In recent years, community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and similar mission-oriented financial services organizations have begun to elevate the importance of explicitly addressing racial equity in lending, investing, and operational practices. While this goal remains urgent, it is also a challenge to determine precisely how to incorporate or operationalize racial equity into our work. How do CDFIs incorporate an explicit racial equity perspective into their lending?
In 2018, BlueHub Capital and a group of seven other CDFIs—including Capital Impact Partners, IFF, Nonprofit Finance Fund, LISC, Low Income Investment Fund, Reinvestment Fund, and Self-Help—formed the CDFI Racial Equity Collaborative on Education to try to answer these questions with a focus on education lending. Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) published a recent blog post, in which Collaborative members, including BlueHub's Vice President of Learning and Impact Measurement and peers, share lessons learned and challenges faced as they try to integrate racial equity principles into lending practices along with the Racial Equity Matrix tool the group developed to support lending with a racial equity lens in education. Read the post here.