Creating positive impacts since 1994.
Craft3 is focused on helping communities create a future in which:
We can’t do this alone. We invite your partnership, your accompaniment, your questions, and your support.
While our primary tool for creating change is capital, Craft3 is more than a lender. We build relationships, connect unlikely partners, and tell the stories of the people and communities we serve. Through our three core strategies of Capital, Relationships, and Voice, we’re working to build a better, more inclusive Pacific Northwest.
Read our Strategic Plan, “Capital, Relationships, and Voice: Investing in Communities and Change.”
Craft3 focuses on three key challenges facing our region. Meeting these challenges will require systems change.
Our region is not providing Tribal and rural communities with sufficient opportunities for economic growth and self-determination. We all suffer because of this.
Forests, fisheries, and other natural resources have made many fortunes in the Pacific Northwest. As unsustainable natural resource extraction has slowed, rural economies have had a hard landing and generally not experienced the prosperity and opportunities our cities have enjoyed. Craft3 works to change this.
Our region is held back by racial inequities, many of which are legacies of a long history of racism and racist practices. These inequities hurt us all and prevent our region from reaching its full potential.
In the Pacific Northwest, race shapes economic opportunities and outcomes, as well as the circumstances people are born into. Black, brown and indigenous people have, on average, less wealth, less educational attainment, lower life expectancies, and lower rates of home ownership. Craft3 works to change this.
Our region is threatened by a climate crisis that disproportionately impacts minorities and decreases quality of life and economic growth. This crisis is already causing droughts, heat waves, floods, and forest fires across the Pacific Northwest.
Not only does climate change disproportionately harm our most vulnerable populations — Native, minority and low-income communities — but also these populations are unlikely to have the resources to adapt to a changing climate or to benefit from the economic opportunities of climate adaptation. Craft3 works to change this.
Since 1994, Craft3 has focused on expanding access to capital by serving people and places not served by traditional financing.
While how we phrase our mission has evolved and our strategic toolbox has expanded, there’s been a remarkably consistent through-line to the why and how of our work.
Craft3 started in Ilwaco, Washington, at the mouth of the Columbia River. As the timber wars raged, environmentalists and loggers were locked in what seemed to be an intractable struggle. The founders of Craft3 saw the potential for community development finance to meet unmet community needs in a rural community making a difficult transition from an economy based on natural resource extraction.
By making loans that support people and places left out of the region’s prosperity, our founders thought they could use capital as a tool for social good – to help entrepreneurs, families and communities develop, grow stronger and determine their own futures. Craft3 has been doing just that ever since.
Since then, we’ve grown and added new capabilities, but we’ve always viewed our lending as a series of investments to help create a better future for our region.