Good morning!

Did any of these (voting devices) go home last night? If you have one can you please give them back to Carolyn?

We wanted to have a little conversation about what happened yesterday. If you weren't here yesterday we used these devices to vote on about 25 different questions which provided real time feedback.

What was your experience using these voting tools? It's nice to know who is in the room and what they were thinking. I would love to have a staff meeting and be able to ask questions and get real time feedback.

Were you mostly seeing what you expected? There were a handful of surprises.

One of the surprises was the addition of administration (in addition to fund raising) as an obstacle. The fact that both fund raising and administration came up so highly was surprising. I would have expected maybe infrastructure and technology to come up but I didn't expect administration.

Any other discoveries during the voting process?

What about the day as a whole? Did you hear things that were interesting to you? I know that if we were invited here to talk to each other and it seems there is a lot of things to share. It's great to be invited together to hang out and talk.

I was quite struck by the creativity of what the speakers had done and how they had been so innovative.

I would have liked to see more examples of CDFI collaboration. They were interesting examples but it might have been more interesting to me if they were specific to CDFIs.

It was by design but it was also because we didn't have a lot of models of collaboration going on in CDFI world.

One of the things that surprised me was how much is going on collaboratively. That shifted the focus for me. This meeting is more about how we are going to collaborate and how we can be creative and get the most out of what we do - and not just about getting us ready to collaborate.

How many of you are a CDFI and are involved in collaboration? A number of hands went up.

There is a difference between cooperation and collaboration. Many agencies cooperate with each other but collaboration with each other is more formal. With collaborations maybe there is a letter of understanding and there might even be budgets involved.

The first panel was an attempt to show the full spectrum of collaboration. There was a range and one of the models presented was actually a cooperative legally.

We're a CDFI. There is a lot more experience with developers putting partnerships together. We're working to do more business collaboration. Their representation to me is that there isn't that much collaboration taking place.

There are more structured and formalized partnering taking place then we realized. It looks like the people in the room today are the people doing it.

We're evolving how we think about what we are going to do today based on what we're hearing.

In the voting yesterday, one of the biggest groups in the room was the 'other'. Certain themes also came up yesterday. The idea is to go into breakouts and discuss more intimately about collaboration - and we're thinking about organizing the small groups by the type of collaboration you are wanting to explore. Does that seem like a good idea?

The suggestion doesn't speak to the fact that we're already in a collaboration and wanting to move it forward to the next step.

At the risk of boring the folks who are experts in CDFI, what is it about CDFIs that you feel would be better if we collaborate? And how does that relate to the goal of this meeting?

CDFI stands for Community Development Financial Institution. We're actually talking a bit broadly and we're talking about entities that lend and invest in communities that aren't served by other financial institutions.

Our research into scaling models lead us to the idea of collaborative structures. Many of the things we learned in our research are relevant to organizations beyond CDFI's (childcare and charter schools, as an example).

The urgency started with the lowering of resources and the business model we have is very subsidy driven. We're in an era where the subsidies are going away. The interesting thing is there are other opportunities to affect mission and impact through collaboration and not just fund raising needs.

I wasn't here yesterday and we're working to set up a housing cooperative and I'm interested in that specific focus.

This is intriguing - when you start talking about collaboration and people have a specific target area and they are trying to do specific investment and it crosses over into other areas - how do you get around these legal restrictions based on these contracts?

Many CDFIs started lending in one type of product area. In order to survive they are having to broaden their products to other areas.

In the area of housing and social services the collaborations have been decisions by government to force collaboration so the government can work with one group instead of many. So these collaborations are mandated.

What if we add a fourth group focused on CDFIs?

We are going to break out into groups and spend about an hour and twenty minutes then come back to the large group and report out what you did. How many people will be in the CDFI group? 9 or 10 Housing? 17 or so. Small business (about 10); social services (about 10).

Each group will report out at the end. This will be self-organized. Get into your group areas and share what kind of collaboration you would be looking for and what you might bring to a collaboration. Then break into sub-groups of like interests.