Opportunity finance is a long-term strategy that recognizes the need for partners, broad appeal, and a sustainable perspective. A strong statement of purpose anchors our policy strategy: Opportunity Finance Network’s policy focus is leveraging capital for CDFIs in ways that help the opportunity finance industry transform into a high-volume financing system. Our advocacy will seek structural and systemic changes that result in billions of dollars of new private and public resources to CDFIs and other opportunity finance institutions and so into opportunity markets.

This approach extends our decades-long effort. To focus on transformational capital-led strategies, we have prioritized our activities; clearly defined our primary issues; and developed criteria to determine which issues and groups we should actively support.¹

Significant change does not happen overnight. Keeping our focus on capital strategies at the federal level for the opportunity finance industry will not be easy; and changing the mindset of policymakers to embrace that opportunity finance is an investment in the market economy may prove even more difficult.

¹We recognize there are other areas that are or could be important to the opportunity finance industry, but we do not have the resources to actively advocate on or around these issues. For that reason, we have developed guidelines and specific activities based on our Members’ level of interest (Appendix A).