Community Development Innovation Review

The truth is that banks and other financial service providers haven’t done nearly enough to help the poor. The good news is that this is beginning to change—and we have the world’s mobile network operators to thank.

Populist ire that arose from the credit crunch is being directed at banks from all corners of the globe, triggering a series of new laws and schemas, whose combined effect will be to impose on banks greater government control over their economics (more regulation on safety and soundness) and greater government interest in their social outcomes (inclusive banking).

When I speak of a Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for Latin America, I mean a mechanism that monitors and makes bank activities public.

The Xi’an branch of the People’s Bank of China reached out to the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and San Francisco to learn more and engage in a dialogue about how CRA might be applied in China. The discussion was a study in contrast, but also uncovered some surprising areas of commonality.

Low-income people in the U.S. and abroad face similar challenges: access to credit, housing, jobs, and critical services including health and education. And yet today, those who work on international economic development and community development hardly know each other. This issue of the Review is dedicated to a simple idea: innovative ideas to solve poverty should not stop at the national border. There are too many good ideas abroad that can help inform our practices domestically, and good ideas here that can be relevant to other countries.

The measurement of nonfinancial performance is becoming increasingly important in the community impact investing industry, where individuals and institutions actively deploy capital in low-income domestic markets for both financial and social returns.

In the community development finance and impact investing worlds, there is both universal agreement for the need for better social outcome measurements and no consensus on how to do it. This issue of the Review is an attempt to gather in one place what we know, what we think the state of the art is, and how we might contribute to an ongoing process to establish a tool—or many tools—that help us measure the social benefit of impact and community investing.

In this issue of the Review, we explore the intersection of community development and health. Specifically, authors offer varying perspectives on how to “bend the health cost curve” using innovative community development strategies and how to positively affect social determinants of health to generate better health outcomes for low-income people.

In this issue of the Review, we explore how both business enterprises and investment decisions can be infused with community goals—providing for those who are less capable of providing for themselves, promoting better health and stronger community fabric, and respecting the environment.

My views about the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) surely differ from those of many of the other individuals who will contribute to this volume. I believe that, despite the good intentions and worthwhile goals of the CRA’s advocates, the CRA is an inappropriate instrument for achieving those goals.