Healthy Food Financing Initiative Questionnaire

To: CDFI/NACA Financial Assistance Applicant

From: Ruth Jaure, CDFI/NACA Program Manager

Subject: Persistent Poverty Commitment Questionnaire

Date: ________________

Thank you for submitting an application for Financial Assistance (FA) through the CDFI Fund’s FY 2012 CDFI Program or NACA Program funding round.

The purpose of this email is to request certain supplemental application information from your organization. Please review this request and respond within ___ days, no later than 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time, on March __, 2012. If you do not respond with the requested information by this deadline, your organization’s application may be deemed incomplete and therefore ineligible for further consideration.

The CDFI Fund’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 appropriation legislation includes a requirement that “of the funds awarded …not less than 10 percent shall be used for projects that serve populations living in persistent poverty counties.”¹ The specific counties that meet the criteria for “persistent poverty” can be found at: www.cdfifund.gov/persistentpoverty.

Please review the counties and respond to the following request:

As an FY 2012 FA applicant for the CDFI/NACA programs, please indicate in Table 1 the minimum and maximum percentage of the award that your organization will commit to serving populations in persistent poverty counties. At the discretion of the CDFI Fund, the applicant may be required to deploy a percentage of its allocation at or above the minimum indicated below, but not more than the maximum percentage indicated below.

Table 1 –Award Commitment to Persistent Poverty Counties
Criteria	Percentage of Award Amount
Minimum FA award amount targeted to persistent poverty counties	%
Maximum FA award amount targeted to persistent poverty counties	%

The CDFI Fund may use the above information to determine the final awardee pool and size of awards to comply with the 10 percent Congressional requirement. Therefore, this information may impact the ranking of your organization’s application and/or the size of an award. As a result, an organization may be advantaged when the final awards are decided if it commits to lending/investing at least 10 percent of its award dollars in persistent poverty counties. No applicant, however, will be disqualified from consideration or otherwise adversely affected in ranking if it does not make a commitment to a persistent poverty county.

If your organization is selected to receive a FY 2012 FA award and you have committed in Table 1 to lending/investing in the relevant counties, a commitment amount will be incorporated into the organization’s Assistance Agreement along with other requirements, such as the need to report Transactional Level Report (TLR) data and the need to maintain proper supporting documentation and records available for review by CDFI Fund staff during site visits and desk reviews.

If you have questions, please contact the CDFI Fund’s Help Desk at [email protected] or call 202-622-6355.

1 The appropriation language defined persistent poverty counties as any county that has had 20 percent or more of its population living in poverty over the past 30 years, as measured by the 1990, 2000, and 2010 decennial censuses.

2