Clifford Rosenthal, Retired President and CEO, National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (now Inclusiv)
- Pragmatic Visionary As President of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (now known as Inclusiv), Cliff’s innovations were grounded in what was needed and what was possible. From his earliest days as CEO he understood the critical role of capital in low-income communities and community development credit unions. The billons of dollars of public and private capital that continue to fuel the rapid growth of credit unions in most overlooked and underserved communities are attributable to Cliff’s pioneering efforts.
- Determined Innovator Cliff’s inspired ideas permanently altered the contour of the credit union landscape, but it was his determination to see them implemented that made him a co-op hero. Although he is now widely recognized as the innovator of the CDFI Fund, it took years of determined statesmanship to make it happen. Cliff first developed and promoted groundbreaking proposals for public capitalization programs at the state and federal levels in the early 1980s. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed a bill that created the fund that made it possible for thousands of people in underserved communities to buy a car, buy a house, or start a small business.
- Devoted Cooperator Cliff dedicated his career to improving access to capital for those neglected by America’s conventional financial banking system, but he didn’t get his start in the cooperative finance world. He first found co-ops in the 1970s when he left grad school to become a community activist. As he learned about world hunger and the role some corporations play in keeping food prices high, Cliff looked for a way to make groceries more affordable in his own New York neighborhood. With no experience and no salary, he opened up a food co-op, and then another, and another.
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Clifford Rosenthal is among five outstanding cooperative leaders who will receive the cooperative community’s most prestigious honor on October 3, 2024, when they are inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame at the Hamilton Hotel in Washington, DC.
Clifford Rosenthal
Retired President and CEO, National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (now known as Inclusiv)
Introduced to credit unions in the late 1970s, Clifford Rosenthal has spent his career promoting financial equity and inclusion in the nation’s most overlooked and underserved communities. Growing up amidst transformative campaigns for social justice in the 1960s, Cliff began his cooperative journey by organizing and managing food cooperatives in New York City and Connecticut. This eventually led him to Washington, DC and the National Association of Farmworker Organizations where he was tasked to organize a credit union to serve its members.
Upon his return to New York, Cliff joined the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (the Federation), first as a volunteer until he was hired as staff. By early 1983, the Federation was preparing to close for good after federal funding was eliminated. Sustained by his conviction that community development credit unions (CDCUs) were important and must be preserved, he once again took on a volunteer role as the Federation’s Executive Director. In partnership with Annie Vamper, the pair rebuilt the Federation into a catalyst for transformative change.
Understanding the critical role capital plays in low-income communities and CDCUs, Cliff pursued a two-pronged strategy to capitalize CDCUs by creating new channels to mobilize private investments and by expanding sources of public financing. This eventually led to the birth of the CDFI Fund in 1994 after President Bill Clinton signed the Riegle Community Development and Regulatory Improvement Act. Cliff also worked to secure NCUA’s issuance of a rule allowing low-income credit unions the exclusive privilege of raising secondary capital.
Cliff retired from the Federation in 2012, renamed Inclusiv in 2019, to join the federal government as the first head of the Office of Financial Empowerment within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He subsequently published Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement. In 2019, he was inducted into the African American Credit Union Hall of Fame. This year, Cliff co-authored a new book with Michael McCray, called Community Capital: Race, Equity, and the Credit Union Movement.