Blueprint Local

Place-based capital that builds wealth in communities rather than extracting it.

Access Ventures was a founding member of the collaboration that launched Blueprint Local which is a platform built to help entrepreneurs and communities access capital in the places they call home. What began as a neighborhood experiment on our own street in Louisville grew into one of the country's leading place-based investment platforms.

Our role: Founding partner and investor

Focus: Community real estate and Qualified Opportunity Zone funds

Geography: Southeast, Texas, and Mid-Atlantic

From Shelby Park to a National Platform

Our conviction that capital can heal communities rather than extract from them didn't start with Blueprint. It started in Shelby Park, the Louisville neighborhood where we do our work.

We began there with a simple, patient idea: restore vacant and abandoned properties using non-traditional, patient debt, in a neighborhood in the path of growth and one whose property values were low but rising, where the timing of investment mattered enormously. Move too fast, and long-term residents get priced out before they can share in the change. Move with intention, and growth includes the people already there. Over time that vision matured into a fuller strategy with commercial development, creative enterprises, coworking, and micro-lending to small businesses in need of critical growth capital.

Shelby Park taught us what community investment looks like when it is designed to be inclusive instead of extractive. Blueprint Local is the expansion of that thesis from one neighborhood to a national platform.

A Once-in-a-Generation Opening

When the federal government created Opportunity Zones to draw private capital into deeply distressed census tracts, we saw both a window and a warning. Well-intentioned programs before it (New Markets Tax Credits chief among them) too often devolved into real estate plays for outside investors, drifting from their original purpose of building operating businesses, jobs, and local wealth.

We wanted to do something different. So we teamed up with Ross Baird (founder of Village Capital and one of the most experienced investors in economically distressed communities in America, and a contributor to the Opportunity Zone legislation itself) to build a strategy that could set a better national narrative. Rather than a single national fund, we designed a series of community-based strategies rooted in specific regions, because investors are drawn not only to returns but to seeing those returns strengthen their own communities.

We learned early that communities are complex organisms that need every type of capital strategically and intentionally coordinated. Opportunity Funds invest equity, but neighborhoods also need grant-supported social services and creative permanent financing to stabilize families and businesses. The regions willing to coordinate all of it are the ones leading the national conversation and, over the life of the program, will see the most promising results.

What Blueprint Does Today

Blueprint Local invests in real estate projects designed to drive attractive returns for investors and meaningful impact in communities. It manages a range of funds including Qualified Opportunity Zone funds across both diversified multi-asset vehicles and single-asset special purpose vehicles, typically investing as a non-managing partner alongside local and regional sponsors and developers.

That local-sponsor model matters. Blueprint's funds pursue financial performance and social outcomes together: increased community dynamism, portfolio diversity across demographics and socioeconomics, and measurable local health indicators — jobs, household wealth created, and neighborhood vitality.

Blueprint has established itself as a leader in Opportunity Zone investing:

• Involvement in the creation of the Opportunity Zone legislation and deep experience in institutional real estate transactions

• A presence in more than twenty deals across ten-plus high-growth cities, representing over $2.3 billion in total built-out project capitalization

• Named by Forbes (2020) as one of the top ten impact-oriented managers of Opportunity Funds in the U.S.

• Ranked in the top 5% of most active Opportunity Zone funds nationwide by Novogradac

• Recognized as an ImpactAssets Impact50 Top Emerging Manager

Why We Invested

For years we've practiced "one-pocket investing" which is the conviction that we don't have to split our lives into a pocket for profit and a pocket for good. Blueprint Local is one-pocket investing at community scale. It proves that patient, coordinated, place-based capital can generate real financial returns while widening who gets to own, build, and belong in America's neighborhoods.

Shelby Park showed us the possibility on one street. Blueprint is helping write that story across the country.