water and wastewater systems. CU Environmental Services staff completed 83 training workshops attended by 1,284 community officials, board members, certified operators, and other environmental management system staff members. CU Environmental Services achieved the following National Environmental Outcomes last year for the following number of communities: 58 Communities: Improved Coordination between Communities (Regionalization Strategies); 108 Communities: Improved Public Health by achieving compliance with Safe Drinking Water Act rules and regulations; 122 Communities: Improved Environmental Health by achieving compliance with Clean Water Act and Pollution Control Act rules and regulations; 40 Communities: Improved Capacity of Community Facilities; 208 Communities: Achieved Financial Sustainability; 182 Communities: Increased Managerial Capacity; 16 Communities: Improved Self-Defined Prosperity; 42 Communities: Achieved Global Information System Mapping Capabilities.

Housing, Entrepreneurship, and Community Sustainability: CU follows a holistic, community-centered housing approach with a focus on local capacity building, technical assistance, resource development, and housing fund and lending development. During fiscal year 2023, CU was in the early stages of program planning and resource development. CU increased housing staff capacity for the housing program by hiring a housing counselor to provide housing counseling services in the Arkansas Delta and surrounding region. Filling this role will allow the organization to provide pre-purchase homebuyer education, housing counseling, and post-purchases or loans for home rehabilitation. In addition to increased staff capacity, the CU housing program engaged partners in expanding a volumetric modular housing manufacturing system and initiatives in increase homeownership for Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. CU housing staff have partnered with WE Center, a non-profit housing development and workforce training center, to launch a modular housing manufacturing center in Pine Bluff, AR with plans to manufacture and place homes in the community during the next fiscal year. CU partnered with local organizations in Pine Bluff, Arkansas to identify a pipeline of mortgage-ready home buyers to engage around modular housing manufacturing. During fiscal year 2023, CU Housing engaged the city of Dumas, AR in a comprehensive housing needs assessment and the development of a local housing task force. Through the housing needs assessment, the CU and the housing task force have engaged community members, employers, and city officials to identify, plan for, and later address the issues caused by the aging housing stock, lack of workforce, affordable housing, and housing infrastructure needs. Entrepreneurship - During fiscal year 2023, the Entrepreneurship Team assisted 310 clients one-on-one with 123 clients receiving an average of 52 hours of intensive consulting services. The program training events include an additional 34 client's completing LMS courses and 204 attendees to live small business webinars. In addition to providing its management consulting and training services to small businesses, CU's Entrepreneurship Team focused on: 1: establishing CU's new Arkansas MBDA Business Center; 2: building out additional CU E-Learning Center small business courses that provide foundational learning and supplements CU's one-on-one consulting engagements; and 3: completing the first year of the E-Wealth Health program pilot. The Arkansas MBDA Business Center (led by the Entrepreneurship Team) completed its first year with 90 small business clients. The MBDA is the Minority Business Development Agency, a bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It is the only federal agency solely dedicated to the growth and global competitiveness of minority business enterprises. In an effort to deepen its partnership with SBA, CU's Arkansas MBDA Business Center signed a Strategic Memorandum Alliance (SAM) with the Arkansas SBA District Office. CU has begun working more closely with Arkansas ecosystem partners around assisting minority businesses in identifying and securing contracts. Launched in August 2022, the E-Wealth Health Initiative (E=Entrepreneur) that is focused on closing the wealth gap through entrepreneurship completed its one-year program pilot. The E-Wealth Health Initiative consists of monthly webinars and one-on-one management consulting sessions. The business owners are taught how to manage their business to profitability and how to grow business retained earnings that are then used strategically toward increasing the owner's personal net worth, establishing retirement accounts, securing capital or other wealth creation strategies. The initial cohorts of business owners were offered Wealth Accelerator payments as an incentive to establish wealth goals. The outcomes have been amazing! Learn more about the E-Wealth Health Initiative from our staff and some of its first-year cohort participants at httpsvimeocomXXXXXXXXXsharecopyt0 httpsvimeocomXXXXXXXXXsharecopyt0 httpsvimeocomXXXXXXXXXsharecopyt0 httpsvimeocomXXXXXXXXXsharecopyt0 As FY 2023 closed, CU's Community Sustainability team's network of partner communities grew to a cumulative 59 communities and 22 counties who have worked toward developing more vibrant, sustainable economies by leveraging local assets for long-term growth. CU recognizes that for communities to achieve real sustainability the approach must be radically resident driven. Residents drive the process; creating the plans, filling gaps and connecting to existing resources to activate the community's power for change. CU's staff facilitates this process and assists with infrastructure management and improvement, community facility development, small business development and access to financing. The team believes that people should have the opportunity to thrive where they live, work, play and worship regardless of the location or population of their community. One of the goals of the CS team is to build a diverse leadership team who are open minded and motivated to initiate change. They provide training to build personal and community capacity that will enable residents to be the problem solvers. As a regional hub they provide WealthWorks training and value chain facilitation along with implementing the principles of Strategic Doing. Assets are recognized through the engagement of community leaders and utilized to build a strategy for economic growth. This strategy directs the long-term execution of work by CS staff side by side in relationship with community. By deploying their E.D.G.E. Capacity Building model, which involves Enlightening - training, Delivering - technical assistance, Guiding - as community conducts tasks, and Empowering - monitoring the community's continued success in their execution of tasks, Community Facilitators purposefully and intentionally go into every community with an exit strategy in mind, realizing that the true benefit of their efforts is building or strengthening the capacity of local governments and non-profits so that when they do complete a project they are no longer needed to ensure that community facilities, local housing, and/or community and economic development will continue to be sustainable. CU leverages each of its programs and identifies partners to bring the resources needed for implementation of the strategies to create lasting change. Community Sustainability helps communities: Evaluate ordinances and policies that are friendly to small businesses. Increase the number of local businesses. Support growth of existing local businesses. Deliver resources and convene partners who have new resources to deploy. Provide access to financing. Evaluate existing community development plans. Work with GIS mapping program to create sustainable resource maps. And, develop broadband strategies and connect to resources for deployment. They accomplish this through: Collaboration with local leadership to provide an assessment of the community's economic opportunities. Environmental technical assistance resources. Small business management consulting. Community facilities resources. Home improvement lending. Local, regional, state and federal convening of stakeholders.

In 1992, CU started making loans to water and wastewater systems in rural areas to ensure that residents had clean, healthy drinking water and safe wastewater treatment systems. In 2001 CU was certified as a CDFI. Loans made to Community Environmental Management Systems are used for improvement projects, pre-development financing, purchase of equipment and emergency financing needs. In 2023, CU closed $5,461,646 to 20 water and wastewater systems to improve their water and wastewater systems. These loans included $1,988,019 (36%) loaned in Persistent Poverty Counties. Loans ranged from the small loan needed to meet compliance to larger loans for pre-development work that helped these communities access larger loans and grants. CU made 6 pre-development loans of $2,615,637, leveraging $34,983,732 in federal and state funds. These loans impacted 1,688 household in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma in communities with poverty rates as high as 23.8%. Pre-development loans are the fastest growing segment in CU water and wastewater loan portfolio. Small business lending was added in 2010 as small businesses were struggling to recover from the 2008 recession and bank lending tightened. Again, CU works to fill the gap in financing with loans from $1,000 to $100,000 to small businesses that do not qualify for traditional financing. Small business loans can be used for working capital, which is one of the biggest gaps in small business financing. Other uses include purchase or repair of equipment and real estate purchase or improvements. CU offers a variety of small business loan products that are designed to grow as the business grows. CU's small business lending is focused on filling gaps in rural places and minority populations. In 2023, CU increased loan production by 14%. Forty-one small businesses received $937,130 in loans, averaging $22,857. This includes 68% to minority owned businesses, 27% in Persistent Poverty Counties, 56% in rural areas, and 83% to women-owned businesses. CU revived the Nuestra Casa loan program that was hugely successful in the early 2000s in the South Texas Colonias, re-launching the home improvement program using the Small Dollar Loan Grant in May 2022 with the hiring of a key local Hispanic lender for the Brownsville office. In 2023, CU provided 154 loans, making a direct impact on the resident' living conditions and often increasing their largest asset value. The program also offers credit counseling and financial incentives to pay on time and improve individual credit scores allowing for improved access to traditional financial products. Through CU's credit counseling efforts, payment monitoring and one on one personal assistance, 76% of the renewal customers have seen an increase in their FICO score, with an average increase of 37 points.

Healthy Foods and various other small programs: CU's service area includes almost half of the nation's persistent poverty counties, and five of the six states where food insecurity is above the U.S. average. We serve where economic discrimination and disparities in access to resources challenge the sustainability of small towns, small businesses, small farms and families in persistently poor rural places. Like access to safe clean drinking water, access to enough food and especially Healthy Food is necessary for children, families and communities to thrive. We know that food insecurity impacts a child's physical and mental development, impacting their future ability to learn and transfer knowledge into work performance that earn a livable wage and builds wealth for them. Food insecurity, compounded by the lack of access to healthy food, is an equity issue in our nation. This is clearly evident in the last 10-years of federal and state data, as well as evidenced by CU's decades of data from our boots-on-ground service in these places. Consider this,Rural households experienced significant increases in food insecurity in 2022 (14.7%) compared to 2021 (10.8). (USDA ERS with DOC, Census & Food Security Supplements from 2021 & 2022). Household with children headed by single women experienced a significant increase in food insecurity in 2022 (18.2%) as compared to 2021 (12.1%). (USDA ERS with DOC, Census & Food Security Supplements from 2021 & 2022). The top 10 counties in the nation with the highest child food insecurity in 2021 (> 36% of all children) are all in CU's service area. (Map the Meal Gap 2023). The growing rate of food insecurity among aging adults is challenging all communities. Arkansas has the highest rate of food insecurity among adults aged 50-59. (Map the Meal Gap 2023). The impacts of structural racism and discrimination, especially in the persistent poverty areas continues to challenge those living in CU's service. (Data from Map the Meal Gap 2023.). Food insecurity among Black/African American individuals is higher than for white individuals in almost every county in the nation. The disparity is as high as 48 percentage points in Cumberland County, TN. Food insecurity for Latino individuals varies by geography and the disparity between people of Latino heritage is as high as 26% in an Arkansas county when compared to individuals that identify as White. For those that identify as White, food insecurity is more concentrated in the rural South with 1-28% of individuals being food insecure. The Appalachian region contains some of the counties with the highest percentage of food insecurity among people that identify as White. Healthy Foods collaborates in the space of the regional food system, with intentional focus on the most marginalized communities, producers and small businesses. Success in Healthy Foods is based on collaboration and a community-centered approach that respects the needs and voices of all members of a community. It also is based on the understanding that trust must be earned, and it is necessary for technical assistance and resources to result in sustainable capacity development. CU has been able to provide technical assistance and access to resources that empowered: connections to new market opportunities for farmers; completion of GAP/GHP certification by small-scale underserved farmers; development and/or expansion of local markets; connections between local medical providers and schools to local producers resulting in increased access to fresh produce; and expanded access to resources to meet transportation, aggregation and storage needs in rural high poverty areas and with small-scale underserved farmers. A couple of examples of current collaborations and projects are highlighted below. USDA's Farm to School program allows CU to empower schools in communities challenged by poverty and racism to access resources and increase the healthy meals served to K-12 children. Local small-scale minority farmers also benefit from this initiative as they are connected with schools that desire to make local purchases and provided the technical assistance to navigate the timing of school meal planning, contracting, etc. CU's Healthy Foods Coordinator serves on the Arkansas Fellowship Steering Committee, Winrock International, to give voice to the opportunities to develop Arkansas regional food systems, connect with minority-women-veteran-other entrepreneurs and producers; and the connection between thriving local economies and access to adequate quantity and quality of food. CU Healthy Foods is the Arkansas partner in the USDA Delta Regional Food Business Center, working in collaboration with the Mississippi Delta Council for Farm Workers Opportunities, Inc. (MDC/FWOI) and other regional partners. Through this collaboration, CU will lead the distribution of over $2M in grant funding in support of regional food system development, food-related business development and sustainable production of locally grown food, ensuring equitable distribution of this funding and inclusive participation in this opportunity.