Fewer Illinois residents using payday lenders after state capped interest rates

The Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union provides small business loans to local Black and Brown businesses, through average investments of $24,000. This small, community lender provides more funding to local businesses than larger national banks like Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, helping support local businesses and finance community development.

A collaborative funding organization called the Runway Project gives loans to primarily Black entrepreneurs in the Oakland area. The initiative aims to address racial disparities in startup capital by reducing the financial risk of starting a business. The program also includes personalized support as a "wrap around" approach to the lending process.

The SAB Foundation is an independent trust set up by South African Breweries (SAB) as part of the government’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment scheme. It helps businesses — particularly underserved entrepreneurs like women and people with disabilities — grow and thrive. Since 2010, the Foundation has backed more than 6,400 social impact businesses in their early stages.

Despite soaring housing costs, the city government in Paris aims to achieve mixité sociale. That essentially means it's preventing economic segregation to ensure residents from a broad cross-section of society reside in the city and own businesses there. It’s doing so by nabbing real estate to create public housing and providing real estate subsidiaries for small businesses.

Generating Income For Tomorrow, or GIFT, works to foster economic prosperity and wealth in Kansas City’s Black community by providing grants to Black-owned businesses. Since its launch, GIFT has distributed $687,000 to 42 Black businesses and GIFT recipients have so far created more than 60 new jobs.

The Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund is helping Black farmers buy land. More than $200,000 have gone toward urban land purchases in a practice some see as “restorative economics." Black land activists are also purchasing land in rural communities across the United States.

Black banks have been held up by leaders and celebrities in the community as a way to end Black poverty. Previous efforts have been made in the 1960s when Black banks gave loans to community members after being denied home loans from white banks. But those loans lost money when housing values declined as a result of redlining policies that damaged public schools. Black banking therefore was not the answer to ending Black poverty and bridging the gap between white and black wealth. One law professor believes the answer lies in public banking which is funded by tax revenue and acts as a public utility.

An American nonprofit called the Community Reinvestment Fund expands access to small business loans by partnering with almost two dozen groups across the country to set up and scale up their community development lending. Founded in 1988, the group essentially takes on the risk of a SBA license so that others could benefit from their license. They created an online platform called Spark that redesigned the user interface of the existing loan processor platform to better facilitate the exchange of money. They have now supported loans for 1,000 communities across 49 states.

CNote has provided a source of funding for federally certified Community Development Financial Institutions by pooling cash from foundations, bigger banks, philanthropists, and donor-advised funds to counter the lack of available cash flow experienced by CDFIs, which are lenders but not banks. Federal COVID-19 funding set aside $30 billion specifically for CDFIs that overwhelmingly lend to women- and minority-owned businesses, which face persistent racial and gender biases and are unable to successfully tap into lending and grants such as the Paycheck Protection Program through traditional lenders.

Lift to Rise, a Coachella Valley nonprofit that pushes for housing and poverty policy change, launched a local lending circle program aimed at serving minority residents break the cycle of poverty. Partnered with San Francisco-based Mission Asset Fund, the lending circle helps those with poor credit or no credit at all to build up a spending history, have access to loans, create a savings account, improve their score, and more. Since 2008, Mission Asset Fund has partnered with more than 50 organizations across the U.S. to provide lending circles to more than 9,000 clients.