News

We at Reinvestment Fund mourn the death of the indomitable Justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who made it her life’s work to dismantle and eradicate the practice of systematic discrimination against women, Black and brown people, and LGBTQ people. Her passing threatens many hard-won civil liberties, for which we all must persevere to fully secure. The ‘Notorious RBG’ stood her ground. Like her, we must not weaken in our resolve to achieve racial, gender, and economic justice for all Americans. Read our full statement.

With elections just weeks away, we are also carefully monitoring the policy landscape and its impacts on communities and the pursuit of equity for all. In many Black communities, a legacy of systemic racism persists, making it too hard for people to own a home, start a business, and build long-term wealth. Moreover, the current pandemic has shown all too clearly the life and death consequences of this historical disparity, with Black and Latinx communities suffering the biggest share of COVID-19 cases and deaths, as well as wage reductions and job losses.

Reinvestment Fund has been awarded the prestigious 2020 Knowledge Challenge grant by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The award is one of 13 announced last week and will support work in partnership with the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) of Saint Paul, Minnesota and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania.

“We are grateful to the Kauffman Foundation for this award and are honored to be in the company of our fellow awardees who represent some of the best entrepreneurship researchers in the nation,” said Don Hinkle-Brown, President and CEO of Reinvestment Fund. “Together with our partners NDC and the University of Pennsylvania, we look forward to better understanding the connections between thriving local entrepreneurship and social well-being.”

Reinvestment Fund today announced the inaugural Nowak Fellow, Marci Monaco-Vavrik, a recent Temple University graduate. The Nowak Fellowship is one of three new initiatives Reinvestment Fund launched in memory of its founding Executive Director, Jeremy Nowak. The Nowak Fellowship, housed at Reinvestment Fund, was established to support a pre-graduate school fellow considering a future career aligned with community economic development.

“Jeremy had a deep appreciation for combining the richness and rigor of academia with an orientation of tangible accomplishment,” shared Don Hinkle-Brown, President and CEO of Reinvestment Fund. “With this fellowship in his memory, we are delighted to be able to give a student the opportunity to gain some real-life experience in their chosen field as part of their professional growth.”

The fulltime Fellow will work within Reinvestment Fund’s Policy Solutions team and work closely with staff to explore the many areas where policymakers, practitioners and investors intersect and inform one another. During this time, the Fellow gains a set of skills, insights, experiences and accomplishments that will provide greater clarity and certainty on how she will take her next step in professional life.

We at Reinvestment Fund mourn the death of the indomitable Justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who made it her life’s work to dismantle and eradicate the practice of systematic discrimination against women, Black and brown people, and LGBTQ people. Never serving on a majority liberal bench, she is best known for her fierce dissenting opinions, as well as her persistence, tireless work, principles of equality and dedication to the Constitution. Her passing threatens many of the hard-fought civil liberties, and for which we all must persevere to fully secure. The ‘Notorious RBG’ stood her ground. Like her, we must not weaken in our resolve to achieve racial, gender and economic justice for all Americans.

In recent years, community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and similar mission-oriented financial services organizations have begun to elevate the importance of explicitly addressing racial equity in lending, investing, and operational practices. While this goal remains urgent, it is also a challenge to determine precisely how to incorporate or operationalize racial equity into our varied work. How do CDFIs incorporate an explicit racial equity perspective into their lending? What work do we need to do as institutions and individuals to genuinely build that racial equity perspective? And how might we collaborate across our industry to successfully achieve that goal?

41 organizations receive support as Fund responds to community needs

Reinvestment Fund today announced $700,425 in emergency meal grant awards under the New Jersey Child Nutrition Fund (NJCNF) program to 41 organizations that are helping to make sure children and families get healthy food to eat at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted normal channels.

The program targeted participants in the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) who have been working to ensure the continuity of meal services through the pandemic-related disruptions.

Reinvestment Fund received a $60 million New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocation award as part of the 2019 round of the NMTC Program awards announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s CDFI Fund. Reinvestment Fund is among 76 awardees who received a total of $3.5 billion in awards this round.

Reinvestment Fund, the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families, Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC), and United Way are conducting a city-wide survey to understand childcare needs as people head back to work and school. Parents and guardians can participate on the online survey anonymously to share their needs and concerns around care for children ages 0 to 5 in their household.

All families who use or plan to use childcare in Philadelphia are encouraged to take the survey, which is accessible at www.reinvestment.com/phlchildcarereopensurvey. The survey will be open for the next two weeks and is available in eight languages. In addition to English, families can access the survey in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Russian, Arabic and French.

Reinvestment Fund today announced the launch of the Building Healthier, More Equitable Communities (BHEC) initiative in New Jersey. BHEC aims to address the barriers to better health through changes to the built environment and community investment system. The initiative will work with four cities selected through an application process, to advance community development priorities and further their plans for an equitable recovery from the current health and economic crisis. BHEC was created with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“From safe housing to access to healthcare, the COVID-19 crisis has amplified the challenges that communities face when it comes to health and well-being,” said Amanda High, Chief of Strategic Initiatives at Reinvestment Fund. “With access to resources and a peer learning exchange through BHEC, selected cities will receive a variety of supports to work with local communities to spur equitable recovery through development.”

Pain, frustration, disbelief, anxiety, exhaustion, fear, anger—each of us has likely experienced some of these emotions and then some as we have witnessed the events unfolding across our country. Those of us who work for social justice have believed we were rolling the boulder up the mountain, only to wake up and find so little discernible forward progress. We despair, we repair, then it happens again.

We mourn for Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and the countless others that came before them. We are outraged by the violent response to peaceful protesters in our cities. As American myths are ripped away the darker reality of long-standing racial oppression, disregard for black lives, and the well documented consequences of militarizing police forces are revealed for all to see.

For too long, we have seen the long shadow of our nation’s racist legacies perpetuate an unequal America. We see it every day in our work to counter the effects of redlining, segregation and discrimination.

At Reinvestment Fund, we know that we must do more. It’s not enough to call out the systemic racism evident in policing or healthcare or politics. It’s not enough to lament the injustice.