Michelle Witherspoon, Larry Witherspoon, and their two children stand on the porch of the home they purchased via a mortgage from FCS Community Finance. Photo by Becca Stanley.
For over forty years, we’ve been able to finance equitable access to housing. Qualifying for a mortgage, and getting one on favorable terms, is often a huge barrier for low-income families to become homeowners. To push aside this obstacle, FCS created our own mortgage products decades ago. Our flagship product has been a 20-year, 0% interest mortgage program for families throughout southeast Atlanta neighborhoods. To date, we have serviced over 400 mortgages like these!
Now, we’re ready to scale this program to even greater benefit for our families and for even more families in our neighborhood. To help us do that, we are thrilled to introduce FCS Community Finance, an emerging Community Development Finance Institution (you can learn more about CDFIs by clicking here). Essentially, this new entity allows us to offer products that will help build our neighbors credit history more effectively and widely.
Even more good news: thanks to a $125,000 technical assistance grant from the CDFI Fund via the US Treasury and a partnership with NeighborWorks Columbus, FCS Community Finance is already up and running. It has even closed on its first loan already!
This inaugural mortgage is making our dear neighbors, Michelle and Larry Witherspoon, South Atlanta homeowners. We are thrilled to see our Youth Development Coordinator and her family sink even deeper roots into this place. We are eager to see how FCS Community Finance will allow even more South Atlanta neighbors to grow their wealth and strengthen their roots here.
As we look with hope to this new year, this still-new decade, I can’t wait to see the new ways we build an equitable, mixed-income community together. Your support and encouragement makes it possible for us to innovate and help South Atlanta thrive!
