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Meeting Community Needs: The Promise of Community Development Financial Institutions

Meeting today's challenges will require CDFIs to build on their traditions of social justice, compassion, and financial professionalism, while maximizing their creativity, resilience, and ability to build coalitions and partnerships and shape policy at the federal, state, and local levels.  

How to Think About Personal Giving Capacity

Scholars and practitioners are now casting fresh light on the question of how individuals’ sense of personal wealth, well-being, and resource capacity shape their giving decisions. Instead of simply considering how to increase the aggregate totals of individual giving – the persistent 2% of our national GDP – we must consider more critically how we might expand the base out of which giving could be taken at an individual level. How do objective and subjective measures of personal giving potential relate? What is the relationship between understandings of personal and communal charitable capacity? Are there policy or behavioral measures that could be taken to increase these measures?

Should State and Local Governments Use Pay for Success Financing to Support Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) for Opioid-Use Disorder?

The increasing rate of opioid use disorder and overdose deaths has become a national opioid crisis, which has further increased pressure for policy-makers to “just do something.” However, the opioid crisis is complicated, and it isn’t always clear how state and local governments can improve the situations people are facing.

Pay for Success (PFS) is an innovative financing model that allows state and local governments to ensure their scarce resources are used for programs that actually improve people’s lives. As one of the only evidence-based solutions available to help address the opioid crisis, implementing Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) through PFS financing may be an effective means for jurisdictions to “do something” that improves the situation. However, successful PFS projects also involve requirements that are not well-suited to every program.

This debate brings together policy researchers, medical practitioners, decision-makers, and PFS experts to discuss and debate whether state and/or local governments could (or should) use PFS to implement MAT as an approach to address the opioid crisis in their jurisdictions.

Exploring Access to Credit: Are Mortgage Servicing Costs, Complexities, and Risks Impeding Lending?

Since the housing and foreclosure crisis, lenders have been more reluctant to originate and service mortgage loans for borrowers with less-than-perfect credit, thanks in part to the skyrocketing cost of servicing these loans—which has, in turn, contributed to a decrease in lending to vulnerable populations.

Are there ways to reduce the costs of regulation in the mortgage servicing industry without increasing risks to consumers and the housing market?

Land-Use Regulation: What’s It Worth Anyway?

A century after the US Supreme Court endorsed zoning in Euclid v. Ambler, questions about the value of zoning and other land-use regulations are more central, in more conversations, than they have been for decades.