CO-CREATE: Many community development interventions never get off the ground because community-based organizations lack a long-term partner who is willing to get their hands dirty. That is why we work so intimately with our community partners to help them turn ideas into viable and financeable community development projects. This sometimes requires that we go beyond the role of a traditional lender and embed ourselves into their team and work together to co-create the projects that we all hope to see in our communities. A CDFI leader once noted that when the projects we need in the community don’t exist, we as CDFIs need to go out there and create them ourselves. We subscribe to this belief and this is why we invest so intensively in providing capacity building services to our community partners so that we can bring about the needed interventions that would otherwise not surface without our support.

INNOVATE: We are dissatisfied with the status quo. The challenges facing underserved communities are deeply entrenched and seemingly growing rather than shrinking. We believe that public and private sector partners must do everything possible to diagnose problems, be flexible in designing solutions, and recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to community investment. This is part of Genesis LA’s DNA, but the bureaucratic systems around us are increasingly becoming ossified, inflexible, and resistant to change. Even the roadway to achieving universally desired outcomes, like affordable housing, is lined with red tape as opposed to a red carpet. This is why we invest human and financial resources into fighting for new ways of going about business as usual in the community development field.

NICHE vs. SCALE: CDFIs were created to serve the segments of the market that other lenders would not touch. By definition, this is a niche role. But, like all industries, CDFIs face pressures to scale up. There are obvious benefits of scale, including the ability to serve more people. However, a typical side effect of reaching scale is the need to create greater standardization in your business model as you grow. The drawback of standardization is that many financing needs will fall outside of the “standard box”. On the path to achieving scale, CDFIs must be careful not to mutate into the financial institutions they were set up to transform. This is why we strive to serve the niche roles in community finance and to serve the borrowers that do not fit within “standard boxes”. Genesis LA will scale where appropriate to magnify impact, but we will avoid scaling up in ways that sacrifice our service to the niche needs in our community.