CEI Stories and Data

CEI Stories

Built to Scale: Designing a Business with Scale in Mind
St. John Manor
Catonsville CO-OP brings together food, community, and local businesses
A Grand Opening Like No Other

CEI Fact Sheet

I represent Northwest Access Fund, a CDFI serving Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. NWAF offers people with disabilities customized loans, financial coaching, and other resources to promote access to assistive technology, independence, financial resilience, and life opportunities. We are helping people with disabilities and seniors who lack the ability to secure financing to afford crucial assistive technologies and modifications – hearing aids, dentures, wheelchairs, adaptive vehicles, and home modifications. We could not to this vital work without the investment from the CDFI Fund.

-Emerson Sekins, Northwest Access Fund, Seattle, WA

CDFIs provide an important unique opportunity support communities by creating opportunities for underbanked companies and individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstrap by creating new businesses, housing and strengthening financial composites

-Kevin FItzgerald, OppFund, East Lansing, MI

CDFIs support the needs of small businesses and consumers in rural, suburban, and urban areas across the United States. The designation is key to legitimizing and elevating our work with banks and other leveraged investors who align with our industry to bring affordable capital to markets that need catalytic investments to sustain and grow small businesses. These businesses create jobs, provide goods and services, and pay taxes that build strong communities. We need to preserve and grow the CDFI Fund for all Americans.

-Patricia Parchmon, St. Louis Community Credit Union, St. Louis, MO

Map of CEI CDFI Branches and Stories