Community Development Finance Association Launch Event Report
Speech: Mark Pinsky, President & CEO National Community Capital Association Philadelphia, Pennsylvania U.S.A.

Comments on The Launch of the UK
Community Development Finance Association

Good morning.

I am delighted to join you for the launch of the new Community Development Finance Association. Today is a watershed day for community development finance in the United Kingdom.

The launch of CDFA means that community development finance practitioners can put 100% of their effort into their communities while the trade association strengthens and expands the infrastructure that will foster and support their successes.

It also is an important day for the U.S. community development finance industry. Today we welcome a new partner in our efforts to create inclusive prosperity worldwide. We are pleased and proud to be associated with CDFA.

I want to congratulate the many, many CDFI practitioners and partners-my friends and colleagues-who have worked for years to create CDFA. Today's launch represents thousands of hours of meetings and dreaming, of strategic planning and coalition building.

If the UK experience is anything like the US experience, that effort will prove to be time and resources well dedicated. The CDFI trade association system in the US built and sustains the foundation on which the CDFI industry has grown.

By supporting, organizing, and leveraging the expertise of individual CDFIs, a trade association can achieve things that individual CDFIs could not do separately.

The Community Development Finance Association will help the CDFI field coalesce and coordinate across the UK. It will help articulate CDFI "best practices," performance indicators, and benchmarks firmly grounded in the experiences of practitioners. It will bring a common voice on behalf of CDFIs to the expanding national debate about finance-led strategies to combat poverty, create economic opportunities, and ensure inclusion. Finally, CDFA will serve as a clearinghouse for new and experienced CDFIs seeking resources, training, technical assistance, and advocacy.

Trade associations make it easier and more efficient for innovative CDFI practitioners to learn from one another. CDFA will track, distill, and organize important developments and opportunities for learning. The upcoming Glasgow community development finance conference is proof of the power of association that CDFA represents.

This new trade association is rising to meet the over-arching challenge that every community development financing system must face-helping CDFIs be strong, effective intermediaries at the intersection of financial services and social policy. At the same time, it will bring order and structure to the development finance market, helping government, the banking sector, and development finance professionals work together effectively.

CDFIs are most effective working just outside the margins of conventional financial institutions, bringing economically disadvantaged people and communities into the economic mainstream, and vice-versa. "Just outside the margins" is where CDFIs have the most leverage. It is where they use their market expertise, financing savvy, and innovative solutions to help people help themselves.

In the UK, as in the US, CDFIs are the most recent-and in the current economic and political environments, the most promising-of a long line of poverty-alleviation and inclusion strategies. Because CDFIs are private-sector institutions that leverage mainstream resources toward public purposes, they are uniquely well-positioned to succeed.

CDFA is building a community development finance system that engages mainstream financial and government institutions, ensures a steady supply of skilled people and strong CDFIs, and gives voice to the aspirations of CDFIs and-through them-to the people and communities they serve.

The talented people involved in creating CDFA ensure that it will succeed. The strength of the CDFI network across the UK will keep CDFA agile and creative. Most important, the shared commitment to increasing the flow of capital to Britain's poorest communities promises to create economic opportunities for tens of thousands of people.

On behalf of the entire U.S. CDFI industry, I commend you for taking this important step forward. Thank you for letting us join you today to celebrate what I know we will all look back on as an historic accomplishment.

Congratulations! We are looking forward to working with you.

- End -

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