Date Issued: May 8, 2026
Submission Deadline: May 25, 2026 by 11:59 PM EST
Contact for Inquiries and Submissions: Jacelyn Matthews, Director, National Training Academy or Devin Thompson, Director of Place Based Strategy
Submit RFP to: instructorrfps@ncrc.org

Overview

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) is a coalition of organizations and individuals dedicated to making a Just Economy a local reality and national priority. Through research, advocacy, and training, NCRC empowers stakeholders to advance policies and practices that support economic equity.

The National Training Academy (NTA) is a key initiative of NCRC, providing comprehensive training and capacity-building programs for community advocates, housing counselors, financial institutions, policymakers, and others. Our mission is to equip individuals and organizations with the skills and knowledge necessary to advance equitable economic opportunities in their communities.

NCRC is seeking qualified instructors, facilitators, and subject matter experts to support the Community Investment Institute (CII), a new training initiative designed to strengthen the knowledge, skills, and collaborative capacity of practitioners working across community development, economic mobility, housing, financial empowerment, and equitable investment strategies. The curriculum, facilitator guides, and slide decks have already been developed, with instructors encouraged to adapt the content to create engaging and thought provoking learning experiences for diverse audiences.

CII is designed as a practitioner-centered learning experience that brings together community-based organizations, advocates, housing counselors, financial institutions, and cross-sector leaders to deepen understanding of community investment systems and strengthen local strategies for equitable development.

The first opportunity to deploy CII trainings will take place June 11–12, 2026 in Buffalo, NY, with additional training opportunities expected throughout the year in various locations and formats. Instructors do not need to be available for the June training to be considered. NCRC strongly encourages qualified applicants interested in future training opportunities to apply.

NCRC is seeking instructors who can deliver engaging, high quality trainings on topics related to community reinvestment, equitable development, financial capability, economic mobility, coalition building, and community centered investment strategies.

Scope of Work

Instructors selected through this RFP may support one or multiple Community Investment Institute (CII) training opportunities based on subject matter expertise, scheduling availability, geographic fit, and programmatic need.

Selected instructors will be responsible for some or all of the following:

• Delivering training sessions in-person, virtually, or in a hybrid format, as required.
• Designing and implementing engaging instructional methods tailored to adult learners and practitioner audiences.
• Developing and providing course descriptions, learning objectives, presentations, facilitation guides, and participant-facing training materials.
• Facilitating interactive workshops, case studies, peer learning activities, and discussions.
• Translating complex concepts into accessible, actionable content for audiences with varying levels of familiarity.
• Conducting participant assessments and providing feedback where applicable.
• Collaborating with NCRC staff to align training content with CII learning goals and participant needs.
• Submitting post-training reports summarizing session outcomes, participant engagement, and recommendations for future learning opportunities.

Eligibility Criteria

Eligible applicants are individuals or organizations with a minimum of two years of demonstrated experience providing training, facilitation, technical assistance, or instructional services related to one or more of the following areas:

• Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and banking regulations
• Banking systems, lending practices, and community investment strategies
• Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) and coalition-based advocacy
• Community and Economic Development Ecosystems
• Financial capability, literacy, and consumer protection
• Community engagement, coalition building, and cross-sector collaboration
• Data analysis, storytelling, and advocacy tools for equitable investment strategies

Applicants should demonstrate the ability to facilitate training content related to the topics outlined within the Community Investment Institute’s foundational curriculum, including historical disinvestment and redlining, CRA advocacy, banking terminology and systems, stakeholder and power mapping, equitable development frameworks, and data informed advocacy strategies.

Priority will be given to applicants with demonstrated experience serving low-to moderate income communities, historically underserved communities, or communities impacted by systemic disinvestment within the United States.

Political organizations and projects that are not aligned with NCRC’s mission are ineligible.

We are unable to hire individuals who have been convicted of a violation under federal law relating to an election for federal office.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience delivering trainings to diverse audiences, particularly adult learners and practitioners.
• Strong facilitation, communication, and instructional design skills.
• Experience leading interactive, discussion-based, or cohort-based learning experiences.
• Ability to translate technical or policy-heavy concepts into practical and accessible learning opportunities.
• Familiarity with NCRC’s mission, programs, and community investment priorities.
• Proficiency with digital learning platforms and tools (e.g., Zoom, Adobe Connect, Miro, Mentimeter, etc.).
• Experience working across sectors, including community-based organizations, financial institutions, government agencies, or coalitions.

Proposal Requirements

Interested candidates should submit a proposal that includes:

1. Cover Letter/Statement of Interest
   A brief introduction highlighting your interest in serving as an instructor for the Community Investment Institute and your relevant expertise.
2. Curriculum Vitae/Resume
   A resume detailing your educational background, work experience, facilitation experience, and relevant qualifications.
3. Instructional Approach
   An outline of your proposed methodology and strategies for engaging adult learners, facilitating interactive learning environments, and translating complex content into actionable instruction.
4. Sample Work
   A sample presentation, facilitation guide, or training material you have previously developed and have ownership rights to.
5. References
   Contact information for at least two professional references who can speak to your instructional expertise and facilitation experience.

Proposal Submission Details

• Format: Proposals should be submitted as a single PDF file.
• Submission Method: Email submissions to instructorrfps@ncrc.org
• Deadline: Proposals must be received no later than May 25, 2026. Late submissions will not be considered.
• Acknowledgment: Applicants will receive confirmation of receipt within 48 hours.

Evaluation Criteria

Timeline

• RFP Release Date: May 8, 2026
• Proposal Submission Deadline: May 25, 2026
• Review Period: Week of May 26
• Notification of Selection: June 1st
• Initial CII Training Opportunity: June 11–12, 2026 in Buffalo, NY
• Additional Training Opportunities: Ongoing throughout 2026-2027

Terms and Conditions

• All proposals will be treated as confidential.
• NCRC reserves the right to request additional information or clarifications on any proposal(s).
• NCRC reserves the right to reject any or all proposals.
• NCRC reserves the right to negotiate terms with selected instructor(s).
• Selected instructors must sign a Services Agreement that confirms payment terms, including that funds will be used solely for the purposes outlined in the Agreement.
• All work products created with funding provided by NCRC will be considered work made for hire and will become the sole property of NCRC unless otherwise agreed in writing.

Appendices/Links

For additional information about NCRC, the National Training Academy, and the Community Investment Institute, please refer to the links listed below:

• NCRC Website
• NTA Course Catalog
• Foundational Training Scope of Work

We look forward to reviewing your proposal and appreciate your interest in supporting the mission of the National Training Academy and the Community Investment Institute at NCRC.

In September, NCRC convened more than 160 community leaders, financial institutions, and policy experts in Nashville for a bold new kind of summit, one focused not on more panels, but on structured, action-oriented dialogue. We heard from national thought leaders about the “new normal” facing communities: shrinking federal support, widening disparities, and a growing sense of isolation among local changemakers. We listened, reflected, and rolled up our sleeves to start imagining what new systems we need to build—in housing, small business and workforce—to ensure inclusive, sustainable futures. Now, the work continues.

Speakers: 

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Matthews 0:07
Hi. My name is Jacelyn Matthews and I’m the director of the National Training Academy here at NCRC, and I wanted to officially welcome you to our debrief of the Just Economy Summit that we had in Nashville two months ago. So from problems to prototypes. Move on to the next slide. I’m going to just give a little bit more information about NCRC if you do not know who we are and what we do. So NCRC network includes more than 700 organizations nationwide, all working together to advance a just economy. So its as simple as a just economy is one where everyone has a fair chance to thrive and where capital and opportunity flow into communities to expand housing, grow small businesses and create quality jobs. So it’s about economic justice, which is making sure people can build wealth instability with dignity, no matter where they live. So we do this in partnership with community leaders, policymakers and institutions that share our belief that an economy should work for everyone, not just a few. So before we actually move into the actual meat of our conversation this afternoon, I just want to make mention of housekeeping slash our Code of Conduct when we are doing webinars or any convening, we want to make sure people are and we’ll actually reference this in the chat as well, so you can actually see our Code of Conduct. Just want to make sure that we are honoring each other, being mindful of how we speak to each other, being respectful in our language as well being welcoming and always assuming positive and good intent in our interactions. So move on to the next slide.

Okay, so what does this mean for you today? Why are we here?

What’s this conversation about? So we’ve structured today’s webinar to mirror the journey participants actually went through at our summit, right? So we’ll start by understanding the shift from our traditional summit model. So if you’ve gone to our summits in the past, you might be wondering and questioning why we pivoted to this new approach. So we’ll go, we’ll double a bit deeper about the why behind that, and moving to a more dialog approach in that shaped our time in Nashville. So next, after that, we’ll set the stage and define the problems beyond just the federal funding cuts, which was the entry point to why we decided to make this pivot. But we wanted to make sure that we are talking about the things that are being faced by the movement for just economy in this moment, we want to make sure that we were being responsive and reflective of what’s happening, instead of going with the status quo. And then we’ll spotlight the most exciting innovations and opportunities that came from the summit these actual conversations we were having with each other. And finally, we’ll end with concrete next steps that you can take to bring these ideas to life in and beyond your own work. Our goal is not just to report out on what happened, but to equip you to be part of the solution.

So just to kind of give a little bit of background about how it was built, like the slide says, we were trying to have a new kind of conversation, moving from our traditional model to a more collaborative model. It’s a leaning in or calling in versus the calling out and making sure that we’re having the right people present in the room to have these really great conversations. So in September, during our summit, we brought together dozens of the best and brightest practitioners in affordable housing, Small Business and workforce development. But we knew that to solve the complex challenges that our communities face, we couldn’t just host another typical conference, so this moment required more of us. So this may not be a unique moment in our history, but it’s a fort, but fortunately, it’s a rare one. When the foundation that our community development and economic justice movements are built on shift from under our feet. These moments of great change are a time of fear and concern, but also one of opportunity, when it is possible to change the structures and assumptions that we work with them.

So this process happened in the 80s and the 90s, and broke the system framed by Lynch, new market, tax credits, workforce, Innovation Act later, WIOA and the CDF, CDFI Fund, just to name a few pillars, and today, many of those have been zeroed out or drastically reduced. And we understand that. We’ve heard from our members about how they’re being impacted. We’ve seen what’s happening to others in the impact. So it’s reduced their pathways of driving investment effectively, and even if funding returns for their purposes, it will look different than it did before. So the truth that we recognize when we said about redesigning the summit is that we can’t just go back to how things were, because, frankly, even that system wasn’t working for many in our communities. And I’m sure you all can agree with that, right? Like that’s not something that we’re just saying. I’m sure that’s something that you’ve noticed as well. So in the last cycle of major change, philanthropy and think tanks used their convening power to drive conversations what would be needed for a system where the federal government would serve to build markets rather than directly support the working communities. So this moment requires a different set of conversations focused on how to make a better system that works for those doing the actual things needed to meet the outcomes and community, which meant we knew that practitioners voices needed to be at the center, and our job was to create a safe place to have these conversations and this place to listen and amplify what we heard. So this summit was designed to do just that.

So you’re probably asking, how do we actually do that? Right? How did we get to the powerful takeaways we’ll be sharing today? Our summit was structured around a deliberate one and a half day format focused on moving from problems to solutions. At each stage, we came together to hear from a panel of leaders at the national and municipal levels, having their conversation served to both ground and jumpstart conversations as we broke into 18 separate tables for facilitated dialogs with our peers. Each table is filled with practitioners from the same field or area of focus priority, with a mix of geographies and organization sizes, including nonprofit executives. Program leaders represent representatives of financial institutions and even a few municipal officials. NCRC staff served as recorders of these dialogs, taking animized notes of over 80 hours of concurrent conversations we had throughout the day and a half. Those notes provided the material that will be going over today, condensed due to the time we have together. There’s a lot that came out of these conversations, but we want to make sure we highlight those things that we heard over and over again from multiple people across many of the tables that we had brought together. And we’ll be publishing a more complete form as an in-depth publication early next year. So you’ll be able to actually see it, you know, actually like, be able to play around with it, read it, dig deeper, ask questions.

So first, we want to say that we dedicated time to unpack the barriers. Right? Instead of starting with solutions, we started with honesty. We asked leaders from each sector to put the real on the ground problems on the table. You’ll see these reflected as the shared challenges and a couple of slides. Second, we shifted to innovate new models. So this is where the energy really sparked. We challenged our participants to think beyond the usual constraints and brainstorm with each other new ways of working. The goal wasn’t small tweaks, but the transformative ideas that could fundamentally change the system. And finally, we worked to prioritize actionable solutions. So an idea is only as good as our ability to implement it. In our final sessions, we filtered these innovations, identifying those with the highest potential for impact, and this prioritization didn’t just end when we left Nashville. That’s the same lens that we use when reviewing all of the hundreds of solutions raised in those rooms, some of them were hyperly specific, either to geography or barrier, and so would be less applicable across our diverse membership. Some were models that are already being broadly adopted and have national support. Others weren’t actionable or attainable, but instead were voice aspirations for a different economic system. While all the solutions deserve to be heard, and the hour we have together today, we’re going to focus on not just interesting ideas, but the most promising strategies that emerge from this intensive process. The full complement of barriers and solutions will be included in the publication that I mentioned earlier. And so with that, I’ll turn it over to Devin to really dive deeper into some of the findings.

Thompson 9:07
Thanks, Jacelyn. So hi folks. I’m Devin Thompson. I am director of health equity and impact here at NCRC, and for those who attended the summit, probably saw me running around, taking notes and helping out across the board. So we’re going to get into some of the barriers, as Jacelyn mentioned, and there we go. So with that process in mind, let’s dive into just what we found together. So we brought together leaders, predominantly in affordable housing, small business supports and workforce development. And while you might expect their problems to be unique and they were, we discovered something powerful, that a lot of these biggest barriers have common roots, and some are nearly identical across sector. So some of the things that you’re going to hear things you probably said yourself, and that’s good, others might be more difficult to hear, because we all have things that we take as the foundation of our work, but we’ve synthesized the set of barriers into three core challenges that cut across all three core groups. So firstly, and I’ve heard this my entire time in community development, and we heard it at nearly every table, regardless of its area of focus, was that of silos. You know, whether it was siloed funding streams and housing that don’t talk to each other, duplicated business support services from organizations commuting for the same clients or the same loans or a lack of holistic support for workers that have needs that cross all parts of the comprehensive community development framework. We heard loud and clear, our systems are too fragmented to be effective. This structure forces people to navigate a maze of services and prevents us from leveraging our collective resources in any given community to create the transformation that that community needs and asks for. So it leads us as organizational leaders to choose to unfortunately have to compete with each other seeing resources as finite and zero sum, where attention to housing must, for some inexplicable, frequently political reason, come at the expense of resourcing for child care or career path programs, but oddly never for from the for profit developers of luxury buildings who are working in those same communities. And while we acknowledged in that room that we are a shared movement, we also acknowledge that we are regularly in competition, while we often communicate with each other, we rarely coordinate outside of certain advocacy activities that serve our direct benefit. Time and again, we heard how that leads to us spending resources on things other than the work we would rather focus on, how too often it leads to our residents falling into the gaps between us and how it leaves us at a disadvantage in trying to tackle those comprehensive and interconnected, most difficult problems when we only have One lever in our hands to pull. The next barrier that cross cut was the fact that we frequently rely and over rely on outdated models that aren’t serving us or our communities in housing. This looks like a dependence on temporary subsidies that create temporary affordability, that lead to affordability cliffs for the residents and leaves the developer on a hamster wheel trying to maintain the same number of affordable units, instead of getting a lock in permanent affordability and being able to increase the total stock of housing that people can actually afford even as their incomes grow, where entrepreneurship service organizations or esos and CDFIs focus on startups and micro finance, with entrepreneurs who are focusing on ventures with business plans that can’t reach scale and represent the highest risk businesses to underwrite, where they may be able to employ themselves but can’t reach a point in growing their business where they can reach back into the community and help others reach a living wage too, let alone build a business that can become a multi generational asset that they can pass on. It can also look like helping families work up a career ladder only to have them effectively earn less as they drop down the benefits cliff, disincentivizing them from participating further in the workforce. And it’s also across all of these a model of free technical assistance that providers can’t afford to deliver at the quality that they want to with, all the wraparound services needed to help the participants succeed even once they’re off on their own. These models often act then as temporary band aids, rather than building permanent, lasting asset, building tools for our communities and their residents.

Finally, a slew of state and local policies were raised that restrict your ability to succeed, and they were cited time and again as one of the greatest barriers to progress. These range from local zones, local zoning that restricts the scale of developments and makes it nearly impossible to build affordable housing in a financially sustainable way, to complex regulations that stifle small business starts and growth to the benefit of frequent frequently to the benefit of entrenched business interests and municipal investments that shift so frequently lack of depth and focus that they can’t reliably be used to coordinate philanthropic market capital alongside them, and even political hostility towards programs of all sorts that have been proven to have impact and have communities trust already, our systems are often working against the very outcomes we are trying to create, and changing them against these entrenched interests is the work requiring a coordinated approach involving all of us who benefit from the system, improving both directly and indirectly.

So those are the three big themes we heard. Now we want to hear from you in a moment a poll is nevermind a poll has already popped up on your screen. Please take a second and select the challenges that you feel most accurately and acute, most acutely impact your day to day work. Is it the silos, those outdated models, or maybe the restrictive policies? So we’re gonna give you all about 30 seconds or so to let us know what you think. Another couple of seconds. Appreciate your patience while we give a chance for everyone to get to weigh in. So thank you, Haley on the back end for all of our technical support on this. Please, when you can and when we’ve got good participation, please just push it forward.

There we go look at that pretty solid spread. That doesn’t surprise me. We heard a lot of these at a lot of different tables. So it looks like many of you are struggling with siloed systems, which isn’t surprising. That’s something that I’ve experienced a lot in my career as well, and that connection spice, where we just can’t bring all of our resources to bear on the residents and participants most in need. So, the fact that these are all kind of universally balanced gives me actually a lot to think on as we think through our next steps, which we’ll hear about later. So with that said, I think that’s actually a great transition, because it doesn’t just stop with the barriers. Barriers were just our first day at the conference, second day at the summit. We really got into those innovative solutions. So let’s get to talk about them a little bit now, as we lift up just a handful of those innovative solutions from our summit participants.

So and for me, at least, the most exciting part was the shift towards the solutions. So we asked our participants to think big and to be candid, you all deliver now, while there were literally hundreds, I think, 213 different solutions, after we did a cluster analysis, today, we’re going to spotlight a handful of those most powerful aha moments that each one and representing a fundamental shift in thinking, and not just a band aid on the work.

So let’s start with housing, and not just because that’s where I originally came from in community development. The core problem that we identified is that the current system treats affordable housing as a temporary product. Its affordability expires, and it does little to build long term wealth for both its residents and frequently enough, the nonprofits that develop it, whether Lynch or just state subsidized, whether rental or for affordable home ownership, we’re constantly left in a perpetual cycle of defending previously affordable units from speculative purchase and redevelopment from the market or from the redevelopment back to market rate, I should say, rather than being able to ensure steady cost increases that keep the entire housing market more stable, which benefits all of us. So the big innovation that we heard from multiple tables that I wanted to lift up is a fundamental mindset shift treating housing as a permanent community asset through various forms of Shared Equity models. So this approach can work throughout the entire continuum of housing, from permanent, supportive housing to even market rate, but centers on ensuring that the community recaptures some of the appreciation of those properties, and that that appreciation is kept in a way that keeps the market from overheating and eventually causing displacement of residents who aren’t in guaranteed affordable units. And so discussions about this included a full suite of different tools that can be used to tackle this, from community land trusts or community investment trusts to deed restrictions, limited equity co ops, the list went on and on, but all of them rest in some way on two major components, the use of a resale formula of some ilk to control the rate of appreciation and some sort of community stewardship that ensures that the Benefits and that appreciation flow back to the community and its priorities, as well as as well as the residents as they transition out. So these solutions have two major advantages, the initial subsidy isn’t lost, but it is instead recycled as the homes change hands. And while, to be fair, the residents don’t receive the full windfall of market speculation, they do get to build wealth through shield shared appreciation of the asset, and that wealth gets shared with other residents who stay in the community, even after others move out. So this is a big systems change. I’m not going to lie, although we have members across the country already working on Community Land Trust and similar models that work to capture this here in DC, we have a long history of limited equity co ops, but it’s a powerful first step that anyone can take towards this would be local policy simplification, working on legalizing ADUs or increasing density, on corridor development models that starts the conversation locally about innovative zoning And right sizing of neighborhoods while laying the groundwork in the 44 states that lack Community Land Trust specific legislation and regulation to start moving towards that. It’s an opportunity that I think we can build on together.

Next and staying in housing, to be fair, but looking at the other half of it, let’s talk about the costs of developing affordable housing. So as I said, I used to be an affordable housing developer, and this one caused a lot of the gray hairs you see in my beard. The problem raised in every housing focused dialog table is that affordable housing is trapped in a financial vice, soaring acquisition and construction prices for materials and skilled labor, combined with the high interest rates and the cost of acquiring a subsidy that creates this massive viability gap, and that then leaves developers stuck in a cycle of re engineering deals that no longer pencil out because they’ve gotten more expensive as the hold gets longer, stalling the creation of new units while the housing shortage just worsens. So this one required another big mind shift, attacking the fundamental cost structure of the development, not just searching for more subsidies to fill the gap. So this approach also centers on two different but interconnected pillars, radically reducing the physical cost of production while simultaneously lowering the financial cost of capital. It’s about re-engineering the process to make it faster, cheaper and more and more predictable from start to finish, not just value engineering a project to its lowest common form, which unfortunately, we are too frequently stuck having to do so again. There was a full suite of tools that were discussed that can be used to tackle this, and we’ll try to cover more of them in the full report coming out early next year. But right now, let’s go into depth on these late we’re going to go into depth on some of them later in the presentation as well, but for now, let’s just broadly summarize them. On production side, this includes everything from off-site construction to adaptive reuse of existing buildings. On the financial side, it could involve leveraging public lands concessional debt or even state-level programs to buy down interest rates, but all of them rest in some way on one core principle, efficiency. How do we create a faster path from concept to complete to completion, and use that to directly slash the carrying costs that kill projects? Now, again, this is a big systems change, but there are powerful steps that could be taken locally. And I’d look at local process reform. We heard a lot of talk around outdated zoning codes and slow and unpredictable permitting processes that are invisible but massive costs, cost drivers. So something like by right approval for affordable projects, or even streamlined, centralized permitting or concurrent permitting would allow for efficient construction.

So for years, the focus in small business support from ESOs and the CDFIs that fund entrepreneurship has been pushed a build from scratch model, frequently entrepreneurship by necessity or solo entrepreneurship. But this misses the single biggest economic opportunity and threat to many of our communities, which is that silver tsunami. We have a wave of business owners who are retiring, and the vast majority of those in the communities that we work in have no succession plan. This isn’t just a small gap, it’s a crisis that risk closing 1000s of viable, cash-flowing legacy businesses that currently serve community needs and frequently actually are community assets. It would vaporize local jobs and the stable revenue that those bring, and it would extract community wealth, while smaller private investment firms and other community outsiders are linking their chops looking at the opportunity to purchase and roll up the most viable of these businesses. So what if, instead, in these conversations, it was raised that we pivoted from focusing on startup and micro enterprises to acquisitions and stabilizing these legacy businesses to continue to be community assets, instead of asking emerging opera entrepreneurs to build from zero. What would it look like to train and finance them to buy these existing, profitable businesses? Now on the risk side, we heard from our bankers and CDFIs that this would be a massive game changer for risk. As one expert noted to me in a sidebar, that if we purchase an existing business with proven cash flow, we would de risk the majority of the venture. So entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is sometimes what you hear this get called elsewhere, eta, it’s a far more stable path to business ownership, even for new entrepreneurs. And it’s not just about one for one sales. There are models of this that we believe are even a more powerful approach that leverage these acquisitions for broad-based community wealth, where esos could be a primary engine converting these businesses all the way to employee ownership. So there are a full suite of tools already in the market on this from employee-owned cooperatives, which would allow for democratic control of the entity by employees themselves, and could be married with employee stock ownership plans that would then allow employees to retire and still retain their vested interest in the business to even more flexible employee ownership trusts that would allow for a mix and match of various solution sets to make sure that community is still central to an to a business as It transitions its ownership structure. These models don’t just save a business, they anchor it in the community, and can give the workers a direct state and success, build generational wealth and maintain its ability to be responsive to community need.

Now, frankly, this pivot requires an equally large structural shift from our key capital partners. Many CDFIs, including ones I’ve worked for previously, are natural financers for these community-based and mission-aligned transitions, but aren’t tooled to underwrite them. Their models are often built on asset-based real estate deals or micro finance for solo entrepreneurs or pro forma based startups, not cash flow-based acquisitions that often currently rely on seller refinancing. So for this to work, CDFIs would need to develop expertise in cash flow lending and valuing established businesses the same way PES and the secondary markets currently do, and this means creating new and more flexible loan products, becoming better at doing mezzanine debt or and as well filling the gap on the entrepreneur side to be able to navigate these complex conversion deals and get them over the finish line. Now this is again, a big operational shift, but a step that would get us there and would build the capacity for ESOs to be able to do more of this that we heard time and again was making sure we didn’t leave behind the promises we made to support single employee entrepreneurship, but making it more sustainable and more scalable. And so one of the ideas that was raised repeatedly was the use of online learning systems, whether by building their own or, frankly, even better, using already completed ones like Hoffman fast track and using these e learning tools would allow esos to free up their trainer and coach capacity to focus on helping others learn how to buy a business from the fundamentals of valuation and financial due diligence all the way to Deal structuring with the current owners, supporting communities to build business. Sorry, supporting community-built businesses to stay community-owned and responsive.

So last of the big, overarching ideas that we want to lift up, let’s talk a bit about the revolving door in human services, so a client gets help with one immediate crisis, like, say, utility assistance, but the underlying reason they’re struggling might be needing child care, so that way they can actually get more hours in their job. And that isn’t addressed because we have one tool, and we’re working with that tool with them in that moment and support isn’t coordinated. A client can face the benefits cliff, where a small raise or change in other finances can trigger a sudden loss of other vital subsidies. So they get $1 an hour raise but lose an $800 a month child care voucher, which makes that raise effectively net negative, and this punishes progress and pushes them right back to where they started, or even worse off.

Now, I saw a lot of folks talking about the need to fix for silos, and this is one that we’ve been talking about for years in the field. And one of the solutions that we’ve lifted up time and again is some idea around a No Wrong Door ecosystem approach that when a client shows up anywhere, a provider constrain can screen them, a provider can screen them for holistic needs, and as one participant raised with your permission, digitally refer you to an organization we trust In the community. And this, though, does require shared technology backbone or shared processes to move from cold hand off to warm, closed loop referrals. The last thing that we want to do is ask that same resident to have to tell their story all over again and again and again. And we all know that happens far too often as it is. Fortunately, some of these have already been developed, but they tend to be very population-specific or service provider-specific, so they’re also siloed solutions. Whether we’re talking about referral programs that are specifically focused for school age children and families in Connecticut or access points to human service systems that are really only serving in the needs of hospital systems. But the technology is just a tool. It really comes down to pairing it with holistic navigators or coaches, a person whose job includes seeing the whole family and their long-term goals and their full suite of needs armed with a Benefits Cliff calculator or other tool that they can help a client sequence their progress, timing a new job or a raise or an increase in hours, to clear the cliff and not fall off it, where we need to align the system to support not penalize economic mobility now. Having helped try to build a city-wide digital network previously, I can tell you, its a giant lift, but there are quick wins that we can get along the way. And starting by not trying to boil the ocean, let’s just start by building one true partnership. Identify your single most frequent referral partner, the agency that you send people to at every week and create a formal, warm handoff process with them. And don’t forget to change your system language to get permission from your participant to share that information. It doesn’t need to be high tech. It can be a simple, shared intake form or a dedicated staff contact, but it’s the first real step in moving from that cold hand-off to a closed-loop system, and you can get it done in the next 30 days. I know this because we did here in DC. And if that doesn’t work for you, there are other options. Consider assessing your participants to identify their top three unmet needs. That helps you identify who else you should be partnering with, or use your local benefits Cliff calculator and model the impact of a $1 raise for one of your common client profiles. Bring that aha moment to your next staff meeting, so that way others can start to understand it too. So we’re covering a lot of ground, and frankly, I’m being very concerned for time, and so hopefully we didn’t cover something – good.

Okay, so we’ve covered massive set of ideas, building permanent wealth through shared equity, innovative solutions through acquisition, providing holistic support through a No Wrong Door ecosystem. I just want to get a quick pulse from everyone that’ll help us judge where the excitement is and where we should be leaning in over the coming months. So in the chat box, if you would, please type the one phrase that feels most transformative to you, but don’t hit send yet, just type those words and hold them, and if you really feel strongly about two of them, type one first and then in a second, type the other. Send it as a separate message, but to give it a second, let everyone type, type in their answer. I’m hopeful that I’m going to see our chat explode in a second. So everyone ready? 3-2-1, send. Oh, thank you all. Oh, my goodness, I’m seeing a lot here. Okay, now, if you have a second one, now would be the time to get it tossed on in. Really appreciate all of this, and you’ll hear a little bit later. I promise you, these aren’t just these aren’t just tricks to engage you. We’re actually going to be making use of everything you’re sharing with us right now and throughout the rest of this presentation, and afterwards, you’ll hear more about that from Jacelyn at the end.

All right, so with that, I want to go a little bit deeper. So I want to talk about a couple of outliers. So we discussed three powerful shifts that we are for power system to start working on now, and I mentioned that housing, cost containment we’ve come back to, because there’s a lot of different conversations, a lot of complexity to that space. Well, now’s that time. So we’re going to dive deep into some of those really big, transformative ideas, the unicorns that show us where the system could possibly go. So I mentioned that one of the most powerful ways to lower housing costs is to attack the soft costs driven by delays. And I want to dig back into that, because it isn’t just a small tweak, it’s municipal policy and process reform that could have long-term impacts in your jurisdictions. So as I said before, we frequently get fixated on the price of lumber and labor. Those are big, sexy conversation topics, but the real project killers are the invisible costs, the loan interest, the legal fees, the insurance that stack up month after month while a project is stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of zoning hearings, permitting reviews and other stalling tactics. This uncertainty is a massive risk that kills projects long before they ever break ground, and makes pre-development financing more expensive because of that risk, it leaves us scrambling to raise that pre-development funding because it’s the hardest and highest risk by nature. So let’s talk about some of these.

First solution set that we heard was by right approval. So this is the certainty solution. It moves development from a subjective political fight to an objective administrative one. If your project meets the clear, pre established rules, you get your permit period. Wouldn’t that be nice? So, but what are those rules? Right? That’s where something like form-based zoning could come in. This is the clarity solution, instead of a complex text, heavy rule book that regulates use, commercial, here, residential, there, but not residential. That’s too dense. A form-based code focuses on the physical form of the building, its height, its shape, and how it meets the street. It’s a what we want guide, not a what we forbid, text list. It makes it incredibly clear and predictable. What can be built, which makes things like buy right approvals possible and most effective? Third would be something like concurrent permitting. This is a speed solution. It directly attacks the bureaucratic run around, where a project has to wait in a queue for the planning department, then the fire department, then public works, then later on, which finally get to construction, has to go through all those again during the inspection process, one after another after another, based on their schedule, with a concurrent process. City departments review those plans at the same time, simple technical fix that can cut, and has, in some jurisdictions, cut six-month reviews down to 30 days when it’s a community priority. Fourth, thinking about community priorities, what would it be like to have an affordable housing permitting track pulled away, and this is the prioritization solution. It’s a fast pass that pulls those projects out of the main line and gives them a way to jump right to the front. It combines things like the speed of concurrent permitting with other benefits, or could combine them with other benefits, like fee waivers and even dedicated staff to ensure that these critical projects are the top priority, not just an afterthought, and not just in queue, trying to get attention behind the multi million dollar developer who we all know is very, very well known in City Hall. So when you stack these solutions, long-term impact could be profound, you permanently de-risk the entire affordable development pipeline, and it doesn’t just help your local nonprofit finish that 10-unit project or that single-family home they’re working on. It makes their 100-unit project more financially viable because it de-risks the process. It stops forcing affordable housing developers to be expert negotiators, and lets us just be expert builders. It creates a system that could actually produce housing at the scale we need it. Next unicorn, we’ll talk about a bit. What would it look like to actually tackle the other soft costs that’s killing projects, the cost of the money itself? So even if a developer controls construction costs and gets through permitting, a project can still die on the vine, because high interest rates make the debt service, that monthly loan payment too high for those rents to do it to actually remain affordable. This viability gap isn’t about the cost to build. It’s about the cost of finance frequently, and while we can be stuck on a hamster wheel of trying to raise more subsidy, subsidy is dollar for dollar deal. It’s not highly leveraged. So the big innovation I’m going to talk about here is how we use public capital instead of just adding more subsidy to the top of the stack to try to bridge that gap. What would it look like to take state-level tools to reduce the cost of senior debt at the bottom of the stack? So it’s not just about more money, it’s about making the primary primary financing cheaper and more patient, and we already have some powerful tools that are not universally adopted to do this. And we heard about the Oregon affordable housing tax credit. It’s a brilliant example that complements the equity side solutions like Lynch. It doesn’t give a credit to the developer, it gives it to the lender, in exchange, the bank most typically gives the developer a long term loan at a dramatically below market interest rate. This permanent rate buy down, effectively paid for by the state, then directly lowers the project’s monthly mortgage payments for decades, reducing the total amount of subsidy needed over time a second crucial strategy is the use of concessional debt or patient capital. So yes, this is a loan, but its terms are more mission driven, not market driven. The lender often a CDFI foundation or even a hospital concedes a market rate profit by offering below market terms, frequently with deferred payments. This fills a critical gap in the budget without adding to the project’s monthly debt service. And there are examples of states working to incentivize this. For example, the Pennsylvania Housing Authority supports the Pennsylvania Health for Housing Investment Program. As a prime example, their state housing agency offers a hard dollar match from its own trust fund for any concessional loan. A health care entity invests effectively doubling its impact. Other states do this by embedding incentives into their Lynch scoring, giving a project extra points if it brings in patient capital as a partner, making it a near guaranteed window, a near guaranteed winner in the adjudication process, if the developer can identify the patient capital on their own. So you can probably see how the long-term impact of this could be transformative. By lowering the interest rate, you’re creating a permanent, baked-in subsidy for the life of the loan, whether that is 15 years or longer. This directly lowers the rent needed to make the project pencil out, letting us pass it on and either have market affordability on some of the units or be able to drive our affordability down further into the area median income range. It makes deals viable that would be impossible in a high market and high interest rate market down a high interest rate market environment, most importantly, it de risks the deal by leveraging far more private capital from banks that they’re than they are now comfortable lending, because risk is the enemy of being able to bring down more debt onto a deal, and this, again, is how we can build a pipeline of projects that are financially sound and could be permanently affordable.

Unicorn number three on housing, because I promised we would get into these. Let’s talk about the construction process itself. The traditional development model is incredibly fragmented. A nonprofit developer has to find, hire and coordinate an outside architect, an engineer, separate general contractor, possibly dozens of subcontractors if they don’t have those under the GC. Every single handoff is a potential point of failure, delay and cost overrun. When problems arise, tt’s a game of finger-pointing between contractors and the resulting change orders pile up, stalling a project and blowing the budget. Not every developer is large enough, but what would it look like here if, instead, smaller developers were able to come together to stop outsourcing that risk and instead embrace vertical integration together? So this is a major strategic shift where the development organization brings those core functions. Brings those core functions in-house the way the larger developers do. This could mean starting its own general contracting arm, or hiring its own architects and engineers, or building a robust construction management team, instead of having to rely on JVs and third parties, instead of managing multiple outside contracts, the developer becomes the designer and builder, creating a single, streamlined team, a single streamlined team working towards one mission. And in instances where their current pipeline doesn’t justify it, well within their bounds to build partnerships with other smaller developers and allow those fixed costs to be shared with multiple agencies gaining the benefits of vertical integration and scale.

A second way to drive down the developer side cost is modern construction technology. We spend a lot of time right now looking at additive manufacturing, 3D printing houses, because that’s the new big, big noise. But there’s also other ways to move away from stick-built to factory-built solutions. Modular housing is a great example. This approach applies those factory principles to home construction. It gives the developer greater control over pricing, because they can buy materials in bulk, minimize waste. It also reduces the soft costs because a building in a factory avoids weather delays and shortens the on-site construction timeline from months down to weeks. This is what makes it cheaper and faster than traditional construction, assuming you’re in a municipality where your local code even allows for it – many don’t still. The real power in this type of thinking, it’s in trying to retain control. Whether you start by vertically integrating your team or by piloting a factory-built project, you’re fundamentally shifting from being a price taker and a fragmented system to being a producer. This is how you gain real, predictable control over your timelines and your budget. This is how we break the old model, and it’s how we finally get to build at that speed and scale that we all know the crisis demands.

Nope. Sorry. Jacelyn, going to pass it on back to you.

Matthews 43:38
Thanks, Devin, and thank you for sharing all the information. I just want to give a kudos to Devin for leading the charge when it comes to synthesizing all this data. There were pages and pages of notes from every table, as well as the recordings that had to be synthesized even know what were the overarching themes that people really wanted us to focus on. So kudos to him for the hard work in doing so. So next is talking about, where do we go from here? How do we actually make this real? How do we turn the conversations and the dialogs that we had over a course of a day and a half to something that can actually be tangible?

So with that, we decided that the Just Economy Lab working groups was a way that we wanted to move this work forward. So coming out of the Leadership Summit, we want to keep the momentum going and turn the great discussions we had into concrete, ongoing collaboration. So the Just Economy Labs will help us do exactly that. They’ll bring together leaders from across the country to move from dialog to action and continue shaping what a just economy looks like in practice. So this means building a large tent, including both members and other thought leaders, and realizing that leadership isn’t a position in a coalition, it’s an activity that we all share in. So the goal of the Just Economy Lab is simple. We’re going to take the ideas and the challenges that surface at the summit and explore real community-informed solutions. So this might be identifying a solution that already exists but isn’t widely adopted, or helping build entirely new solutions for us to test together. We’ve already started by gathering input from you all today. So when we did the word cloud, and you kind of like give some of your responses, even with the initial poll, we’re going to use that information to help inform us about the direction we’re going with the actual Just Economy Lab. So so we’re asking for additional input from those who couldn’t be in attendance, so we will be sending us out as a recording and giving people opportunity to weigh in as well, so we can help inform which topics we move forward with.

Okay, so you’re probably wondering, okay, so how does this actually work? Right? We’re doing this lab, this working group. What does it look like and function, and how can I be involved? So we’ve already convened an internal leadership team to support the working groups. They have already been identified. They’ll review the information you’ve all shared today alongside other feedback from the summit to identify the top priorities. So each just Economy lab will include about 15 to 20 participants, representing a mix of organizations, geographies and perspectives. Will open participation for self-nominations and peer nominations, so folks can either put themselves forward or lift up others they think should be part of the conversation. Each group will have facilitation provided by NCRC, but the direction the priorities and goal outputs of each lab will be determined by the participants themselves. So these groups are designed to be collaborative, to be flexible and responsive to the needs of the members doing the work. And NCRC will also convene additional outside supports for the working groups providing additional support in the ideation and deployment process, so you are not alone in this, regardless of the solution being explored and implemented. We want to make sure that we have additional supports to kind of like, get moving from ideation to actual implementation. And then from there we’ll identify participants. So we’ll complete outreach and announce the group by the end of the year. So we kick off the first group in January 2026. There’ll be three groups total, with the first one, again starting January 2026, and our intention is that by the 2027 Summit, each lab will be able to share what they’ve learned, the solutions they’ve tested, what’s worked in their communities, and how they’re going to build on those successes and help replicate the solutions. This is about more than just meeting – this is more about building a shared space for experimentation, collaboration and impact.

So with that being said, I know that you saw us and what Devin go into detail about some of the overarching themes that we’re going to use to help, again, inform the working groups, but one that kept coming up that we weren’t sure about the direction that you all might want to go in, was the part about housing cost reduction. So this Devin discussed a few ways to reduce the cost of developing affordable housing, but the idea is being strongly considered for one of our working groups. So as you heard, there are multiple directions it could go, and we love your input to help us make sure that we’re going where you’re interested in going. So in a moment, Haley will actually put up another poll that will outline these three strategies, and we’re just hoping that you could kind of like, weigh in and tell us what you’re most interested in, either exploring directly and being part of working group or hearing more about from the working groups or the Just Economy Labs. And we’ll give it about 30 to 45 seconds for people to think about this, the direction they think we should go in, okay? And we’ll close those out. Okay, so we’re seeing here what some of the ideas are in terms of which direction we should go in. It seems that most people are leaning towards state policies to lower the cost of debt. Again, we’re using this information, and all information that we gathered via the polls and the word waterfall, think Devin named it, to help inform our decision about the direction of the the working groups, or the topics of the working groups. With that being said, I want to give us an opportunity to go over some questions that you might have had about the information that Devin shared in terms of the key topics. What people have said were some solutions that they were interested in, innovations. We would ask that if you have questions, please utilize the Q and A function, just so it helps us be able to actually find the information in the queue, in the chat and be able to answer. Okay, so we’re really thankful for all of you taking time out of your day today to be with us. We know it’s middle of the day. We know there’s many other things you could be doing, but you were interested in hearing about what came out of these conversations, whether you were present for the summit or not. We appreciate your taking time to actually be curious with us about this. So thank you for joining us on the journey from problems to prototypes. We really hope you feel energized by potential for change. Even in the midst of what’s happening in our world, we still know that there’s still things that we can do, and the work continues.

So as I mentioned, we’re going to utilize the Q and A function. If you have any questions for us, I know the question was about sharing the slide deck – we’ll not have the slide deck available, but the this is being recorded, we will share that out as well as all of our findings, once everything has been completed with that as well.

And I see two questions in the chat. I mean, the Q A box, and it seems like Devin is already answering, so I’ll let him answer.

Thompson 51:03
So one of them I actually need a little more elaboration on, so I just sent that back to the person. And so I’ll say we did get one on someone looking for more information on how to secure capital for non-traditional borrowers to be able to access those, those silver tsunami businesses, the transitional businesses. And that’s the real joy of cash flow-based transactions, is that it’s about the standing of the business, not the standing of the borrower, although the borrower standing is still a piece of the puzzle that needs to get solved for. But businesses with a productive cash flow are underwritable based on their cash flow, in principle, and that’s part of why you saw that getting lifted up as a possible unicorn solution.

Matthews
All right, so we’ll give it another second or so…

Thompson
Jacelyn, see that one for you, want to tackle that one.

Matthews
Yeah, see it now. Will the lab be across the country to enable more groups to use it? So we are having people who are representative of organizations from across the country. Yes, it will not be just relegated to one particular area. We are hoping that the groups can be a mix and be representative of multiple geographies, because we know that there’s going to be things that each other can help, to help parse out ideas and think think about things. So whether it’s urban, rural, small, large, whatever the case might be, it will be representative of multiple groups and geographies.

Thompson 52:29
So thank you for the person who came back and gave me the elaboration. So I’m going to paraphrase the question back in, why not or what would it look like to do this work with employees and workers who are not currently credit-worthy. And I think this is actually where things like employee cooperatives really do work incredibly well, because it’s not on any one worker to be credit worthy, or one worker who is not credit worthy does not sink the ship a combination of diversifying the risk pool by having multiple employees and being able to finance based on the cash flow of the business allows for those transactions to work. In a couple of examples, we’ve seen one actually up in Baltimore, where a community health worker, collaborative business, community health worker, sorry, CNA, a nursing assistant collaborative did that where a number of them were not individually able to be underwritten, but as a group could be. Hopefully, that answers your question.

Matthews
And I see we have a couple of minutes left, so I actually want to pass it on to Haley talk about some next steps, but I will say also be on the lookout for again, for the recording of this. If you know other people who want to be a part of this conversation but couldn’t join today, we ask that you pass it along to them. So we really do want to hear from them about ideas, about the direction of the just economy labs, and also to be able to nominate yourself or someone else who you think should be a part of the conversation. We want to make sure that we are hearing from you about that as well. And Haley, I’ll pass it to you.

Schneider 54:17
Everybody. Thank you so much for attending. I just wanted to drop in the chat some upcoming events that we have here in CRC, April 14 through 15 of 2026, we have our Just Economy Conference, which is our annual event. We would love to see you there. Our schedule just dropped for that. So you can see the link in the chat, and then you will also see the link for a webinar survey form, just to hear about how we did. So if you have any feedback or any things that you really appreciated want to see again, please let us know, and thank you so much for attending.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

November 6, 2025 , 1:00 pm EST – 2:00 pm EST

In September, NCRC convened more than 160 community leaders, financial institutions, and policy experts in Nashville for a bold new kind of summit, one focused not on more panels, but on structured, action-oriented dialogue. We heard from national thought leaders about the “new normal” facing communities: shrinking federal support, widening disparities, and a growing sense of isolation among local changemakers. We listened, reflected, and rolled up our sleeves to start imagining what new systems we need to build—in housing, small business and workforce—to ensure inclusive, sustainable futures.

The work took place through dialogue tables that brought people together, data-driven discussions that helped us understand the facts, and community ideas that inspired new ways to make change. We also explored partnerships across different sectors to find solutions that go beyond “business as usual.”

Now, the work continues. Join us for our Post-Summit Debrief, Wednesday, November 6, 1 pm ET.

Already, 200+ people have registered to hear the key themes, what we’ve learned, and how this will inform NCRC’s coalition-building, advocacy and member support strategy going forward.

If you care about building a just economy, this is your invitation to stay engaged and help shape what’s next.

Speakers:

Jacelyn Matthews, Director, National Training Academy, NCRC

Devin Thompson, Director of Health Equity & Impact, NCRC

Hospital mergers significantly impact low- to moderate-income (LMI) communities, reaching far beyond just healthcare access. This issue is a matter of economic justice that directly affects the financial well-being of families and the stability of neighborhoods. When hospitals consolidate, it often drives up healthcare costs, reduces essential services and causes job losses, pushing LMI communities deeper into poverty and widening the racial wealth gap.

The story of Crozer Health in Delaware County, Pennsylvania serves as a stark reminder of these consequences. After Prospect Medical Holdings acquired Crozer-Keystone Health System in 2016, it distributed at least $457 million in dividends to its investors via a $1.12 billion loan that burdened the hospital. Ultimately, Prospect filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2025, leading to the closure of Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital in April 2025. Company executives laid off more than 2,500 employees and left Delaware County’s 500,000 residents with significantly reduced healthcare services. The closures strained nearby hospitals, increased emergency response times and disrupted local economies dependent on the health system that wealthy investors had harvested for a half-billion-dollar windfall in the initial merger. 

“Everything that requires time and definitive care are being taken away from these people.” William McCall, a paramedic at Crozer told a local news outlet about the closures. “People are going to die on the way to the hospital.” His daughter, Rachel McCullough, who worked for the local EMS and was born at Crozer, called the loss a “betrayal” to the region and their family. This shows how quickly a community’s healthcare safety net can unravel when financial gain trumps patient needs.

The Staggering Costs for LMI Families

It doesn’t stop with additional travel and waiting room costs either. Hospital mergers nearly always lead to higher healthcare costs for individuals and families. Hospitals in monopoly markets charge about 12% higher prices than those in more competitive areas. These increases come through higher premiums, steeper deductibles and increased out-of-pocket costs. For LMI individuals who often have less robust insurance or are uninsured, these higher prices mean larger bills or avoiding care altogether. Those with quality insurance often see a nearly $500 premium increase compared to those in more competitive places. In fact, hospital consolidations led to a slower decline in medical debt for those areas, while the rest of the nation saw more significant improvements.

Adding insult to injury, many merged systems have introduced “facility fees,” hidden charges for routine visits that can add hundreds of dollars to a bill even if you never step foot in a hospital building. These fees disproportionately burden those with high-deductible plans or no insurance at all. When a market consolidates, it puts more pricing power in the remaining hospital systems’ hands, invariably costing LMI patients more in the long run.

Dwindling Access and Healthcare Deserts

Hospital consolidation often means fewer options for care. Merging hospitals frequently close facilities or eliminate essential services that rarely turn a profit, like maternity wards, emergency departments and primary care clinics, particularly in underserved and rural areas. The closure of maternity units, for example, forces expectant mothers to travel much farther for prenatal care and delivery, increasing the risk of complications. Black and Indigenous women, who already face significantly higher maternal mortality rates, are hit hardest by these changes.

When local hospitals close, the remaining facilities become overcrowded, leading to longer emergency room wait times and appointment backlogs. This means delays in critical care, which can be life-threatening in emergency situations. The loss of a local hospital also affects continuity of care for chronic conditions, often leading to more preventable hospitalizations and higher costs down the line.

The Human Cost of Job Losses

When hospitals merge, the workforce often bears the immediate brunt. Beyond the direct layoffs, which disproportionately affect those in vital but often lower-paying administrative, clerical and support roles filled by LMI and BIPOC community members, there can be a chilling effect on overall compensation and job quality. Merged entities might look to standardize wages or benefits, which can mean a de facto pay cut or reduced benefits for workers from one of the former institutions even if they transfer facilities to keep their jobs. This squeeze on earnings for essential healthcare workers adds another layer of financial pressure on families who may already struggle to make ends meet in the very communities these hospitals are supposed to serve.

The repercussions of these job losses and declining job quality extend deep into communities’ future economic health outcomes. It’s not just about the loss of current income, but also the erosion of stable career paths within the local healthcare sector. When a major local employer like a hospital downsizes its workforce or makes jobs less appealing, it can discourage local talent from pursuing healthcare careers or force experienced personnel to seek opportunities elsewhere. This drain of vital healthcare talent can leave a lasting void, making it harder for the community to rebuild its healthcare infrastructure and maintain a robust, locally-based workforce. Displaced, experienced healthcare workers struggling to find comparable employment nearby can be forced to uproot their families or accept positions with lower pay and fewer benefits, further destabilizing households and the local economy.

Building a More Equitable Merger System

As ugly as these post-merger patterns are, proponents of the mergers claim they often serve to head off other grievous outcomes. While it’s impossible to prove a counterfactual, these supporters view mergers as the only alternative to wholesale closure of hospitals. The question for community advocates, then, is not how to stop hospitals from ever merging. It’s how to make sure that when hospital firms merge, the result benefits the surrounding community.

We can ensure that hospital mergers strengthen, not weaken, economic stability, access to care and racial equity in our communities. Much in the same way that banks are held accountable for their reinvestment efforts in underserved communities, the same must be true for healthcare systems. This means fighting for policies that prioritize community health over corporate profits and building structures to insure the negative impact of acquisitions are counterbalanced before they happen.

This fight is about keeping wealth in communities, protecting access to life-saving care and preventing another pillar of economic security from collapsing under unchecked corporate consolidation. If we don’t act now, hospital mergers will continue to extract wealth from the very communities that need investment the most.

Devin Thompson is NCRC’s Director of Health Equity and Impact.

Photo credit: fitra sulfy via Upsplash.

Watch a member-focused webinar to showcase our new report-generation capabilities. NCRC’s Research team demonstrates how they create customized reports for NCRC members. Using data curated for NCRC members’ unique needs, we work with each member to produce bespoke reports that target the specific places and issues that matter to them. This webinar demonstrates how we can produce reports that are perfect for working with funders, banks, elected officials and other stakeholders or to form the basis for your own publications. This is an exciting new capability that we are excited to offer.

Speakers

Ralph Cyrus, Membership Engagement Specialist
Jason Richardson, Senior Director of Research
Jacelyn Matthews, Director of the National Training Academy
Devin Thompson, Director of Health Equity & Impact

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Richardson 0:09
Great and thank you very much. Hi everybody. My name is Jason Richardson. I’m the director of research for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. In just a minute, I’m going to go through a couple of slides on the screen, and then I’m going to stop sharing so you can you’ll be able to see everybody. But I want to thank you first of all for joining us today. We’re gonna be talking about reports that we generate for members of NCRC, and we’re going to give you an example of one that I’m going to do for Jacelyn today. And then we’re going to answer some questions about them, but I’m going to let you watch through our screens here as I pull together a report that is exclusively for Jacelyn. It’s going to be based on information that she needs to do her job. And I think it’s a kind of an interesting process, and I’m hoping that you all agree. Couple of quick notes. First of all, I want to make sure I reintroduce Jacelyn Matthews, who’s our National Training Academy director, and she has been gracious enough to be my co-host, organizer and and test member for the day. Ralph Cyrus is also joining us. He’s our member engagement specialist. He’s going to be here to answer any questions you have about NCRC membership. And Devin Thompson is also available. He can help with Q and A or questions in the chat, and he himself does some interesting work on health or healthcare access and health accessibility.

Here at NCRC, we are recording this, and if you have any questions, put them in the chat. We will have a Q amp a as soon as I’m done. And of course, you can always redirect and just email me if you have any questions after the call. Jacelyn, I think that’s it. Are you ready to see… Actually, I should have gone through a couple of slides, which kind of repeats what I just said here. But, and of course, Jacelyn and Ralph are here as well. Go ahead and just shut down the screen sharing, and there we go.

So ever since this I took over this research team about 10 years ago, we have focused on supporting our members with data and analysis and the back end part of that, we build data sets and we build databases. We, you know, we’ve done for years, but often the challenge was translating that into something that was actionable. Our members are over 700 groups across the country, many of whom don’t have their own data and research people on staff, and that means that translating the data that we have into something that makes sense is always been a key area of concern for us. The report we’re going to do today is just a sample of the kind of thing that we can do for members. But you know, if you’re, if you’re ever not sure if you’re, if you’re a member of NCRC and you’re not sure if Jason can help you with something, the safest bet is always just to shoot me an email and ask, more often than not I can find a way to help if we have data to support it. So Jacelyn, with that, I was just going to jump right into it and talk a little bit. All right. So Jacelyn, we’re going to I know you had talked to me earlier about doing looking at mortgage lending in your county. Why don’t you remind me what it was Essex County, New Jersey. I believe you said, right?

Matthews 3:48
Yes, Essex County, born and raised in New Jersey, so I’m really interested in seeing what’s happening in the county now.

Richardson
Right, exactly. So in we’re looking at, you said you want to look at mortgages. Are you interested in homeownership patterns, like, who’s getting home loans? Or, yeah,

Matthews
Yes, absolutely that. I’m really interested. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Richardson
I was going to say, I was going to ask if you, if you’re interested in focusing kind of overall in the county, or do you want to dive into individual lenders and kind of understand individual lenders who are active there?

Matthews
I would really like to see individual lenders and what demographics are actually lending to and at what rates as well.

Richardson
Yeah, we can. We can do all of that. So the mortgage data set we use is from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. This data is produced every year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it includes about 90% of applications for mortgages across the US. It has. It’s a very deep and complex data set, and so like I like to interview, in this case, Jacelyn, just to make sure that we are slicing the data in a way that helpful, because it’s one of those data sets where you can look at it in an almost infinite number of ways, but we want to make sure it’s of interest to her. So what I heard her saying is that she’s interested in home purchases. Who is loaning to new home buyers? Where are they loaning? Who are they lending to, and more importantly, sometimes, who are they not lending to, and what areas are not getting investment. So I’m going to share my screen again here, and we’re going to draw upon the NCRC database that goes back to 2007. So we have about 160 million rows of our mortgage application records essentially on file. We also keep databases on things such as bank branch locations, openings and closures over the last 20 years, and we have small business data going back, I think, to 2007 as well.

You know, we get a lot less detail on the business loan data, but it is, it is a resource. In addition to that, we often bring in other sources. Census data is very commonly used as a comparator. We’re going to use a little bit of that today. And we often work with members that have their own data. For example, your members that help with things like pre-purchase counseling or homebuying classes, we can pull data that they have under an NDA agreement and compare that to other lender data, for example, or help them better understand their own impact in their community. So all of these are things that we do for members, and let’s go ahead and focus on Jacelyn right now. So in front of you, what you see is my screen, and I’m sharing the whole screen here, so you see my little icons and everything there. But in the middle, this is a tableau worksheet, and we just use Tableau as a way to easily link to and manipulate the data that we’re going to be using. What you have here are loans as a table showing home purchase, refinance and home improvement lending from 2018 to 2024. It has the number of loans, and then it has several columns that are additional variables that we are interested in. LMI B means a low to moderate income borrower. So that’s somebody making 80% or less of the area median income for the city they’re in. LMI CT is a low to moderate income census track, which means the income of that track is 80% or less of the area median income. MMCT is a majority minority census tract, which just means that the population is less than 50% non-Hispanic, White, and then the percent of loans to Asian, Black, Hispanic, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and Native American borrowers.

And we have published several white papers on how we calculate these variables. So if you are a mortgage geek and you are interested, by all means, let me know, and I can go into an excruciating amount of detail about how we do that. But for today, we’re going to be focusing on home purchase loans. So let’s go ahead and just clip that. And it takes a second there. And then we also just take this off to simplify the view. We also know we want to look at Essex County, New Jersey. Now we can look at just about any geography. So if it’s a you know, I’ve had a member just a few weeks ago that was interested in two zip codes in their city, not in the entire city even, and we were able to clip out just those records. So if you’re not sure about the area, let me know, and we can always work together and figure out what, what’s going to solve your particular need there while we’re waiting on this, that was an interesting case. Jacelyn, this is what I think I did tell you about this one day they were interested in home purchases in two zip codes in Missouri or St Louis, Missouri. And in the middle of the call, they said, you know, we hear that our neighborhoods have more duplexes than anywhere else in the city, and we hear that investors are buying them up. So I was able to take that information and then go back into this data and separate out investor loans, which a lot of investors pay cash for their houses, but a lot of them will pay a large down payment, and they’ll still mortgage part of it, so it does show up in our data. And sure enough, we found a huge issue in those neighborhoods of investors buying up duplexes, triplexes, etc. And, you know, it just and then just renting them out, instead of them being owner-occupied.

So okay, on the right-hand side here, you see the data has been adjusted. The numbers are a lot lower because we’re just looking at Essex County. These are home purchase loans on site, built, meaning not manufactured homes, one to four unit owner-occupied properties. So this is a good way to kind of get an idea of the overall health of the neighborhood. Now we also want to dive into specific lenders and how they’ve done over time. But the problem with that sometimes is that there, especially over seven years, can be quite a few lenders out there. So instead, we’re going to focus on, I think, the top, let’s just say the top 20 in lenders in 2024, and we’ll do that, and then I’ll bring in the lender names so we can, I’m go there, and let’s organize that.

Matthews
Jason, they’re asking the chat if you can enlarge your screen a little bit, because they want to be able to see the rows and columns better.

Richardson 11:20
All right, excellent. Let me know if that is a little bit better, guys. All right, and we’re going to do a couple of quick things here to make sure that we get just the largest lenders. And you’ll note here, right off the bat, you can see the largest lender is guaranteed rate in 2024 with 345 loans, and then cross country mortgage with 343 and then really quickly you see how those numbers decline, until you’ve got some kind of small entities here that, that, that we’re still going to take a look at, but that’s kind of a concentrated market where it’s a few lenders that really kind of dominate Essex County. And that’s the first thing. If I had, like a little red flag to wave. Jacelyn, I would, I would kind of be waving that because, as an advocate, you want there to be more lenders sharing the space. And when you see a concentration, this isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but it’s not, you know, it’s not great. Let me go ahead and filter.

Matthews
And I’ll, I’ll say, as you’re, as you’re speaking. I’m doing this, Jason, for those who are kind of like, this is a lot of numbers. I’m not understanding how to actually understand what the numbers mean. This is a great opportunity to work with our research team, because they can help you make sense of the numbers. And so we don’t want you to kind of get overwhelmed with that. We want you to be able to utilize the services that they offer to help you make sense of the numbers for whoever you’re using this report for. So if it’s for your own benefit, your own organization’s benefit, but if it’s also for you’re having a meeting with elected officials or with other banks or anything of that nature, they can help you make sense of this in the report that they do publish for you.

Richardson
Yep, exactly. Good point. All right, now, so I’ve, I’ve gone ahead and I’ve sorted all the data that I want to use. We’ve got the top lenders here. Back to here. Hang on one second. Here, and we just go ahead and call them vendors. What I’m doing now is just kind of shaping the data, and this is kind of the more important part of the process, because we can make sure that we are bringing the right thing into the report that we are going to be talking about today. I just want to double check something here, make sure it works right, and then I’m going to stop sharing my screen in a moment, because I’m going to be exporting this data to Excel, just for simplicity sake. Because the next step is, we’re going to start working with the AI, and it’s a kind of a key step here is to simplify your data as much as possible before you bring it into the AI and make sure you double-check your data there. I know notoriously, many of us have heard crazy stories about AI being asked for things and making things up, usually that has to do with either giving the AI too little context, confusing directions, or poorly formatted data. So we spent a lot of time just making sure that we that we properly format that data. Let me see here, and just takes a minute for these things to export, and then we’ll, we’ll keep moving. Jacelyn, did you have any other questions?

Matthews 15:00
I do actually. What be the benefit of reaching out to your team to collect this data, versus like me myself, going to Google, typing in some things and putting into Chat GBT on my own?

Richardson
Well, yeah, and so the data is publicly available. You can go to the CFPB website and download the Honda data yourself. Like I said, it is, it is complex data, though, and it’s difficult to work with. You know, it comes in, like very large amounts, so you’ve got to have some facility with data already just to be able to download it, work with it, and kind of interpret it, and then we join it together with a lot of other data sets to kind of give a little more context that are make it more relevant to what you’re trying to do. And then with, you know, AI, like I said, Chat GPT or Claude, which is what we’re working with today, they need a lot of context that that you really need a you know. If you just give them the data, they won’t inherently know what a mortgage is or how to work with it, or they won’t know. You know, the AI are just large language models. They help bridge that gap between a subject matter expert and the data really well. So the report we’re doing today, and I’m just downloading the other sheet now, is actually not like I’ve done these reports for years for members, the big shift is now, instead of it taking me 10-15, hours to do a report, by the time we get off this call, you’re going to have a report.

So that’s a pretty big deal, I think. All right, so I’ve got the data now in Excel, and I just want to pull up Claude here, and I will start sharing my screen. Now. There are several major large language models out there, ChatGPT from Open AI is probably the one that most people know. This is Claude, which is from a company called Anthropic, and that I prefer it for this kind of work, because, although it’s not as good at math as chat GPT is like, I’ll use chat GPT if I’m doing coding or if I’m giving it large data sets that I wanted to help manipulate, but it’s I think Claude is much better at interpreting data and writing about it in an understandable way. So this is the interface with Claude, and you can see already typed in Essex County mortgage member mortgage report, because I had a little hint from Jacelyn before this that she was going to ask about Essex County, but I just wanted to kind of get it started. So this project in quad already has a lot of information, and I’ve given it on humda data on the format of the reports that I like, the style guide for NCRC and how we write things is already loaded here, so now it’s up to me to give it instructions. AIS like this. Need have a short you want to kind of short sentence structure when you talk to it, and be very clear and explicit. So today we are writing on mortgage purchase.

Matthews 18:22
So as you’re doing that, Jason just to explain to everyone else. So Jason is going to put in this information based off of the questions that I have the information I’m looking for. So here you would be able to reach out to Jason and his team to say, like, I’m looking for information on x, y, z, and give try to be as detailed as possible about what you’re looking for, and then they can put this into the report. Now we understand that you might be trying to just gather data you’re not really sure about exactly what you’re looking for, and so once the report is kind of generated, the team can actually help you, kind of like, drill down to the actual key items that you’re looking to, to be able to share out within your organization or with others that you see fit. So this is a starting point for them, and so Jason will do like an interview, almost with you or whoever from your team, to kind of talk about what is that you’re looking for, what’s information that you’re seeking, and so that they can actually help you to drill down on the content so that they can answer on some questions in here. And obviously, this is me and Jason have had conversations, so he’s able to kind of answer this already based off of, like, just the conversation we’ve been having. But this is something that is also a member benefit for you. You can ask, like, really pointed and direct questions so that they can actually get you the information that you need. And while Jason’s doing that, I’ll also mention that if you have any questions, we would ask you to put it into the Q and A box here so that we can get to them. Jason will be sure to answer the questions. And if there’s something that comes up, because we know that, and when you’re in the middle of a webinar, you’re still processing the information. So if you need to reach out to Jason and the research team, you can do so, he will provide his email at the end of our time together. But we do want to let you know that this is a benefit, a perk for being a member of NCRC,

And Jason, actually, while we’re doing that, you mentioned HMDA data initially, and can you tell us a little bit more about what that is?

Richardson
I’m sorry, yeah, that’s the well, I the data set I spoke about earlier the this Consumer Finance Protection Bureau collects data on about 90% of mortgage loans every year, mortgage applications. And you can go to the CFPB website here, ffiec.cfpb.gov, because it’s the easiest URL to remember, and you can go and explore the data yourself.

When we download it, we clean it up quite a bit. We combine multiple years, because generally you can only look at individual years here. But if you’re looking for information on a specific lender or area, it is perfectly well within, you know, just anybody’s capabilities to go in here and download the data and kind of poke around it. And if you’re interested in doing that kind of work, but you’re not in your again, Member Services mean a lot of different things. I’m happy to hop on a call with you and walk you through this website and get you started on doing this kind of work yourself.

All right, now we go back here. Claude has kind of looked through and it’s asked me a couple of questions here, should I focus on… let me see. I’m going to tell it here – is the county wide data for all wonders – and just give it that. And you’ll see this isn’t like a single I don’t just give it everything, and then it just goes. There’s usually a back-and-forth with the AI. And constantly I have to review what it’s writing. I look at the the code that it writes if it has to write any sort of code, and this is where the subject matter experience comes in, because I’ll spot things here that I know instinctively just aren’t right sometimes, and I’ll go back and see that either the AI misinterpreted something, or I gave it a you know, instructions that weren’t really clear. So right now, I’m just letting it start to write the draft or the report over here, and I still haven’t given it all of the data. I still want to give it all of the data on those top lenders that we talked about. So let me copy that data on the top.

All right, you’ll notice two things. First of all, my typing is atrocious, but that’s okay, because it, you know, clean that up a little bit. But also, I’m asking you to do is kind of a basic analysis of the county lending. It’ll talk about how that compares to national lending that it’s got records of, and it will also look at the top lenders and talk about how they are doing compared to one another. So there is that data, and we’ll give it to it. Here we go,

Thompson 23:45
Jason, while Claude does its thing. Would you be willing to take two questions from the audience?

Richardson 23:49
Sure, of course. Where are they in the chat?

Thompson
So I can read them off to you. So first one, can you also add loans that have gone into default or first legal filing. So is that in the data set separately?

Richardson
So Liz pendants filings would be data you would receive from the county? Yes, you can combine so that you cannot link them with specific loan records. No. But if you’re looking to learn more about you know, quantify the number of Liz pendants filings in a particular area. We can help you work with that data to do so. We are seeing, I can tell you, and you can look at Urban Institute’s monthly chart book that they put out, we are starting to see defaults, and 90 day defaults going up. They’re still historically pretty low, you know, but, but it’s Savannah, New Orleans, yeah, I Yeah. I’m sure it’s a we’re seeing more defaults there. But, yeah, and that’s one of those great questions I get a lot. Unfortunately, there’s not a national data set of defaults. It’s all. Locked, kind of at the county level. But if you’ve got, if you’re working in a county and you want help with that data, let me know. We can, we can take a look at it together and see what’s available there.

All right, it looks like it’s done now, with some of this, let me go through it, and we’re going to now, I’ve given it all the data, and you see, it’s got home purchase lending analysis that’s all correct. Now I want to add a little bit of more detail about Essex County, so I’ve got a couple of reports here that I pulled down earlier. These are from Policy Map, which is an excellent resource that filters a lot of census data and puts it into a much more understandable and dynamic kind of format. So just to give the AI a little more background, I’m going to give these reports to it. Okay.

All right. And what you’re going to see here is, on this right hand side, the reports going to start kind of taking shape, but and at this point, like Jacelyn, you see it kind of coming together. I’m including background on, you know, how many people live in Essex County, what their distribution is, what their demographics are. I’ve also included information here on rents in Essex County, rental burden as a factor. Rental burden means a family that’s spending more than half of their income on rent, and it’s a good measure of how likely, you know, folks are to be able to buy a home if they can’t save if they’re spending so much on rent. So we kind of like to include some things like that.

Matthews 27:01
And if, Jason, if my organization, for example, had some data that we wanted to include, could we send the reports to you? You could also include that in here?

Richardson
Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s one of the more interesting things. Is when members come with some of their own data and they’ll, they’ll say, Hey, I got this, you know, we worked with a member called Covenant Community Capital, who are based in Houston. They do pre-purchase counseling, and then their clients work with partner lenders to ultimately make their purchases. And they had great data on all of those clients and what they paid in closing fees. So my team worked together with them, looked at a representative sample of other loans from Harris County, and found that CCC clients were consistently getting lower closing costs, lower interest rates, and they were able to buy more valuable homes. They’re able to get bigger houses, and that’s a measurable impact that CCC can then take and put in their own reporting and seek funders or other support, just to show what they really are doing.

So here we go. Essex County context. It gives a brief overview here of the race, ethnicity distribution. It shows the change in lending over time. And you can really see the impact of the pandemic here, where home purchase loans spiked by about 10% between 2019, and 2020, and then. And then they die pretty sharply after that. But you still have last year, about 4,500 home purchase loans across the county. We see here, we have a breakdown here, year over year of lending per population. Keep in mind, if we look back, for example, lending to Black borrowers is at just under 24%- 39% of the community is African American, though, so that’s a pretty big gap. Meanwhile, you see Asian borrowers are overrepresented, and Hispanic borrowers are right around where we would expect them to be as a percentage. Let me see the first thing is, I didn’t include the percent of White in this because we weren’t really looking at that, so I’m going to tell it right now just to drop White. And then Native American and Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, you know, in a context like this, those populations are going to be relatively small, so it’s a little difficult to really tell anything by that.

All right? There we go. It’s a little bit clear, also easier to read. Now, these tables, right now, these reports don’t come with fancy maps or graphics or anything like that.

We can do that work, but it’s a much heavier lift, and our goal is to make the something that we can deliver to you quickly. but you’ll notice these tables – 1t’s really easy just to copy and paste this into anything you want to from Google Docs to excel, and you can make your own visuals. We have had members that have taken this as kind of a starting point for reports that they were publishing themselves. And I think that’s really exciting, because that’s that’s something that I think beyond, is beyond the capability of a lot of small groups but it really lets them punch above their weight when they’re able to publish original research specific to their community, and they’re not just regurgitating stuff that, you know comes out of one of my reports, or things like that.

The geographic distribution is really interesting here. The percent of loans going into low and moderate-income tracks has steadily increased over time, majority minority tracks. It has it has remained relatively stable, 2022 you see this jump here from 44.6% to 54.3%. That’s the year that they changed the boundaries for the census tracks with 2020 and it created about 30% more majority minority tracks across the country. So that’s probably not a real bump there, you know, but, but the increase in lending and low to moderate income tracks is interesting, especially because we go back to let’s actually do this with LMI borrower, because I saw something before when I was looking at this that I think is interesting. There we go. All right, so this table is one I want to focus on for a minute. Jacelyn. The well, still writing here.

Thompson 32:01
Hey Jason, while it’s doing that, can I toss you another question that perhaps.

Richardson
Yes, absolutely.

Thompson 32:05
So there was a question on what AI applications are really good at taking raw data and converting it into charts and summaries. So you mentioned that we’re not doing that here, if someone wanted to do that on their own.

Richardson 32:22
Yeah, I haven’t found anything that consistently will do charts. It’s a large language model, you know, that’s, that’s where all these are. So they, they like, it’ll, it’ll produce, like, I’ve had Claude and ChatGPT both produce really beautiful charts, but I couldn’t replicate it from one report to the next, and that’s not very useful for us. Now summarizing the data, I prefer Claude to chatGPT. I haven’t tested Gemini, Devin uses that more. I think, I think Claude is great at taking data and then re and then writing about it in a way that’s more understandable for people really quickly. That’s just been my experience, though. And keep in mind, this technology is moving quickly enough that in a couple of weeks, it may be a completely different story. I would encourage you just to kind of test out different ones with similar problems and see what works best for you.

But I want to talk about this table for just a minute here, Jacelyn. So what you’re seeing here is year over year, the percent of loans home purchases going to low to moderate income borrowers versus those in low to moderate income tracks and majority minority tracks. Now you can already see that there’s been an increase, albeit a slight one, over time, for loans and LMI tracks, and we’ve seen relative stability in lending and majority minority tracks, but lending to low- to moderate-income borrowers has sharply declined from 28% in 2020 to 14% today. That’s a pretty, this isn’t the worst one I’ve seen nationally, but this is a pretty severe drop off. But there’s not a drop in majority-minority track or LMI track. So do you know what you understand what that means, Jacelyn?

Matthews
No, I’m not sure. Can you explain that?

Richardson
Rich people are buying in poor neighborhoods, essentially. And this is a trend we are seeing nationally, where as low- to moderate-income borrowers get priced out of the market. We’re seeing a lot more middle and upper-income borrowers active in LMI, and especially LMI majority minority neighborhoods. Yeah, so you know that’s, that’s a trend. We’re seeing this. But I’m just telling you, Jacelyn, this is a, this is another red flag here. I think we talked earlier about the concentration of the market in just a few lenders, but this severe drop in LMI borrowers is really concerning. And you’ll see this kind of goes to that last question also Devin. The text here is, it kind of summarizes the data above it pretty well, I think. And I’m just double-checking some of the figures against my Excel. One thing I will tell you, if you’re working with any AI is always to spot check the some of the data points. And just because I liken working with these AI tools now as working with a very, very smart PhD student, basically, or even a very smart high school student, sometimes they can do amazing things, but you often need to double check them and make sure they actually did the work. And any parent out there knows what I’m talking about.

So we’ve, we’ve actually already kind of done this, this table here, we’ve added that to the information upstairs. So let’s allow it to remove this table, and then we’re going to dive in. I want to make sure we get through the top lender section, and then we have some time for Q and A afterwards. But let’s get that through there. Now another thing is, when you talk to me and if we work together on producing one of these reports, and generally speaking, by the end of an hour session, we’ll have most of this done. But it doesn’t mean that we’re done. So if you take the report back, you have time to absorb it, talk to other people and have more questions or you want to tweak it or change it, I keep all of these records. I keep all the files. So just email me and say, Jason, we really like this, but can we add a section that discusses this a little bit? Yeah, not a problem at all. Just shoot me an email, and we can absolutely do that.

Thompson 36:41
Jason, I got one more that I should have asked way back when, but I don’t think we’re gonna come back around to it. Does it matter how the data is formatted in Excel before you copy and paste it into the AI prompt?

Richardson 37:02
Yeah, so that’s a great question, actually. So the data I took out of Tableau was automatically formatted like this, so I’ve already done the percentage calculations so I know those are done correctly. I’m not relying on the AI to do that, although, if you are going to have an AI do math like that, I would use chatGPT right now. It’s just better at it, because it does the calculations using Python. And if you want to do any type of statistical testing; first, you still want to have an expert in statistics review it before you go out and claim statistical significance, but chatGPT an use R, which is a free statistical software language to run the statistical test as well. I would avoid using Claude for that. It’s just it doesn’t use Python. It codes everything in JavaScript, and it’s just not as good at it. But I copy and pasted this, what you see in front of you, right into the chat with Claude, and understood it instinctively, but, but the whole first part of our process today was me shaping the data, cleaning it, and then and then exporting it, so I knew it was in a small enough format that the AI could understand. That’s good question.

Here we’ve got kind of the information on the top lenders and their market share, guaranteed rate and cross country mortgage. This is not unusual looking. We’re looking here at what the top eight lenders, and out of eight of them, six of them are mortgage companies. And that’s important, and it’s important because mortgage companies are not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act, which means that they have no obligation or duty to serve low-income communities that banks are judged on, you know, that banks get examined on. At NCRC, we have long supported expanding CRA to cover mortgage companies as well, just so there is some type of a regulatory framework that ensures that everybody is, you know, being kind of judged on how much they invest in working-class neighborhoods.

Significant contract? Yeah, I noticed here that the eight largest lenders are 40% of the market. So not only did I notice it when we first started looking at this chat, or Claude, in this case, also noticed that concentration is pretty high. And then we’re looking at see. So I don’t really like this. It doesn’t have all of the lenders listed for one thing, and it doesn’t have all of the categories. So let’s see if we can go ahead and make some changes here, wanting lenders… Well.

Okay, so I’m giving a little bit of instruction here on what I want to see, and I just want to narrow it down to 2024 data when we look at the top lenders. Because if you’re going into a meeting, for example, with you know United Shore, and that they’re mostly a wholesale lender. So you probably never heard of United Shore, but they’re top one or two lenders in the country. Almost every year, they deal exclusively with mortgage brokers. So they, you know, their patterns are often a little concerning, depending on what propelled brokers in the area are doing their loans. But, you know, I always feel like you kind of want to get the more recent data for the individual lenders, and then when I asked it to write up the report, I don’t want to be overwhelming people with just repeating that same data that they see in the table. So in this case, I’ve asked it to kind of, you know, write the narrative, but just cite the most, the most kind of compelling figures that explain what they’re seeing. And what you’ll note now here. First of all, it’s dropped the Native American and Hawaiians from the data set because it’s just the numbers are too small. In all likelihood, a great many of these lenders probably didn’t make any loans to those groups because the numbers are just, that’s just how they break down. But what’s interesting is to look at the great variation in lending to different groups, LMI borrowers, for example. Keep in mind, we’re talking about the same loans. These are home purchase loans to buy houses, guaranteed rate 8.7% are LMI, cross country 13. See if anybody really stands out. Loan Depot, Paramount residential. They all look pretty good, and then some others that don’t look that good, right? You know, and I always find it interesting which ones are great. You’ll typically find the banks do a lot less lending to LMI borrowers than others. But look at Bank of America, they’re actually doing pretty great here, at about 20% compared to other lenders. So, you know, this is a really kind of interesting space, I think, especially as we’ve seen this sharp decline to 14% of LMI borrowers in the  county overall are low to moderate income. You’ve got quite a few players here that are doing better than that, and quite a few that are doing worse. So, you know, for example, if I were looking at this with a member, You know, North Point bank, they only made eight loans, though, but you know, we can go back over time and get more information on them. They might make a great partner organization in Essex County, you know, if they really are doing a good job, it looks like, you know, with eight loans, it’s hard to tell for one year, I’d want to go back a little bit further with them, but they’re, they’re the out of those eight loans. They’re doing loans to LMI borrowers in LMI tracks, whereas other lenders are not doing as well.

Let me scroll down here and see it does. It does do a little bit lower element borrow rates versus county averages. So it’s kind of highlighting some of the lenders here, and this is stuff we can always kind of tweak and change based on what you need. Jacelyn, is this, do you think this information so far is helpful?

Oh, you’re muted.

Matthews 43:40
Sorry. Thank you. Yes, I think very helpful.

Richardson 43:49
Great. Well, I tell you what I think I’m going to I’m going to export this right now to what we do is just export it to a PDF file here and save that. And I want to share this with you at the end of the call, and I’m also going to give you the raw data that I pulled here. And that way, you’ve got not just the written report, but you’ve got the raw data that I’ve used to create it that you can use for your own purposes. If you want to use it to double-check some of the figures that are in the report here. I’ll also save all of this for us, including all the records of how we produce this report. So in a couple of weeks, after you’ve had time, and I’m going to stop sharing here, after you’ve had time to check it out and talk to your colleagues about it, if you have any other questions, or if you spot something you think is maybe off, let me know. And we keep all those records, and I can fix it for you. We can produce a whole new report. But in the last 40 minutes, you now have a comprehensive report on mortgage lending in Essex County from 2018 to 2024 that covers the top lenders in the county, how well they’re doing at serving different communities and who’s who’s not meeting their you know, who has opportunities to improve.

Matthews 45:11
Excellent. Thank you, Jason.

Richardson 45:14
I can finally see the chat.

Matthews
Yeah. And there are some questions in the Q and A that Devin and Ralph were able to answer. But I do think that it might still be worth speaking out loud, especially because we are, you know, doing a recording of this.

Richardson 45:30
There’s some good questions here. Yeah, the source of small business lending data, it’s FFIEC. Flat files are what we use, which we download from, f, i, U, C, but yeah. Dennis photo was there. Devin was able to answer that one. Lucy, yes, if members of NCRC get free access to the NCRC research team, that’s myself, Dr Bruce Mitchell. Myself, Jason Richardson and Dr Bruce Mitchell, as well as Jad, our GIS engineer, and Joseph Dean, who is our economist. And you know, when you can’t, if you want to do a report like this, you and I’ll work together, but if it’s sometimes, I partner you with other people on the team, depending on what what your exact request is, and who’s a better skill set match for you. Default for simplifying, I answered that one. Jamila had some good questions there. Okay, Devin, yeah, Devin uses a lot of these tools. Also, I’m a lot so, so So I think that’s good answer there, yeah. And I would agree, you know, Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT all have their different use cases, and they seem to be, you know, they seem to excel in certain areas, and that can change with the next model that comes out. So I’d recommend kind of being open to you to moving back and forth between them and testing them out and seeing which one fits your needs best.

Matthews
I’m just going to reiterate her question just again for recording purposes. So the question was about AI application. AI applications are really good at preparing raw data into charts and summaries. And then, do you see using Claude?I do see using Claude. Are there any others that you would suggest to use as well to do summaries and taking raw data?

Richardson 47:34
Yeah. And then, so yeah, the three big ones are chat, GPT, Claude and in Gemini from Google. Honestly, I, you know, it depends on what you’re doing. You know, some of them are better than, you know, at certain things than others. I like Claude, and I think that we’re going to see the industry kind of develop in a way where different ai do different things, and eventually they’ll work together on some things. But for, but for today’s demonstration, I just stuck with Claude, just because it was easiest and I was taking care of all the data myself. Co pilot, yeah, that’s another one. I haven’t I haven’t used it very much either. So

Matthews 48:21
That asked a question about looking up data. Can they request data from other counties within your state?

Richardson 48:27
Yeah, that’s a great question. And obviously, you know, we can look at any state in the country, anywhere in the US or the colonies the but if you’re bringing in specific data for your area, yeah, absolutely we can, we can bring that data into our database. We can relate it to our data in different ways. Yeah, we’re happy to, I’d love to take a look at whatever you’ve got. I I’m always happy to get a, get a look at any data that isn’t, you know, just public data that everybody has. You know, proprietary data is something that we’re used to working with and we can. We can even have an NDA drawn up if you need, if you need us to, so we can look at the data for you.

Matthews 49:08
Another question is, what are your thoughts about balancing the need to double check the work of an AI with realizing time savings from having AI help create these types of reports?

Richardson
Yeah, that’s a super question, because, I mean, that’s kind of the crux, if not, why do it? So as we were working on this today, I was able to, since I since I pulled the data myself, and I actually did all the calculations myself in Tableau, and then I just gave that prepared data to Claude to work with. I was able to go through the report as it was writing and cross check a few. You know, what I’ll usually do is go through and check several instances of data between my original data I gave it and what it’s putting the report to make sure that it’s, you know, that it’s not making anything up. But when I used to, when I was doing these reports, let’s just say manually, meaning that. I would download the data myself, and I would write up the whole report. This would take me a couple of days to do. You know, you’re talking about hours of time spent writing and rewriting and going back and creating tables, and we created that report in 40 minutes. So the volume and the quality of the of the product that I can put in your hands very quickly is kind of crazy, to be honest with you. I think we’re we’re really moving into a to a space now where we’re able to provide better tools that are exactly what you need for your local purpose. And you don’t have to go to some dashboard somewhere, you don’t have to learn how to be a data person. You know, there’s none of that. So I’m excited to get started, you know, to do this kind of thing. So I want to encourage folks there, if you’re members of NCRC, shoot me an email if you’re interested in membership, Ralph, I’m conscious of the time here. Did you want to come on and talk a little bit about membership of NCRC, and we can put, I’ll put some contact information in the chat, also for folks.

Cyrus 51:12
Yes. I’ll speak real quick. I just wanted to reiterate for people are just starting out, and they’re curious on how to connect with research. If there are any other, any other membership benefits that that you’re that you’re interested in, feel free to reach out to the membership team. We’re happy to talk. We’re happy to do a one-on-one conversation, walk you through both how to get customized reports, and then also, a lot of times we just like to, we do like to share the premier reports that the research team does. Throughout the year, they recently released a really interesting report on gentrification, that I think a lot of people should, you know, try to utilize first. And the other thing I would like to say is, if you are interested in having some type of data request, and you’re curious on how to interpret the results, what to do with the reports is that we, we typically in a locality, also have other members who may be more experienced and reporting and using reports for advocacy. And as much as we want you to collab with us. We would love for our members to to collab among each other, so we can also connect you to your fellow members, some who or who could be research centers, fair lending, fair housing advocacy groups as well, and use these reports as a way to build larger coalitions where you are,

Richardson 53:03
Great. And I was going to put contact info in the chat, but I think we’ll just send around. When we send around the recording link, Jocelyn, I’ll include, obviously, our contact information for Ralph and myself. And also, there was another question in the chat I wanted to address before we wrap up here. Karen Hughes, do you also integrate qualitative data? Yes, yes. We can the it. It can, obviously, can’t be linked directly to, like, in this case, mortgage lending, but yeah, we’re comfortable working with all kinds of data like that. We do a lot of work around public health already. You’ll know, we’ve published several reports on redlining and public health and a lot of Devon’s work has touched on social determinants of health, in particular that you mentioned there. So yes, absolutely. I’m going to include on the email that we send out later not just the link to this session, but also links to our most recent reports on gentrification. And we are about to debut a new mortgage market series online that looks at different aspects of mortgage lending in 2024. So the first three parts of that, we hope to publish this week, and there’ll be more parts coming out over the rest of the year. So make sure you’re signed up for emails, and you’ll hear about that.

Matthews 54:33
And Jason, I’m going to ask one last questions. I think it is an important one. What is the cost to a member to actually have your team compiled report.

Richardson
It’s zero if you’re a member of NCRC, this is, this is a core part of what my team is tasked to do. We produce our own research. We support other internal departments here at NCRC, such as the policy team and our leadership and we help members. So those are the three things we do. And if you come to our conference every year, you’re gonna you’ll see our research area that we set up with. You know, we’re with big computer screens and everything like that we usually have, and we spend all day sitting there talking to members and talking about their data needs. But no if you’re a member of NCRC, that is the cost. So we’re very happy to engage.

Matthews
Great. Thank you and thank you. This was a very informative I know we couldn’t get into all the questions, but if you have any additional questions, or, like I said before, if as you’re watching this recording, you’re like, Oh, wait. I you know, wanted more information about this or that, you can definitely find Jason about the actual research. Jay richardson@ncrc.org if you have questions about membership becoming a member of NCRC, you can reach out to Ralph R cyrus@ncrc.org. We can also provide that information for you as well. And again, thank you for taking the time to meet with us today. We hope this was informative for you as well.

Richardson 56:05
Thank you. Have a good day.

Are you making the most of your NCRC Membership?

Do you know NCRC offers health equity expertise and subgrant opportunities?

Join us to learn what resources, services, content and networking opportunities your membership includes and how being a NCRC member can help you in your fight for a #JustEconomy. NCRC staff share tips for making the most of your membership and walk through NCRC’s newest member features.

Download:

Powerpoint

Speakers:

Devin Thompson, Director of Health Equity and Impact, NCRC
Laura Bentley, Director of Grant Administration, NCRC
Caitie Rountree, Director of Membership and Events, NCRC
Diane Ashong, Membership Engagement Manager, NCRC
Ralph Cyrus, Membership Engagement Specialist, NCRC

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Ashong 0:10
Hi everyone. Welcome to NCR C’s membership webinar. Feel free to introduce yourself in the chat. Type in your city and state where you’re joining from in this webinar. So we’ll get started since it’s a couple minutes past one o’clock, and I am going to remind everyone to if you have any questions, submit that in the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen. And we’ll, throughout the webinar answer some of those questions. But there also be, at the end of the webinar a portion with Q and A Okay, all right, and I will turn it off to Ralph, who will talk about NCRC and what we do.

Cyrus 1:09
Welcome everyone. I am Ralph. I’m the membership engagement specialist for NCRC. Just to let you know a little bit about our organization, NCRC is the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. We were founded in 1990 and we have become a nationwide organization of over 700 member organizations with the mission of making a just economy a national priority and a local reality. We work with our members to close racial and social economic divides, as well as closing opportunity divides. As I said, we were founded in 1990 with the mission of advancing the goals laid forth in the Community Reinvestment Act, and to specifically advance credit lending and investment and moderate to income communities. We do this by advocating for policies that support community development and financial inclusion, we build partnerships with community lenders to negotiate CBA agreements with financial institutions and those CBAS are blueprints for how lending institutions will provide equitable chances of lending and development. We also provide technical assistance and training to community organizations to build out their capacity to provide better services to whoever their attended audiences and to make them as as effective as possible. And lastly, we convene events that bring stakeholders together to discuss and to discuss how the best create the most equitable solutions to the problems of a of an unjust economy. And with that, I will now turn it over to Caitie to see what highlights some of the main benefits that membership in NCRC brings and what we’re trying to expand upon.

Rountree 03:38
Hi, thanks, Ralph. I’m Caitie Rountree, NCRC director of membership and events. So thank you all so much for being here with us today. I’m going to briefly talk about some of the benefits that we see members relying on most heavily. These are some of the key tools which we deliver the value that Ralph just highlighted. So one of the key ways that we connect our members to one another and to us is through events you’ll you’re already hearing a little bit from us about the just economy conference. If you are on our email list, this is the national event for folks working to make a just economy a national priority and a local reality. Over 1000 people, community leaders, financial institutions, local and federal government agencies, academia, all coming together to network, share ideas, learn and ask hard questions to chart out a better future. This year will be in DC, March 25 through 27th members get a steep discount and get to participate in Hill day, where we send delegations to meet with congressional offices, and right now we’re taking proposals for sessions. So this is a great time to submit your best ideas for conversations that you want to lead at the just economy conference, and make sure you get those in by September 13. Another way that we convene folks in person, we have an annual summit that moves around the country. The just economy conference is a national event, but these summits allow us to dig deep into a particular region or metro area. Every fall, we go to a city where NCRC has been partnering for a while, and we work with our members there to convene a summit around local economic justice topics this fall will be in Detroit on September 24 so if any folks here are within driving distance of Detroit, that could be a really great way to connect with us in person in the fall, throughout the year, both in person and online, we also provide unique learning opportunities through our National Training Academy. NTA is a comprehensive training program that meets the needs of organizations committed to increasing access to credit in communities, and we do this by increasing the knowledge and skills of organizations seeking to expand their services. And you can check out our course catalog of live and recorded trainings. We’ll put the link to that in the chat. One of the key ways that folks look to connect with us is around our policy expertise, particularly as it relates to the regulation of financial institutions and ensuring that those institutions are good partners to communities. There’s a few different ways that we provide that insight. Radar is one of our most popular weekly newsletters where we curate some of the most important developments in the field. So make sure that you’re signed up for that. We also regularly publish papers and blog posts breaking down relevant policy issues and laying out potential ways for our members to engage. We hold a monthly ledge reg call to brief members and give our members a chance to ask questions and engage on policy developments. And then finally, we rally our members on particular policy campaigns, giving member organizations the opportunity to sign their names to comment letters on issues that matter. And we’ll share a link in the chat to see some of the different testimonies and issues that we’ve taken a lead on from a policy perspective. And the final research benefit that I want to highlight is our research. NCRC research team regularly produces original work on topics such as redlining, gentrification, displacement, bank branch closures, segregation, public health outcomes and other topics. They also support our members through three few different ways, and we’ll link to some of these as well. The Fair Lending tool is a great interactive tool where you can look at Bank and lending activity in your area, in your community, across a variety of different factors. We help our members with data access. You know, how do I find this data? How do I get to that? Those are, those are questions that our research team is ready to help field. Our research team also does lender analysis to help our members understand how particular lenders are performing in their markets. They do mapping and data visualization and consultation as well. And then finally, sometimes members have particular research needs that are a little bit more involved than what those things I just listed can cover. In those cases, the research team can map out a contract at a discounted member rate to support analysis of lending, new bank branch site locations or other support, including the full production of interactive reports for public release. So starting with the fair lending tool is a great place to start look at some of the materials that our research team has produced, and then reach out, and they’re very creative and responsive and helping you really make sure that you’re using data to drive the movement for economic justice in your community. So those are some of the kind of the tried and true benefits that, again, that we see members really coming to us for over and over again and really leveraging in their communities. But now I’m going to turn it over to Laura from our community impact team, and then to Devin from our health equity team to talk about some member benefits that are evolving and emerging. So Laura, I’ll hand it over to you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the community impact team.

Bentley 9:20
Awesome. Thank you, Caitie. Well, nice to see you all today. My name is Laura Bentley, and I am the director of grant administration with NCRC Community Impact team. You can see as well on the screen. Our other colleague within my team is Luis Ortiz, who hopefully you will all become familiar with as you continue to partner with NCRC. So to overview a little bit the community impact department. Our goal is to build member capacity through sub-grants, and that’s our effort. And we oversee three program lines for NCRC members, so I’ll be touching on those. The first is our housing counseling network, or HCN, as we call it. NCRC has served as an intermediary for our housing counseling network for over 15 years. Currently, we have 25 housing counseling agencies in our network, and just last year, our network served over 14,000 households. So we’re really excited to serve in our role as administrators for this network, and as administrators we, for example, apply on behalf, on their behalf, for both public and private sources of funding, such as through HUD, and then we administer this funding directly to our network and support them in reporting and disbursements. So for housing counseling agencies, being a part of the network with NCRC unlocks additional sources of funding, and it also simplifies their reporting process. So for example, outside of the network, you might have a different reporting system for each of your funding agencies as a housing counselor or housing counseling agency, but as part of our network, we use just one system. We have one point of contact for our housing counseling agencies, as opposed to, you know, a different contact for each funding agency. So we really look to streamline that process and maximize the system for our housing counseling agencies that they can focus their energies on doing the hard work on the ground. I will note as well that over the past 15 years, we’ve continued to evolve our housing counseling network services based on feedback from our network. So as we look into the coming year, we look forward to deepening our work with the National Training Academy that Caitie was mentioning to offer additional training and information sharing on housing counseling industry trends. We’re also looking to be bringing the network together more often than occasional huddle-ups to connect on common challenges, best practices, resources and additional shared learning opportunities. So we look forward to offering an even more robust service to our housing counseling agencies as we continue onward. Next, I’d like to highlight our fellowship for equitable development. We can move to the next slide. This is an opportunity to work with innovative new talent, where we pair master’s level students with our NCRC members to complete member-designed fellowship projects that advance your organization’s mission. So in this program, fellows receive a $20,000 stipend for their work, and hosts receive a separate $5,000 administrative stipend. This is a great opportunity for you as a member to test out, for example, a seed idea for your organization, such as through research or impact assessment, data analysis or support for a pilot project through the form of a fellow. The next fellowships will begin on September 9 of this year, so stay tuned to our social media and newsletter to see highlights and stories that are shared during this fellowship year, if you’re interested in applying to host a fellow during the next round, our third area for Community Impact is our field Empowerment Fund, or Fef, and this, in contrast, is an opportunity to level up an established service line to increase your baseline service to the community through an injection of grant funding up to $200,000 so applications for this program are live now through September 13. So if you’re interested in learning more, our informational webinar is available on the field Empowerment Fund website, which you see at the bottom of your screen, and there on that website, we have additional information and additional eligibility details, etc. So for any of these programs, if you do have any questions regarding this, you can always contact the community impact team at impact@ncrc.org and we’d be delighted to to serve you in these programs and to also connect on them. Thank you.

Thompson 13:44
So good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. I’m Devin Thompson. I am director of health equity and impact here at NCRC. Appreciate your time today. So a little bit about this work. So for all of you who are been around with us for a while, you probably heard this health equity is kind of this newer body of work for us, and it is we’re kind of the first piece of this in place-based approach that we’re bringing to our work out of our new strategic plan. And you may be asking, Well, what does health equity have to do with a just economy and the community development work that you do? The reality is that every year there’s about $450 million sorry, $450 billion in economic growth that does not happen in the communities that we stand alongside due to health disparities. And so health equity is really just the premise that we can create a system where in which individuals are able to be healthy by their own choices and have a fair and just opportunity to be that healthiest self, where there aren’t those systemic barriers to health, which are similar in a lot of ways, those systemic barriers to wealth that you all have historically focused on. And the reality is of that, you know, $450 billion a year, 70% of it is economic growth that does not happen in predominantly Black and Brown communities. And so health equity as. See right the terms of health and comprehensive development have a lot of commonalities. So when we talk about comprehensive development, really talking about the notion that all of the work and all of the work to improve in a neighborhood is interconnected, and that that neighborhood thrives when a number of those factors are in place, effective schools, low crime, good jobs, quality, affordable housing, healthy residents, local retail and that they’re all interconnected, that we improve community safety when we’re transforming abandoned properties into affordable housing, or when we’re engaging at-risk youth in the community development efforts in the community, when we reclaim parks and make them spaces for families to play, or when we help commercial corridor become a vibrant place to shop and increase foot traffic. All of these things impact these other things. It’s that they’re deeply interconnected, and because more than 50% of health outcomes has to do with zip code by improving those outcomes, we’re also improving the health of the community members there, so that way they can continue to be engaged members of their own community. When we impact health outcomes were impacting wealth outcomes and vice versa.

Now at a highest level, next slide. Thank you. All of this really is engaged with the recognition that these outcomes are near interconnected, but they provide feedback to each other. So when we increase a parent’s income, we’re improving the likelihood of improved childhood education outcomes. It’s a generational virtuous cycle, but the work that we do and the work that you do doesn’t just end at what’s in the tree. A lot of our work is midstream or upstream. It’s that stuff that’s in the soil. It’s how we work on housing afford unaffordability as a systemic support. How do we work on and disaggregating communities and creating increased access to social capital and economic capital within the communities that we do, which are the outcomes of work of community development, and when we fix those structural barriers to ill health. We’re also fixing the structural barriers to wealth development. So that’s kind of at a top level why we’re doing this work. Now. A little bit on the how, if I could get next slide. So it all really starts with knowledge. That’s, you know, you heard us talk about research and policy work, NCRC, at our core, we’re great, and we view our best selves when we are finding what works in communities across the country and helping spread it to our other members. All of this in the support of the fact that our job, you heard, our mission, is to create a just economy, a national reality and a national priority and a local reality, and we do that by increasing the flow of of capital to the priorities of communities, especially in our place-based work. So as we figure out what works, and hear from you and support you in building out what works to do that, especially in MySpace, when we talk about health industry capital slide, we then drive that information back down to you, our members. When that happens, we’re helping you build better policy or program recommendations that become your advocacy agendas. We help you build up better outcome measurement structures that way you can then engage with other types of investors. We are not reaching, for example, in MySpace again, health investors that can be hospitals, it could be payers, it can even be your local departments of health. And when we can inform your project and program pipelines and those measurements, we can help you be better positioned to make those cases. We also engage directly with those investors. We connect that same information to those non-monetary outcomes that they’re seeking from their investments. And so that way their community development investments are able to then their investments in health equity outcomes are community development investments. And at the highest level, next slide, when we bring it all together, we facilitate inclusive investment coalitions. They identify projects in community that meet investors intent and we support investors education process to learn how to engage in participatory investment with communities that frequently don’t have a high level of trust with them. Today, as I frequently remind my colleagues internally, banks didn’t start knowing how to do equitable community investment. It’s taken decades of education, insured learning, to get there, and we’re in the similar process right now with Hospital and Health and Health payer investors one more if you would, thank you now to help support that environment, and because you know you all know us from our national level advocacy work, there’s a recognition that we can take that same information and use it to help drive policies that drive more equitable investment from those healthcare agencies to community identified outcomes. This is looks a lot like state policy work, because frequently it is because those are the entities who actually have oversight. This is less of a federal body of work, and when we find out and identify what works for two’s example, hospital and health facility. Sectors, we can work with you as our members to build local coalitions around those key topics that run very parallel to those coalitions that you’re already working in, because it’s the same intent of driving capital to the things that we know actually work as interventions. So that’s the bigger picture. How are we helping you as our members do that today? Next slide. Proud to get to share off our work in this new office hour. So how do we more directly support you? So besides the research work, and hopefully you’ve all had a chance to pop onto our website at some point and seen some of our you know, our research spotlights, that way you can build better case statements, some of our op ed work, so we can actually identify and help provide you with language to work in your own community. We’re also launching, starting this coming month, set of open office hours and member office hours. The open office hours are exactly as they sound. They are open to not members and non members alike, where we’re going to dive deep into a topic. So the coming six weeks, we’re gonna be focusing on transparency and efficacy of health facility mergers. So big topic right now you saw recently on the hill, and a couple of states are picking up local legislative, local local legislation around it, much of which we think could be significantly improved. So topics like that are going to rotate on a monthly by bi-monthly basis, but focused on the intersection of health, justice, investor accountability and those community-led development work that you all are doing in your communities. There, we will have open conversations, find out what’s worked, lift up what’s worked inside the network, as well as bringing other examples in from outside the network. As a member side, we recognize that the situation in any given locale might not be the same as what’s going on in other jurisdictions, and so we want to create spaces for you to get tailored information and tailored responses to what you need. Now, what that can look like is going to be 30-minute deep dive sessions together where we’re going to focus with one organization, or coalition, if it’s multiple organizations, working together on a topic, where we’re going to deep dive into what’s going on in your community and what sort of supports you need. Now this is the start of a process, but it’s creating an entry point for you to start getting access to the to the additional supports that you need in your community. This could be the beginning of identifying how to build a local investment pipeline that is multi axis, and actually is able to therefore engage multiple different types of funders, not just banks. It might be larger legislative or policy play around how to create better local legislation to actually so to actually bring accountability and oversight to health facility mergers, what it’s going to look like is, again, going to be tailored by you and what you need as members and as coalitions. I will say we’ve been putting out a lot of webinars on this topic to make sure that we’re going to be respectful for everyone’s time. We are actually making those, well, at least one of those trainings a prereq for engaging with these office hours and members-only sessions. The links for those are going to be available. And actually, I believe they just went live on these events just went live on our web page today, so you should be able to sign up for the open office hours or member-only sessions as of earlier this morning. I think that is everything. So I think I’m going to turn it back over to you,Diane. You, Katie, sorry.

Rountree 23:25
Yeah. Thank you so much, Devin, and thank you, Laura, those were really great. And I know that was a lot of information, so just a reminder, we’re going to share this recording and slides with all registrants. So if you weren’t able to digest all of that or take notes or get screenshots, don’t worry. It’s coming to you as a follow-up after this event. In a minute, Diane’s going to share some of the nuts and bolts about member eligibility costs and how to manage your membership. So hold on to those questions for right now. But before we dive into that, we wanted to give an opportunity to answer some questions about the member benefits that we just talked about. And there’s one actually in the in the QA box that I wanted to start with, because I thought this was just fantastic. The question was, to what extent does NCRC promote the research publications and advocacy efforts of members? For example, my organization regularly publishes original research and blogs. How does NCRC highlight that work, promote that work and bring attention to the advocacy efforts of membership organizations? I love this question, can we? Can I hire you to promote this? We have a form that can be found on the membership hub that day, and we’ll talk through it a little bit. It’s called Field Notes, and we are constantly looking for our members to share back with us what they’re doing that we can then amplify through our blog post, through our social media. So that field notes form, we’ll post it in the chat here, but that’s the best way to tell us that you’ve got something that you really you think that the rest of your peers would be really interested in. I frequently say that the real benefit of being a member of NCRC is not actually what we staff provide, but it’s the it’s the membership itself. And so when y’all are willing to tell us what great work you’re doing you’re actually providing a real value and benefit to your fellow NCRC members. So please do that. We’d love to amplify that work, and we would also love to be able to let your fellow members know about that work. I am checking I am going to ask that questions go in the QA box or in the chat so that we can make sure that we get to those. I did also want to highlight we answered this in the chat, but just to make sure that folks saw it, Sandy asked about the geography for the Field Empowerment Fund. We actually are opening that up. There is a list of priority geographies, but there is limited, limited funding now available for organizations outside of that target geography. And those geographies may shift a little bit and are not consistent from one funding opportunity to the other, so that’s something to pay attention to. When you see those opportunities as different funding opportunities have different restrictions on them. Let’s see. I’m waiting to see if I see any other questions about either the health equity work, the Community Impact funding opportunities, or any of those benefits that I highlighted earlier around research, policy advocacy, the events that we hold, or the training academy. Feel free to keep thinking about them. We’ll have more time for questions at the end, but I think in the interest of time, I’m going to go ahead and move us to Diane to walk us through eligibility and how to join.

Ashong 27:20
Okay, thank you, Caitie, so bear with me. I’m going to share my screen. Okay, okay, so we are here at the NCRC membership page to become a member, especially in organizational membership, click on join today. And just as a reminder, when you’re on the main page of NCRC, there is a membership button which will take you to this membership page. So just look up at at the top of the main page of NCRC, and it’ll take you to the main page of the membership. So to become a member and to see the eligibility, just click on join today, and we have three categories for organizational member. For instance, we have a nonprofit category with three levels, and dues are based upon your organization’s budget. So we have a small option which is 170, $5 per year, a medium option which is three, $50 per year, and a large option which is $900 per year. So take a look at that. If you qualify for the nonprofit category, if you are a government entity, we also have a government category that has two options, a local which is $900 per year, and a state option, which is $1,500 per year. And then lastly, we have a education category for any educational institutions like universities, your dues rate will be $900 per year. And I did also want to highlight, as you scroll further down on the membership page, a frequently asked questions. So please check that out. These questions may answer some of the things you’re wondering about. For instance, eligibility, payments. How do I pay if I sign up adding team members to your due subscription with us? So check that out first. If you can’t find any answers to any of your questions or concerns, you can always email us at membership@ncrc.org Okay, so if you do not qualify for the organizational membership, we also have a individual membership option, and this is located at the top of the page of the member. Page, and individual membership is called just economy club members. So you’ll click here on the just economy and it will take you to the individual membership page one second, all right. So as an individual member, you have three options. You can be a monthly member, a yearly member, or a one-time member, and each of these options have varying amounts, so see what works for you, and figure out if you want to be a monthly member, if it’s an easier, you know, contribution that way, or yearly member, or one-time member, all right, so that’s how to join as an individual member or organizational member. I actually want to pivot towards something that we have just for members only. It’s a called the member hub, and ultimately you get to this page. Let me revert back to the membership page. Is again, up at top, there’s a member login that you will click, sign in with your email and password, and then it will then take you to the member hub, which is just for our members only. And what the member hub is a portal where, for instance, you can update your information, your email, your organizational organizations, address things like that. Check out also, you know your current subscriptions, download invoices, things like that. And as you scroll further down, we have a compilation of what’s new at NCRC, different articles. You know, any new work that we’re doing, it’s all in one area within this portal. Before I move further down the page, I will show you where to update information that I have just mentioned. So you’ll click on Account, and it will take you to a view where you’ll see your different subscriptions. So right here under account, you’ll see your name, preferences, mailing address. This is where you can update that type of information. On the left-hand side, there’s also subscriptions. You can see what’s active in your due subscriptions with us, as well as within the order section, you can download invoices or view the invoice to there’s also a add a credit card portion, where, for instance, you want to switch the credit card tied to the membership and update the information or that credit card was expired. This is where you’re able to provide the new numbers and things like that. So go back to the member hub, and I will show you a couple more functions of this portal. I think many of you would be interested once you become a member. So as you scroll down further, and I know this was referenced in a couple of mentions from Devin, from Laura and from Katie, but we have a research section, as you can see, this is a compilation of any member tools they released or reports. You can also reach out to them through this link here to request any customized reports or data visualizations only. And as we scroll further, we also have a section for events and learning. There are some upcoming events. Feel free to check out the calendar here and some summaries and videos of those events and webinars. And as you scroll further down, and I really want to highlight this portion of the portal is our Field Notes section. What this is, is we want to hear from you as members, what are you doing? What upcoming programs, we want to showcase your contributions and successes within the work that you do. So if you want to share those stories and share those updates and projects and campaigns, you’ll click here, submit here on this button, this will take you to the form to provide that information of the successes that you want to share, and we’ll promote that within our social media communications that will be seen from other industry partners. So definitely check out that Field Notes section and submit your information within this form to share your story of what the work. That you’re doing and what you want to highlight. And I know we’ll drop in the chat the link of this field notes form as well. And the last bit, as you go further down to the page, we have a few more sections of for instance, on our reader. That’s a compilation of different newsworthy articles within our industry, as well as press releases and in the news of what NCRC is doing. So these items in the news and press releases are some official documents of artwork, all right. And so that’s it for how to sign up. How, if you’re eligible for organizational membership or individual membership, and a little bit more about the member hub, which is just for members, and that ultimately is a portal where you could see all the different benefits any upcoming work that N series is doing, or upcoming events, as well as submit any highlights and success stories that you want to showcase in your work. Alright, I will turn it over now to Caitie.

Rountree: 36:15
Sure and thanks, Diane, I’ve seen a number of questions come through, so we’re going to spend a little bit of time on that before we wrap up here. But I saw a couple of questions about individual membership, and so just wanted to talk a little bit about how we approach that, and how to know whether organizational membership is right for you or individual membership. If you are an organizational member, you have all the benefits that an individual member would have. So that probably is the right choice for you. If your individual members get the same level of access to most of the data benefits, the research benefits that we provide, they also do get a discount to events. It’s not quite as steep as the organizational discount. There are some ways that organizational members are served slightly differently for funding opportunities. For the most part, you need to be an organizational member to be able to access those. And there are some advocacy campaigns that are geared towards individual members. On occasion, we’ll have something where individuals can sign as well. But a lot of that work is is geared around organizational members. With that said, individual membership, there’s a very wide it’s kind of choose your choose your level in terms of payment. It’s a great way to stay connected. A lot of times, we see folks where their organization isn’t ready to join as a member yet, or they’ve, they used to be at a member organization. They’ve moved, or just their their their vocational institution isn’t member-eligible, and they still want to be connected to this work. And so those are the folks that we tend to see join as individuals. So I hope that’s helpful. You know, happy to take some follow-up questions on that. There was a data question, which I’ll confess, I had to double-check with our research team, and they’re so responsive that I got an answer before it was time for me to answer that question live. So the question was whether NCRC is able to share data from private entities like Zillow or ATTOM, which might be pronounced Atom, but I’m not a data person, so I’m not going to try to remember so they don’t have to incur the cost of trying to acquire that data. And just want to be transparent about the fact that a lot of those platforms have restrictions that preclude us from being able to share the data we do use we, the data that we use and share with members is usually available without you know, our the data that we share is not paywalled. And then we’re in large part, trying to help sort and sift. If anybody has looked at Raw Honda data, it is not user-friendly, and so we’re really focused on using developing tools and analysis that makes sense of publicly available data that frequently is just not very user-friendly. And then I’m actually going to turn it over to Laura to talk a little bit more about our housing counseling network and how that works with NCRC. So Laura, let me hand that question over to you.

Bentley 39:49
Thanks, Caitie, let me just see here. Ah, yes, okay, so regarding the housing counseling network, so the question is, how. Does the kind of application work and how does the funding support the housing counseling network? So in that regard, we do apply directly to both private sources of funding as well as to federal sources of funding, like to HUD. So we apply every year for funding on behalf of our housing counseling network, and then that funding we receive kind of the entire source of funding for the network, and then we sub grant that to our network members, so they really only have to interface with us, and we provide them support in that reporting. But yes, we do apply directly to kind of those main sources of funding on behalf of our members. I believe that answered the Q and A, but feel free as well to kind of send me follow-up questions that didn’t clarify it.

Rountree 40:51
Thanks, Laura, that was really helpful. Um, yep, and I am just checking we have just a couple more minutes, um, for one or two additional questions. So we’ll give a minute for that before we wrap up and close. And just to reiterate, because I did see this question again, we will share the recording as well as the slides and resources. And Laura, this looks like another question related to HCN. If I can ask you to answer Sandy’s question, and I believe I know the answer, but I’ll let you answer it.

Bentley 41:42
So I would say maybe Sandy, it’s worth connecting with us offline as well, because I might be a little confused on your question. But essentially, if you are part of the housing counseling network, you also have to be to get HUD funding. You would need to be a HUD approved agency as well, and certainly NCRC can kind of support with for example, our National Training Academy has training assistance on how counselors can be approved by HUD. So in terms of getting HUD funding through NCRC as an intermediary, the agency does also need to be HUD-approved. In terms of additional source of funding, HCN also does, as I mentioned, apply for private sources of funding, but we distribute that to our HCN members. So if you’re a housing counseling agency looking to get funding for your housing counseling services through HCN, you would need to be a part of our housing counseling network, the other programs that I mentioned, like the field Empowerment Fund and the fellowship, those are available to all members of NCRC, whether or not they’re part of the smaller housing counseling network. But I can mention, as well, the Community Impact email, if there’s further questions, we could get on a call and discuss that.

Rountree 43:06
And I see a question actually, about how to add context to your NCRC account, which is a great one of the nice things about having an organizational membership is that you can have multiple staff members engaging with those member benefits. So Diane, why don’t I pass that one over to you to walk through just really quickly how to do that?

Ashong 43:31
Sure thing. The best bet would be email us at membership@ncrc.org so we can see how many you want to to add. But for if you want to do it on your own, give me one moment, and I will share my screen so it will basically be through your member portal and under you remember under quickly, it will be, let’s go To the top, under your account. Click on under Account subscriptions within your NCRC membership team, and that’s where you can add your team, your additional teammates, or change out old members to be removed, as well as add new members. If you’re running into issues like I said, feel free to email us at membership@ncrc.org and we can do that for you, especially if it’s a bulk update of different contacts, people who may have left or joined. We can do that. Okay.

Rountree 45:02
All right, awesome. And speaking of that, membership@ncrc.org email address, if there are other questions that you think of after this or that we didn’t get to today, that is a great first stop, and we will be happy to schedule time to talk through any questions as well. We also have, as we move towards wrapping up here, we have a survey that we’d love for you to fill out. We do these types of webinars with some regularity, and we’re always working to figure out how to make them clearer and more helpful. We’d really love to have your feedback on that so that we can continue to improve. And that’s really, that’s kind of it for today. I do want to say just one last word from me. You know, we’ve talked a lot about different really kind of tangible benefits that are part of being an NCRC member. But I do really want to remind us all that beyond getting access to cool data or being able to pick Devon’s brain about health equity work or getting funding for your organization, really membership with NCRC is an invitation to join over 700 other organizations in a bigger movement. It takes all of us to bring together a coalition to bridge America’s historic racial and socioeconomic wealth, income and opportunity divides, and we really need you to be a part of that movement. And you need all of us. We’re really, really grateful for the work and the energy that our members do, and we really do encourage you to to join us. And for those of you that are members, use it leverage, leverage us. Leverage these benefits and stand with us as as we’re working together. Yeah, so that’s our final call. Thank you again for joining us today, and we’ll be in touch soon, and again, we will share the recording in the slides. Thanks so much. Have a good one you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai