LYNNFIELD — Town resident Pam Feingold harnessed Eastern Bank’s financial power to help a South Shore cancer support home recover after a devastating fire.
For more than 40 years, Alice and John Feeney’s home welcomed guests in need of comfort. When Alice died in 1997, Janet Gibson, whose cancer support group had benefited from the home, along with other community members, realized the importance of continuing this legacy.
In 1997, Janet founded Alice’s House Inc., a nonprofit charitable organization, which was able to purchase the home from Alice’s estate. For 15 years, Alice’s House was able to open its doors for individuals, families, and small groups seeking a healing respite by the sea from challenges they were facing.
Alice’s House was one of four destroyed by fire in 2012.
Del Berrada, an Eastern Bank trustee and Marshfield resident, connected Gibson with Feingold, Senior Vice President for Community Development Lending Director at Eastern.
Feingold was eager to assist with Alice’s House Inc.’s rebirth. “Eastern’s Community Development Lending Group supports the financing needs of many nonprofits in our local communities, and Alice’s House was particularly special,” she said in a statement provided by Eastern.
Eastern’s financing enabled Alice’s House to complete the reconstruction and reopen its doors to the community again in 2017.
To celebrate the final loan payment, Gibson and her associates delivered the final loan payment in person at Eastern Bank to Feingold, Executive Vice President, Senior Commercial Banking Office Matthew Osborne, and Commercial Relationship Manager Johanna Stone.
Alice’s House is just the latest community success story Feingold has helped make a reality.
She worked at Wainwright Bank in Boston in the 1990s when the bank helped support Rosie’s Place, an organization aiding women, and she worked with Wainwright founder Robert Glassman, who steered the bank into finding ways to fund housing for people with AIDS.
Wainwright merged with Eastern Bank eight years ago and Eastern, in keeping with Glassman’s vision, has loaned more than $1 billion in community development financing to date, including money for construction, lines of credit, affordable housing initiatives and broader-range economic development projects.
Feingold-led projects have helped health care providers offer more services in neighborhoods where such services are lacking. Eastern, as the lead lender with Feingold supervising, devised a tax credit lending structure that will allow Horizons for Homeless Children and WaterMark Development to build a center in Roxbury serving families struggling to move beyond homelessness.
