Business View Civil and Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 9

27 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 9 online. People can access all kinds of material from our website, such as how to expand your community facility. How to establish a social enterprise. How to set up a micro-loan fund. We’ve done extensive research over the years to develop a resource of best practices and make that available to our members online. Every week our members receive a newsletter outlining funding opportunities that are available from the public or private sector. And we do a monthly newsletter that talks about what’s going on in the industry. We have about 200 members scattered throughout the State. There is some concentration in urban areas, such as Los Angeles and the Bay area. But the fact is that we have many members in rural California, and over the last two years, CCEDA has been trying to bring services to those members; emphasizing that unless we resolve rural community issues, as much as we’re trying to resolve urban community issues, we can never bring them together to achieve the common goal of economic well being for all communities. One area we’re particularly focused on right now is that there are very few African-American and Latino community development financial institutions (CDFIs) – and that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. During this Covid-19 pandemic, Black and Latino businesses were rejected at twice the rate as non minority businesses. We have seen greater approval rates by Black and Brown CDFIs. We’re trying to promote the growth of those organizations and establish new ones throughout California. BVM: With the recent impacts of climate events, have you been called upon more often for help? Barragán: Yes. In 2019, CCEDA launched a Climate Adaption Initiative with the support of Chase and Bank of the West – with the belief that while there’s a lot of conversation about climate resiliency and putting in solar panels to provide for electricity, and taking a lot of other costly steps to deal with climate CAL I FORNI A COMMUNI TY ECONOMI C DEVELOPMENT ASSOC . (CCEDA) change, communities of color and low-income communities don’t have those kinds of resources. For those communities, the conversation is not so much about resiliency as it is about adapting. Finding ways to mitigate the bigger challenges of climate change is the goal. We received a lot of appreciation for that 2019 initiative and then beginning early last year, with the help of the State of California Community Services Division, we put together a Climate Adaption Resource Guide for organizations serving communities of color. Addressing how they implement strategies to adapt to climate