[Finance] Pursuing funding for a combined coliving + makerspace property

[Sparr]

First, hello! This is my first post to this list, although I was active on
the discuss list years ago when I was more active in traditional makerspace
organization.

I am pursuing a dream of a large coliving / cohousing community with an
integrated makerspace and other shared functional amenities. I've set my
sights on an old boarding high school (more recently a corporate retreat
and a spiritual retreat) outside Portland, OR. The property has 130 dorm
rooms, 30 bedrooms in apartments and houses, and 130k sqft of additional
functional indoor space. Notably that includes a 14k sqft industrial arts
building equipped as an auto shop, wood shop, and welding shop. The tools
are gone, but the infrastructure (lifts, dust collection, welding booths,
ventilation, power distribution, oxygen and acetylene plumbing, etc) is
still in place and functional. That building also has classrooms that we
would convert into a machine shop and a high tech fabrication shop (3d
printing, circuit etching and milling, etc), and the other buildings have
spaces for fiber arts, kiln crafts, etc.

So far my financial prospects have included investment from the founders, a
crowd investing campaign, and some committed funds from members joining
when we launch. I've also been pursuing angel investment and bank financing
both as a small business and as a commercial real estate purchase.

That brings me to this list. I'd like to ask for guidance on pursuing
financing at least part of the project from the makerspace/hackerspace
angle. I would appreciate recommendations of lenders, grant programs, etc
that might be applicable. Perhaps as part of the purchase price of the
property, perhaps for buildout and tool acquisition, perhaps for some other
aspect of the project. I expect some of you might even have angles in mind
that I haven't even thought of yet.

If you'd like to know more about the project, and I put this at the end
because this email is primarily in search of information and not meant as a
pitch, you can find our various web presences here:
Website: http://CoDwell.org
Crowd investing campaign: http://wefunder.com/codwell
Facebook page: http://facebook.com/CoDwellCommunity

Thank you,
Clarence "Sparr" Risher
CoDwell
sparr0 at gmail.com
sparr at codwell.org

PS: I hope I haven't caught too many of you by surprise, resurrecting this
old list. I wonder if there's an equivalent of "thread necromancy" for a
whole mailing list?
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