Industry & Member News

The Financial Capability Innovation Fund, managed by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), supports promising nonprofit-led projects designed to help consumers better manage their finances and achieve financial prosperity. Specifically, the Fund is looking for educational projects focusing on behavioral changes, which ultimately result in measurable, improved outcomes for lower-income, underbanked consumers.

Yashoda Naidoo, owner of Annapurna’s World Vegetarian Café and a client of ACCION New Mexico ∙ Arizona ∙ Colorado (ACCION), is generously contributing $15,000 toward completion of ACCION’s new regional headquarters in Albuquerque. In recognition of this gift, ACCION will name the break room in the new building after Naidoo’s Annapurna World Vegetarian Café.

Friday evening, banking regulators seized ShoreBank, a CDFI in Chicago, IL, and an OFN Member. Essentially all of the assets and liabilities of ShoreBank were acquired by a new entity, Urban Partnership Bank, that is headed by the management team brought in earlier this year at ShoreBank. Urban Partnership Bank intends to become a CDFI.

OFN's President & CEO Mark Pinsky's official statement and key data points affirm the fact that the CDFI industry is sound and healthy.

On Friday, August 20, 2010, ShoreBank, Chicago, IL was closed by the The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named Receiver. No advance notice is given to the public when a financial institution is closed.

JPMorgan Chase has provided IFF, an award-winning community development financial institution (CDFI), with a low-interest loan of $9.5 million with capital raised through the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) Program. The funding comes at a critical time for nonprofits which have seen other facilities financing options decline during the U.S. economic crisis. IFF will use the JPMorgan Chase investment to provide loans to qualified nonprofit borrowers in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently hosted the Healthy Communities Conference in Washington, DC to explore the potential benefits that low-income families and children could receive from greater collaboration between the community development finance and health fields.

Conference videos, transcripts, speaker bios and presentations, a conference blog, and a number of related publications are now available on their Healthy Communities website.

Following the conversation from their first Webinar on capitalization, "Innovative Capitalization Strategies: What is Scalable?" FIELD is hosting a follow-up discussion on the individual investor strategy to raise capital. In Raising Capital with an Individual Investor Strategy: the Ins and Outs, Sally Hatch, Director of Investor Relations and Alan Cantor, Vice President of Philanthropy for the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, will give us a deeper understanding of this capitalization structure and discuss both the costs and benefits of this strategy. Practitioners will also learn about the most important steps in getting started in this area.

The Federal Reserve Event, “Addressing the Financing Needs of Small Business” was held on July 12 in Washington DC. This meeting attended by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, served as a capstone for a series of more than 40 meetings. Community First Fund President and CEO, Dan Betancourt was featured on one of the panels during the event. He was asked to field questions on how to better utilize SBA, CDFI Fund and other public sector programs.

Opportunity Fund enrolled their 3,000th client in their IDA Matched Savings program, crossing a key milestone in the program's history. Launched in 1999 as part of the Assets for All Alliance, Opportunity Fund's IDA Matched Savings program is now one of the largest in the country and a leader in the field. Special thanks to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation's Center for Venture Philanthropy, Citibank and Catholic Charities for over ten years of partnership.

The Housing Assistance Council announced today that its January –June 2010 funding to support affordable green housing in rural America totals $12.7 million dollars to help build 1,697 homes. Most recently, HAC awarded grants totaling $265,000 to 24 local nonprofit rural housing associations to support green building techniques in homes owned or rented by low-income families. Grantees will use the funds to ensure that homes are more energy and water efficient, have good indoor air quality and provide a safe, healthy and affordable space to live.