What is community reinvestment, why is it important, and why should people care about it?
The Community Reinvestment Act is a law on the books for any financial services institution that accepts deposits that they have to reinvest back in LMI communities, low or moderate-income communities. That means your products, services, branches, [and] your credit access has to be in all communities equally, regardless of income levels.
It matters because that law [The Community Reinvestment Act] has been changed three times in the last 40 plus years and is actually going through a change right now. They are thinking about what else that law should be inclusive of; should it include lending by race or ethnicity and looking at the lender’s performance to ensure that they [the banks] have part of the rating they get. It’s also important because banking has changed over the last 40 years.
Can you talk about some of the wins you’ve experienced coming in and some challenges you’ve experienced?
[What] I’m excited about is our Advancing Black Pathways Fellowship program. It’s progressively grown year over year. Our first year, we started with 50 students [and] we had 170 students last year. Next year, we plan to double that for 2022.
I’m [also] excited about our homeownership initiative. That has been one of the opportunities we know is a great wealth builder for individuals … our homebuyer education grant that we provided to 6,700 majority-minority tracks will make a difference in helping those communities with intentionality [improving] homeownership in their communities.
Watch the full interview here.
