In the last few months, four strategies with client-partners made the first investments into the community, we welcomed new partnerships and portfolio companies, and the second cohort of community finance fellows graduated.
Today concludes our formal year of learning together with the second cohort of the Community Finance Fellowship at Mission Driven Finance. Join us in extending a huge thanks to them for a fruitful year together!
Our distributed team got together in real life in San Diego for a team retreat to connect with each other and our mission.
Earlier this year we shared some exciting and bittersweet team changes. Now that we are heading into the final quarter of the year, we want to share more about how our team is growing.
This year, we opened the fellowship application to candidates nationwide. We received applications from 13 states, Washington, DC, and even one from another country!
As Mission Driven Finance celebrates its fifth year flowing capital to community, we have seen our company grow and change many times, especially given our focus on being a deliberately developmental organization. This season feels like one of great change even with that mindset, and we want to make sure you learn about the latest team changes at Mission Driven Finance.
If you missed the Community Finance Fellowship info session, check out the slides and recording here. Share with those you think are interested!
James Benedict (Left Tackle Capital), Deborah Frieze (Boston Impact Initiative), and Lauren Grattan (Mission Driven Finance) discuss different approaches to develop and empower more representative talent in the investment industry in this ASBC-SVC Spring 2021 session.
We are proud to announce that the first cohort of the Community Finance Fellowship—Louise Jordan, Benson Ochira, Andrew Moncada, Essence Rodriguez, and Crystal Sevilla—is graduating.
Hear directly from the 2020 cohort fellows— Andrew Moncada, Essence Rodriguez, Louise Jordan, Crystal Sevilla, and Benson Ochira—about their career goals and their experiences thus far changing the face and flow of finance.
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, one of the visionary supporters of the Community Finance Fellowship, spotlights Mission Driven Finance.
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.
With 2019 officially behind us, our team took a second to celebrate our favorite wins, which helps us to also look forward and set goals for 2020.
By focusing on underinvested communities, the Community Finance Fellowship is an accessible on-ramp for a traditionally inaccessible sector.
Diversity is a strength, a great reducer of blindspots, and our industry has been woefully not diverse. This lack of diversity in finance perpetuates unequal access to capital and opportunity.
Cutting Edge Capital spoke with Mission Driven Finance Co-founders Lauren Grattan and David Lynn to talk about our mission, and how our community-first perspective guides us to find investment opportunities.
