Langdon Morris and Kirsten Moy

Good morning everyone. Remember us? What we are going to do this morning is work through a conversation about ideas and themes you are interested in working on this morning and then you will work in small groups and then come back into this large group and report out.

We'll see if we can identify some specific ideas you can work on.

Are there any good ideas and themes from yesterday? What was your experience of yesterday? Was there anything that surprised you?

I made contact with one of the presenters that should help us raise some capital to do some development work. That was a goldmine for me.

I liked the business model discussion, the graphs, the sad stories but it seems to be more then a nudge to think about ourselves as a business.

There was a credit union that partnered with check cashers and they said that there was an issue about size. Government agencies might begin looking at the wrong numbers and we're afraid of that. When there were announcements at the Gates Foundation for new employees they were looking for operations people that had 6 Sigma experience. Expect a business like approach from these larger Foundations.

Its not just business. Remember WiiFM (What's in it for Me?)?

We haven't looked at local government as an opportunity. What about bond issues? I'm working in a community where land has been donated to a CDC and they are turning around and selling it to a developer to sustain themselves. Looking at different financing vehicles.

Tax increment bonds are paid for by the property taxes in a community.

General revenue bonds are paid for by the general revenue of a city and I'm talking about using the general revenue bonds to help fund something.

There was a housing coalition that was started and there is a much bigger bond issue going out. There is an infrastructure piece and an arts piece, etc.

That's an opportunity that might be available in Austin but you might not find that opportunity in smaller communities.

There was a lot more support for it among a broader political spectrum - people see stable housing as a necessity.

I was struck by the prospect of the collaboration panel using an old system of cooperatives for community development. When people started putting cooperatives together they were put together as a survival strategy so that smaller businesses could survive in the face of larger competitors. There are comparisons to CDCs and we haven't looked very strongly at cooperatives. Setting up cooperatives that we might not be able to do that well because of economies of scale could be interesting. The farm credit system is a cooperative. As long as you are borrowing money you have money deposited in the form of stock.

Congress has not seen the need to authorize a bank for community development. Maybe we need to look at working with the cooperative banks - the Bank for Cooperatives and the National Cooperative Bank?

Coops are old and we've seen them as a social movement as opposed to an economic movement.

CDFI Fund and how much it is being funded for - what political support does our industry have? Where is it that we are making contact? It has become more of a numbers game. There isn't an elected official that doesn't have a community in their district that doesn't have an economic need. They won't ever zero it out but it will never get the upswing until we change the language and the things we're talking about here.

What was interesting about the keynote was when he said we don't prepare for success. What happens after we get started?

I was just going to say with political support that it is important and we need to learn how to use opportunities to get the congress person there at any chance we can.

It would be interesting to figure out who is here. The organizations that did the insurance - they were all high producers with reputations and they all had a similar problem. One of the challenges we are going to have is that many of us do different things. Its hard for me to see something that we can do together unless we figure out the common issues and what we all need. We don't want to get something started here that we can't continue.

I'm surprised there wasn't much talk about new markets tax credits. This is going to be authorized again. Everyone loves tax credits. How can we get a piece of the action if it does happen? How can we become players in the process. New markets tax credit has created a lot of opportunities for a CDFI in California. Is the CDFI industry already the gate keeper for the new markets tax credit?

25% of the money goes to CDFIs but the rest of the money goes other places.

I would like to transition now to the way we are going to work today. I'd like you to talk to your neighbor about the things you are most interested in working on today.

Please bring your conversation to a close. What are you interested in working on for the rest of the morning? Just to recap, these were the two theme areas that were suggested yesterday.

Cooperative Bank for CDCs

The whole room thought their business model could go to scale and what could we watch for in our business models that we can keep an idea on that would tell us we have to change.

Looking at specific private sector industries and doing some campaigns (branding) with them. Explaining some things we could do - messaging for specific sectors. A lot of the funding comes because of priorities.

The large corporate model for change but if you look at the private sector model and the way foundations are approaching funding they are doing that like venture capital companies and they don't have an angel investor wing and that is how most of the jobs are created - because someone is going in at the beginning.

Foundations have got to change their model to get innovation and change in community development. We haven't collaborated politically to get our share of the pie from bonds. What are the options with bonds? How do we cooperate to leverage that money - this is local money.

On the fund raising side there is need for CDFIs to create the business models that create these major capital campaigns. There are processes that are already created but we can explore these other models. How can we use some of these fund raising tools?

Awareness and branding can be added to collaborative ventures.

How do we all fit together? What is the common thread? What we do in this is a continuum with each of us doing a piece moving towards a particular result. There are more then one outcome.

What is the continuum of what we do? How do we relate to each other?

What criteria do you use to select your collaborative patterns? What do you do about the fallout?

We have an organization that is underutilized. Everyone can be a member in TACDC. What does TACDC have the power to facilitate for us? What about the insurance issue and the retirement issue?

Money goes where management is. Money wants management. Are we growing our management? Can we attract management from other sources? There are a whole cadre of managers (baby boomers) and how can we attract some of them? Its not necessarily how we can find them but how can we tear them away from what they are doing?

We're not doing enough management training for executive directors. Unless you have been in the private sector you are missing some of that experience. Enterprise overs a piece of it but we need to notch it up another notch.

There are a lot of trade organizations that provide that kind of training already.

From where I come in I'm familiar with a group of people that are unemployed (in Utah). We have to create a new image to attract the talent.

There is not going to be enough resources for every organization to have a staff of 25 and it will be hard to bring professionals to rural Texas - so we might need to think about how we can serve these rural areas in different ways. How can we partner and share resources to provide services to places like Lubbock?

Two words are not used here - public relations (we don't talk about it and we don't do it); we're missing that opportunity.

InnovationLabs does a lot of facilitation of groups. One of the things we have found is an effective group size is 5 to 8 people. Pick the one that you are most interested in working on for the next hour.

Can you consolidate them?

What would be most helpful to you going forward would be to spend some time on each of these:

• Description
• Goal
• Action
• Next Steps
• Participants