Overview
 

This conference is cosponsored by the Federal Reserve System and the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program, and is the second in a series of seven to be held at various Reserve Banks and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors over the next two years.

The basis of the conference series is a paper by the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program published by the Chicago Fed’s Consumer and Community Affairs division in December 2004 in its periodical, Profitwise News and Views. “New Pathways to Scale for Community Development Finance” summarizes ten case studies, primarily private sector examples, of successful attempts to broaden the impact and market reach of an assortment of products, services, and organizations.

The goals of the conference are to:

  • Introduce a new framework for scale and sustainability for the community development finance field;
  • Explore new business models and practices with potential for promoting scale and sustainability in the field;
  • Provide a forum where bankers, community economic development professionals, foundation representatives and other funders, and those involved in related public policy areas can share ideas about the future of the CDFI/community development industry;
  • Encourage future dialogue and action on the industry and industry practices, and the development of techniques to measure the impact of new or modified organizational and industry practices.
  
 

Real Time Record
This web site is a record of the event at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, Massachusetts as it happened - captured in real time and presented here in this web site. The documentation of the session includes text and images that were captured throughout the course of each day of the session and is chronological (in the order that things happened). The text is not a transcription of the event. Rather, it represents the documentor's synthesis of the team reports and group discussions.

This record is intended as a reminder to the participants of the conversations that took place during the summit, as a stimulus for further conversation and it serves as an artifact of the group's work.

For anyone who was not present at the event reading this, you may lose some of the energy and creativity the participants expressed - and some of the ideas may not translate completely without that context. If you have any questions about the content or anything that is represented here please speak to someone that participated in the process or Langdon Morris at InnovationLabs.

Images
Photographs of participants and the scribing are included throughout the Real Time Record. To view a larger version of a board, click on the thumbnail image. The larger image will open in a new window.

 

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