Wainwright advances socially responsible policies
CAMBRIDGE-- Bankers do not inspire warm and fuzzy feelings.
They are the men foreclosing or threatening to foreclose.
They are the ones who squeezed small business owners looking for loans in the late 1980's, but then gave millions to condominium speculators who defaulted and left financial institutions in ruins.
A Boston based bank trying to expand its operations in Cambridge wants to change that image.
Wainwright Bank and Trust Co., which started in 1987 and rode out the stock market crash that year, has married social causes to high finance and is in a strong financial position.
"The Ben & Jerry's analogy works for us,"
said Robert Glassman, chairman of the board for the
bank.
Ben & Jerry's, the profitable Vermont ice cream
maker, is famous for its investment in social causes
like saving the Brazilian rain forest.
In an interview last week, Glassman and Wainwright Bank President John Plukas, who attended Harvard Business School together 25 years ago, talked about the company's "socially responsible" banking policies.
"We're a conventional bank doing unconventional things," said Glassman.
The bank has provided financing for a number of special housing projects in Cambridge and Boston over the past several years.
In Cambridge, where there are two branches on Mt. Auburn street and in Kendall Square, the bank worked with the YWCA and YMCA in rehabilitation and construction of 173 rooms for poor people.
"They stepped to the plate, and we discovered how wonderful they were to work with," said YMCA Executive Director Richard Foot. "They knew the players and had experience."
The bank provided a $2 million construction loan to renovate 128 rooms at the YMCA, said Foot.
Wainwright was also one of several financial sources for the Ruah House in North Cambridge.
The house, a renovated multi-family building on Russell Street, provides seven units for homeless women with HIV-AIDS.
Wainwright was the lead bank in a shared $210,000 loan with the North Cambridge Cooperative Bank to Ruah Inc.
Glassman said the bank has been involved in much of the single-room and AIDS housing financing in the area.
In the bank's statement about its philosophy of socially responsible banking, a Boston Developer who initiated an AIDS housing project lauded Wainwright.
"It is excruciatingly difficult to obtain construction
loans from Boston's local banks," said Caleb C.
Clapp. "Without the substantial involvement of
Wainwright Bank, the project would not have been possible."
The bank has also financed homeless shelters, food banks and urban health centers. "There is a general impression that this is marginally profitable," said Plukas. "But it can be just as rewarding. There is a better non-default performance."
"These people pay you back. They don't walk," said Glassman, who said the bank has $250 million is assets.
Wainwright also instituted the Community Credit Card with MasterCard.
One percent of every purchase with the Community Card goes to gay and lesbian or AIDS organizations in the Boston area.
Bank officials are also proud that about a quarter of the employees are black, Asian or Hispanic and that a quarter of the board of directors is black.
The bank, like many others, had to overcome the stock
market crash of October 1987 and only returned to profitability
two years ago.
Plukas said the majority of banks that started up in the 1980s were not so lucky.
The Franklin Street building in downtown Boston that houses Wainwright is a reminder about who did not make it out of the go-go 80s, when real estate got hot then busted out. It once housed the Coolidge Bank.
Coolidge lost tens if millions of dollars in bad commercial real estate loans several years ago and the federal government had to take over the bank.
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