As a financial services firm, we must address long-held racist beliefs in the world of finance and commit to doing better. Here’s how we are working on it.
Our commitments to being anti-racist
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All posts by Wilda Wong
Wilda is the senior manager of marketing & communications at Mission Driven Finance. When not talking about impact investing, she enjoys attending film festivals (virtually + in person) and tasting creative ice cream and gelato flavor combinations. Learn more about Wilda here.
Community Finance Fellowship: Learning to use finance as a tool for change in a time of action
The inaugural cohort of Community Finance Fellows—Louise Jordan, Andrew Moncada, Benson Ochira, Essence Rodriguez, Crystal Sevilla— impress and inspire us every day and it’s not fair to keep their wisdom to ourselves. So we invited them to share their thoughts on how finance can invoke true racial and economic justice. The fellows’ perspectives and lived experiences give us invaluable insight into how we can use finance as a tool for real impact.
WES Mariam Assefa Fund Spotlights Mission Driven Finance
WES Mariam Assefa Fund, one of the visionary supporters of the Community Finance Fellowship, spotlights Mission Driven Finance.
Introducing the San Diego County COVID-19 Small Business and Nonprofit Loan Program
The San Diego County COVID-19 Small Business & Nonprofit Loan Program (SBNLP) is designed to help the small businesses and nonprofits at the heart of our community get back on track.
How the Community Finance Fellows are learning during a pandemic
While sheltering-in-place during a pandemic, we welcomed five Community Finance Fellows to our team in March to begin learning in a virtual environment: Louise Jordan, a renewed San Diegan with a legal background who moved back from Virginia to join us; Andrew Moncada, a financial analyst from Florida who wants to run his own impact investment firm one day; Benson Ochira, a refugee from Uganda with a degree in business management; Essence Rodriguez, an undergrad research fellow with the U.S. Immigration Policy Center; and Crystal Sevilla, an executive assistant from San Diego with a deep interest in economics and finance. See how they are learning during a pandemic.
Finding the way back through evidence-based holistic treatment
The Way Back uses trauma-informed care in its client activities—clinical groups, education groups, mindfulness meditation, relapse prevention groups, codependency groups, anger management, emotional regulation, and individual psychotherapy. “We are training men to be better fathers, better husbands, better employees, to stay out of prison, to work, to communicate,” says The Way Back Executive Director Chris Thomas, a licensed therapist who has been sober for 25 years. “Men are an important part of family structure, and addiction is a family disease.”
Mission Driven Finance selected as an ImpactAssets 50 2020 Emerging Impact Manager
Mission Driven Finance has been named as an Emerging Impact Manager in ImpactAssets’ IA50 2020, a publicly available, online database for impact investors, family offices, financial advisors and institutional investors that features a diversified listing of private capital fund managers that deliver social and environmental impact as well as financial returns.
Changing the face of finance through the Community Finance Fellowship
By focusing on underinvested communities, the Community Finance Fellowship is an accessible on-ramp for a traditionally inaccessible sector.
