The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is a federal law that encourages banks to serve neighborhoods and individuals with low- and moderate-incomes (LMI)***. This toolkit will help you learn how to develop and enhance partnerships with banks to support employment and economic advancement for people with disabilities.
***NOTE: For a lot of you LMI means labor market information. However, to a bank this means low- and moderate-income. They need you to respond to them in terms of LMI as low- and moderate-income, due to their requirements under their federal regulators. So, for the purposes of this toolkit, LMI will be used for low- and moderate-income.
Should my SVRA work with banks?
Here is a brief explanation of the opportunity to work with banks. We hope it will stimulate some thoughts and get you interested in starting this journey.
- SVRA-Bank Partnership One-Pager (coming soon)
Case Study and Success Story
This opportunity is all about partnership and shared focus for community impact. It’s best to approach new partnerships on a small scale and, like all relationships, they can grow over time. As an example, here’s a story from Florida about a bank partnership, and ‘John’.
- Case Study (coming soon)
- Success Story (coming soon)
Overview of the Toolkit
Welcome to the Vocational Rehabilitation Technical Assistance Center for Quality Management’s (VRTAC-QM) toolkit on building bank partnerships for state vocational rehabilitation agencies (SVRAs). Within this toolkit, you will find tips and tools to explore the benefits of these partnerships for your agency, the people you serve and for your bank partners. We hope that you will find information here to strengthen your service impact and community connections. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us with questions, comments or requests for additional technical assistance.
You may use the toolkit in a ‘start-to-finish’ manner, as it is designed in a process flow, or you may pull information à la carte if you already have experience with bank partnerships and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
In each of these sections, you will find links to information and tools that will support your journey along this path. This material has been developed with the input and insight of leaders from the banking industry and financial regulators.
Within financial institutions, you can develop powerful allies by recognizing the alignment between your missions. This toolkit serves as a guide to finding that alignment.
The information is organized into the following sections:
- Getting Started
- Developing Potential Projects
- Developing Bank Partnerships
- Sustaining and Growing Partnerships
- Technical Assistance and Resources
Please do not hesitate to reach out to us with questions, comments or requests for additional technical assistance. Contact Yvonne Wright at ywright@ndi-inc.org.
Our team would like to share the following resources as these have all been of great value to us in developing this toolkit.
- LEAD Center Technical Guide: Workforce-Bank Partnerships
- LEAD Center Workforce-Bank Partnerships Resource List