BlueHub Capital CEO Elyse Cherry joined Carrie Fox on the Mission Forward podcast to discuss how staying close to the community has shaped four decades of BlueHub's work.
Elyse traces BlueHub's founding in 1985 with $3,500 and a single mission: to build healthy communities where people of limited income live and work. She explains how that mission has stayed fixed even as the organization's tools have changed — from its original loan fund to a venture capital fund, the WegoWise utility-cost company, the SUN Initiative born out of the foreclosure crisis, and One Percent for America, which lowers the cost of the path to citizenship.
The conversation centers on proximity — why BlueHub has always kept its offices inside the neighborhoods it serves. Elyse shares how that closeness led BlueHub to finance a Cape Verdean grocery store and a community health center side by side in Brockton, Massachusetts, treating food access and health as a single, connected need rather than separate problems.
Elyse also revisits BlueHub's role during the 1992 banking collapse, when the organization bought its own distressed loans back from the federal government at ten cents on the dollar to keep families housed, and reflects on the recently released Roxbury Impact Study, which found $147 million in BlueHub financing over 40 years leveraged an additional $910 million and helped create more than 3,200 units of housing.
"Courage can be quiet, but it can't be silent," Elyse says, describing how she thinks about leading through uncertain times while staying grounded in BlueHub's mission and the communities it serves.
Listen to the full episode on the Mission Forward podcast.