Opportunity is the bedrock of U.S. policy. The Declaration of Independence rests on it, the Constitution guarantees and protects it, and generations of  congressional, executive, and judicial actions enhance it. In and around the work that community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and the opportunity finance industry engage in, opportunity is embraced explicitly in formative statutes—the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, to name just two—and implicitly in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991.

Opportunity as a product of sound policy is different from ownership and entitlement, both of which have their places. Opportunity means that a person has a chance, and equal opportunity means that every individual has a fair and reasonable chance relative to all others, no matter what that person strives to achieve. Ownership is one by-product of opportunity, and entitlement is the safety net that ensures it.

Opportunity is central to the opportunity finance industry. The common vein linking the industry’s diverse financing strategies is that they all create opportunities and provide resources to help people act in the best interests of their communities, themselves, and future generations. Every day, the people of the opportunity finance industry spend their working hours seeking, fostering, developing, encouraging, and financing opportunities for low-wage and low-wealth people and places. Whether they are financing small businesses or affordable housing, child care facilities or manufacturing plants, microenterprises or mortgages, they are investing their resources—money and time—in people and groups of people who want nothing more than a chance to succeed. No guarantees. No promises. Nothing motivates people more than an opportunity to prove what they can accomplish.

CDFIs work just outside the margins of mainstream finance to create opportunities for the people, organizations, and businesses that live and work in the nation’s lowest-income communities. CDFIs open those opportunity markets to mainstream institutions. For more than 30 years, very quietly, CDFIs have been proving that people will deliver when they have the resources and support to seize an opportunity.

This is an excerpt from The NEXT American Opportunity. The full text can be downloaded as an Adobe PDF Document.