Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

Documentary Brings the Beauty of Cogeneration to PBS

Documentary Brings the Beauty of Cogeneration to PBS

A new documentary film, Ink & Linda, chronicles the unexpected friendship between Inksap, a Vietnamese-American street artist in his 20s, and Linda, a white modern dance teacher in her 70s. Shortly after a chance encounter brings these two together, they begin...

Announcing the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity

Announcing the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity

We’re out to show the world that older and younger people can help solve pressing problems when they work together. To that end, today we’re launching the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity, a partnership with the Ares Charitable Foundation to elevate...

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John Nelson

Wall Street Without Walls
Purpose Prize Fellow 2008

Helping nonprofits access advice and private capital by connecting them to active and retired finance professionals.

John Eric Nelson had always worked in community development and environmental preservation and was frustrated at the way most nonprofit groups faced an erratic funding stream from foundations and government grants. In 1998, at a Rockefeller Foundation gathering on ways to link nonprofits to capital markets, he met Greg Stanton, a Wall Street investment banker, who had founded an organization of financiers eager to donate their Wall Street expertise. Nelson now leads the group. Financial experts of Wall Street Without Walls help community development organizations think through a financing need, identify the best sources and structures for funding it. The finance professionals share their expertise by connecting capital markets with local economic development organizations that serve disadvantaged small businesses, individuals and families. Nelson has engaged national financial institutions including the Federal Reserve Bank system to give non-profits access to more than $1 billion of new mission capital since 2000. More than 2,500 professionals and 1,000 community organizations have taken on projects such as financing 1,000 units of workforce housing in Washington DC; creating a mortgage loan system for immigrant home purchasers; leveraging under-used federal assets to back a $1.1 billion infrastructure bond in New Orleans; and designing a national investment fund for micro-enterprise organizations. “My entire life’s experience has been my training for this unusual opportunity, and I am ready to take it on, at 61 years of age.”