You sort of never know what comes out of these things. This is different from what we have been doing. This was the first regional meeting we've had. I'm excited about this.

I'd like to invite you to the web site. The web site will be available at http://www.aspenscale.org

You will find there what you have talked about these last few days. This is organized chronologically. You will also find the other conference information there. The powerpoints will be there. There is a pretty complete record there.

Thank You.

Comments

All of the things that have been identified here are appropriate for our organization (TACDC). We have a certain capacity and none of these things are budgeted but we need some cooperation and assistance of the people that are interested.

One thought I had is, Mark is going to have the head of the Federal Reserve speak and the Community Reinvestment Act needs some regeneration. One of the issues we have is the savings rate. Why can't we have an initiative to reward asset building organizations? To create a new movement around a defined need around building assets - home ownership or new businesses.

Some of us had dinner with Wachovia and they have committed $10,000 to research the branding issue. We are looking at generating something by January and putting together a web site. We will be researching television broadcasting.

The web site - aspenscale.org - has all the events and the presentations from each event.

We are really fortunate to have the inventor of these events with us.

Chicago Fed
There are a lot of interesting ideas that have come out of all five sessions. There are a lot of things that need to be done. We are planning on having a meeting in 2007 and thinking about national platforms and building critical mass. How many people are really using this model? Where do we miss the mark? Others are jumping on this but the CDFIs aren't. We want to remain relevant. We have to come up with ideas, implement them, come up with new strategies, and some organizations aren't large enough to take advantage of these things.

How do we get the right people in the room to make these changes? The next step at the Fed is to work with Kirsten and Greg and say what we really want to see happen strategically. We need to leverage the web site and brand and market. This is a work in process and make things move.

There are some spin offs that have come from this work.

Mike Berry
This conference series wanted to open the topic. This initial set of conferences got us moving. As we sit down to make things happen we need to get the right people at the table and the conferences moving forward will be more specific and topical. Affecting policy and industry structure is the next phase.

Comment - I'm feeling the duality of some of this. Having the right people in the room sounds good for some things but this session had such a wide variation and that was helpful for me to see the width of what everyone is doing. It is important to have the right people at the table but we also need to get the information to all levels.

Comment - these conferences have been great. If you asked me a year ago if we could make this an industry I would have said maybe. Now I look and I would say its happening. The focus of our conference is to bring the people together that are doing things. New things will be in place in two years. A lesson we are trying to learn is how to work in a hall of windows instead of mirrors. The things we are talking about are great and there are people doing some of these things and we need to link up with them.

Maybe we need to get the marketing people from all these different organizations together to talk? Let's figure out how to leverage what we have done already.

Alfreda
We will make an effort to communicate through our publications and we need to get people talking about going to scale and there are new things we have to do and share. We will have a follow up meeting in April and we will try to get the policy part going.

In our region we will continue on these two tracks. We'll keep talking and you will keep researching.

Kirsten - we are launching the scale institute to help this movement go further.

Alfreda - I hope you were encouraged and inspired. I am excited because we have great representation from different organizations. Thank you all for contributing to the discussion and thank you for coming. Don't forget to fill out your evaluation forms.