Last fall the Muntu Dance Theatre was going through that phase known in the not-for-profit world as downtime. It had been promised a grant for productions, but the check was “in the mail.” The south-side dance troupe was facing a dilemma: work for free or suspend its current production.
For their efforts they recently won the praise of Mayor Daley and were rewarded with $500,000 in contributions from a consortium of eight downtown banks. That gives them a loan base of $1.5 million, which, if all goes well, they will be able to turn into nearly $4 million worth of loans.
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“We provide basic working capital to not-for-profits–we bridge their cash-flow problems,” says Wilkerson. “We lend to groups that banks and other conventional lending sources overlook. A lot of times the difference between a group going out of business and keeping afloat is whatever loan we can muster.”
Ironically, the Nonprofit Financial Center faced some rough times early on because its first managers didn’t have a head for finance. “When I came here in 1982, 85 percent of our loan portfolio was delinquent,” says Wilkerson, who used to work for the South Shore Bank. “The people administering the program did not have a strong financial background. These were supposed to be loans, but they tended to treat them as grants.”
They’re also determined about retrieving their loans. “We’ve taken people to court to get them to pay us back,” says Wilkerson. “Generally if a group can’t pay us, it means that they’ve gone out of business. We like to think that if we can’t collect, nobody can.”
They borrowed $40,000, and have not had any financial problems since. Garza says, “I’d tell other people facing a similar problem, ‘Don’t feel humiliated–it can happen to anyone.’ The great thing about the center is that you can act with them in a way you can’t act with a bank. With a bank, you have to go in like gangbusters. With Delena, you can admit that there’s something you don’t understand, and she won’t hold it against you.
