Interview with Charlie Hammerman :
The Disability Opportunity Fund and the world ' s first fully accessible hotel - The Schoolhouse Hotel -
Charlie Hammerman
What influenced your decision to start the Disability Opportunity Fund ?
From our perspective , what the disability market needed for growth in 2005 / 2006 was finance and capital to address the public policy needs of that market - housing , community centers , education , more employment etc .
DOF is a not-for-profit , a Community Development Financial Institution ( CDFI ) certified by the US Treasury Department . We are one of 1000 CDFIs and there ’ s just a handful of us that focus on disabilities as our mission . With that exclusive disability focus , we ’ ve identified that there are needs in the disability world and that capital is necessary to be able to meet those needs .
What are the most prevalent needs identified ? Do you work with organizations only or directly with people with disabilities ?
We work with both . But we do financing more on an institutional level with organizations or when we do work with individuals , it ' s typically individuals who come together to create their own organization or their own entity to own a house or similar initiative .
We started with housing for people with disabilities because it was the easiest to tackle . In 2008 , housing was the number one challenge from the standpoint of who was willing to finance it . CDFIs finance what a bank or traditional financing won ' t , so
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