NEW YORK–Cliff Rosenthal, the long-time leader of the National Federation of CDCUs (now called Inclusiv) who also led the BCFP’s Office of Financial Empowerment, has published a new book: “About Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement.”
“Decades before Occupy Wall Street challenged the American financial system, activists began organizing alternatives to provide capital to ‘unbankable’ communities and the poor,” said Rosenthal in describing the book. “With roots in the civil rights, anti-poverty, and other progressive movements, they brought little training in finance. They formed nonprofit loan funds, credit unions, and even a new bank—organizations that by 1992 became known as community development financial institutions, or CDFIs.”
Rosenthal said that CDFIs have grown from church basements and kitchen tables to more than 1,000 institutions with billions of dollars of capital, in the process helping to transform community development by providing credit and financial services across the United States, from inner cities to Native American reservations.
Tracing the Roots
According to Rosenthal, Democratizing Finance traces the roots of community development finance over two centuries, a history that runs from Benjamin Franklin, through an ill-starred bank for African American veterans of the Civil War, the birth of the credit union movement, and the War on Poverty. The book is drawn from hundreds of interviews with CDFI leaders, presidential archives, and congressional testimony.
For more information: https://www.cliffrosenthal.com