Finance Leaders Fellowship - Tackling the Racial Wealth Gap
We recognize both the responsibility and opportunity we have to advance racial equity in and through the finance industry. We believe that high-integrity, enlightened leaders can exert wider and more systemic impact when their change efforts are made collectively in coordination with other firms and nonprofit and public sector partners. There’s greater “return on investment” when individual actions are matched by others, with each entity doing its part to expand equity and opportunity at scale across an entire sector. One clear multiplier opportunity lies at the nexus of the Aspen Institute and the AGLN Fellow network of finance industry leaders. We have set out to harness the power of the network in tackling one of the most pressing challenges of our times.
Please see below and the attached white paper for more background on the effort.
NOV 20_Pre-read_Finance Industry Response vf.2_sent to Fellows_20201120.pdf
In 2020, sparked by the waves of crisis from COVID-19 that demand racial and economic justice, FLF Fellow Salah Goss launched a collective effort to close the racial wealth gap in the US. FLF Fellows embarked on a series of strategic working groups with the larger goal of holding the finance industry up to higher standards and leading the industry in areas like unbanked Black communities, Black wealth accumulation, and Black entrepreneurship and business lending.
Pushing this work further, this Action Forum session invited Fellows from across the AGLN to join forces. One clear actionable insight coming out of this discussion was industry and business leaders taking collective action on racial equity matters more than ever. But we can’t do it alone. To that end, we set out to create a more formal mechanism to harness the collective intelligence and expertise of industry leaders to advise and guide strategic Institute efforts to advance racial equity in the financial services