Democratizing Finance

Democratizing Finance

Author: Clifford N. Rosenthal

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 152553663X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Decades before Occupy Wall Street challenged the American financial system, activists began organizing alternatives to provide capital to “unbankable” communities and the poor. 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. By melding their vision with that of President Clinton, CDFIs grew from church basements and kitchen tables to number more than 1,000 institutions with billions of dollars of capital. They have helped transform community development by providing credit and financial services across the United States, from inner cities to Native American reservations. 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. Drawn from hundreds of interviews with CDFI leaders, presidential archives, and congressional testimony, Democratizing Finance provides an insider view of an extraordinary public policy success. Democratizing Finance is a unique resource for practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and social investors.


The Credit Union World

The Credit Union World

Author: Wendell V. Fountain

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2006-11

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1425970079

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is a remarkable book. It is the real life story of a pilot of the famed 91st Bomb Group, the Memphis Belle Group, in World War II, and the missions flown in that Group by the author and his comrades. It follows him from the time his B-17 was shot down over the German-French border, he was rescued and hidden by villagers in the tiny village of Baslieuse, then escaped through a Europe occupied by Nazi forces desperate to escape pursuing Allied armies. The book chronicles, in fascinating detail, the life and training of those young men who made up the heroic 8th Air Force, and describes the affectionate relationship often maintained by their crews with that most famed heavy bomber of all time, the fabled B-17. It includes some of the most tragic stories as well as some of the wryest humor ever written about combat groups. A heavy bomb group consists of 36 heavy bombers. The 91st lost 207 planes during its WWII combat time 32 during the author''s flight tenure. Dr. Anderson uses the words of the extraordinary crews of those planes to describe the training they absorbed, the missions they flew, the results they achieved, the tragedy of watching their planes explode and their friends die, and the heroism that brought so many near fatally damaged planes home with their dead and wounded crews. This is also a story of growing up in pre-war America, and of the growth and


Lending Power

Lending Power

Author: Howard E. Covington Jr.

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0822372770

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Established by Martin Eakes and Bonnie Wright in North Carolina in 1980, the nonprofit Center for Community Self-Help has grown from an innovative financial institution dedicated to civil rights into the nation's largest home lender to low- and moderate-income borrowers. Self-Help's first capital campaign—a bake sale that raised a meager seventy-seven dollars for a credit union—may not have done much to fulfill the organization's early goals of promoting worker-owned businesses, but it was a crucial first step toward wielding inclusive lending as a weapon for economic justice. In Lending Power journalist and historian Howard E. Covington Jr. narrates the compelling story of Self-Help's founders and coworkers as they built a progressive and community-oriented financial institution. First established to assist workers displaced by closed furniture and textile mills, Self-Help created a credit union that expanded into providing home loans for those on the margins of the financial market, especially people of color and single mothers. Using its own lending record, Self-Help convinced commercial banks to follow suit, extending its influence well beyond North Carolina. In 1999 its efforts led to the first state law against predatory lending. A decade later, as the Great Recession ravaged the nation's economy, its legislative victories helped influence the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Self-Help also created a federally chartered credit union to expand to California and later to Illinois and Florida, where it assisted ailing community-based credit unions and financial institutions. Throughout its history, Self-Help has never wavered from its mission to use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of justice to extend economic opportunity to the nation's unbanked and underserved citizens. With nearly two billion dollars in assets, Self-Help also shows that such a model for nonprofits can be financially successful while serving the greater good. At a time when calls for economic justice are growing ever louder, Lending Power shows how hard-working and dedicated people can help improve their communities.


Safe Money

Safe Money

Author: Beatriz Marulanda

Publisher: Inter-American Development Bank

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1886938695

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Policymakers in Latin America increasingly are turning to policies that have high economic rates of return and a favorable impact on income distribution. By providing financial services to small businesses and poor households -which normally lack such services- credit unions help secure growth with equity. The challenges faced by Latin America's credit unions today are likely to force them to further modernize and consolidate, fine tune their inherent advantages, improve mechanisms for prudential regulation, and find ways to increase their share of low and middle-income markets. Safe Money presents the new thinking on how credit unions can compete effectively in modern financial markets while still retaining their social mission.


CU 2.0

CU 2.0

Author: Kirk Drake

Publisher:

Published: 2017-06-14

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781619616783

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent decades, credit unions have seen unprecedented threats, due in large part to an eighty-year-old business model and an inability to adapt quickly to a digital economy. But Kirk Drake has devised a powerful plan to revitalize these noble institutions, making them more competitive, more creative, more connected with their membership, and more in tune with the times. A serial entrepreneur focused on credit-union technology, Drake has written a must-read manual for every CU board member, CEO, and management team in America. The first and only book of its kind, CU 2.0 offers essential strategies for leveraging the latest technologies to facilitate organizational growth and foster more even competition with the banking industry. With the tools provided here, the CU of tomorrow will be better equipped to empower its employees, while giving its members the superior financial service they want and need. It's time to be innovative and bold, to challenge long-standing inefficiencies and move away from the "old school" methods of doing business. CU 2.0 provides the skills, the savvy, and the fresh ideas necessary to finally transport the credit union out of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.


Rebuilding Labor

Rebuilding Labor

Author: Ruth Milkman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780801489020

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Rebuilding Labor Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization. Throughout this collection, the focus is on the formidable challenges unions face today and on how they may be overcome.-publisher description.