Since the day the CDFI Fund announced our $70 million allocation, our phone has been ringing a lot. One of the most common questions is, “how do I submit my project for NMTC financing?”
The good news is that you do not need to apply directly to the CDFI Fund. If you are working on an Indian Country project, you can seek financing directly from Travois. While we do not have a specific loan or investment request form, we have a format that we encourage project teams to follow when submitting:
- Executive summary: this should tell the story of your project in one to three pages. It will be important for us to hear what problem your project will solve, how it will solve it and how our NMTC financing is critical to that.
For example, here is a hypothetical:Our tribe has been operating its health and wellness program out of our high school gymnasium on weekends. We need to construct a new building so that our health and wellness programs can operate five days a week in a setting that affords privacy, access to technology and other aspects to better suit our needs. This project will cost us $5 million, and we have $4 million committed from grants, a loan and tribal funds. We need $1 million to close our financing gap. We seek NMTC allocation from Travois.
- Sources and uses: this document needs to demonstrate, at a high level, how the funding you have (assuming our NMTC investor can provide 20% of the cost) matches up with the costs you have. In the early stages, you do not need to provide a detailed description and cost for every line item.
For example: you don’t need to tell us how much will go to concrete, electrical systems or windows. But we would need to know how much will go to hard construction costs as opposed to site work as opposed to initial operations.
- Project image: part of our job is to tell your story to our NMTC investors. It always helps us tell that story if we can plant an image in the investor’s mind.This can be a photo of construction in progress, an architectural rendering or even a photo of the raw site. Images help.
We still have NMTC allocation available and we want to hear from you if you are working on projects. If you have any questions at all or just want to introduce yourself or your project, call any time. But when the time comes to submit project documents to us, the three mentioned above will be the first ones we want to see.
The New Markets team can be reached at 816-994-8970 or newmarkets@travois.com.