Amara Omeokwe
speaker
439 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2020
last heard Dec 2023
Amara Omeokwe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It runs a credit union and a nonprofit loan fund, both of which are CDFIs.
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It recently received a $10 million deposit from Netflix.
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And that was the first time that Netflix has ever sort of gotten involved with CDFIs.
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Google also launched a $125 million fund for the CDFI industry.
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And one thing that the...
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The chief executive of Hope told me was that the Netflix investment was valuable, but what was even more valuable was the interest that he's seen from others since Netflix made its announcement.
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So he's gotten several additional monetary commitments from other individuals and corporations since Netflix made its investment in Hope.
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Well, that's something that remains to be seen.
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A lot of the people I talked to for my story said they're certainly hopeful, but they have skepticism as well.
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Bill Bynum, who is the CEO of Hope, as I mentioned, he was talking about how the CDFI industry has previously received spurts of attention when there were previous crises that laid bare some of these racial and geographic inequalities that we've been talking about.
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For instance, with Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
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But he said hopefully this time the momentum is sustained.
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So one thing I heard throughout my reporting on this is that the CDFI Fund, which is, again, under the Treasury Department, demand for grants and support through the CDFI Fund typically far exceed the congressional appropriations that that fund gets every year.
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So a lot of people said, you know, this is just an industry that needs more capital.
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It needs more support.
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Several members of Congress have put forth proposals to shore up the CDFI industry amid the pandemic, but there is a stalemate in Washington over what additional coronavirus aid should look like.
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So it's unclear whether Congress will actually be giving CDFIs more support as they did earlier in the pandemic.
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One thing that happened because CDFIs got so involved with the Paycheck Protection Program is that a lot of them had to sort of upgrade their technological capacity to process a high volume of loans.
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to accept applications online, for instance.
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And so I heard that CDFIs need more of that technological development if they're going to sort of broaden their reach and expand their capacity to serve underserved communities.
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Showing 281–300 of 439 · page 15 of 22
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