Video: Your Membership, Your Benefits: A Closer Look at NCRC Membership – July 2025

Online Event Archive Recorded: July 10, 2025

Are you making the most of your NCRC Membership?

Do you know NCRC offers policy and research expertise?

Learn what resources, services, content and networking opportunities your membership includes and how being a NCRC member can help you in your fight for a #JustEconomy. NCRC staff share tips for making the most of your membership and walk through NCRC's newest member features.

Speakers:

Diane Ashong, Membership Engagement Manager, NCRC
Ralph Cyrus, Membership Engagement Specialist, NCRC
Jason Richardson, Sr. Director, Research, NCRC
Caitie Rountree, Director of Membership and Events, NCRC
Lauren Wolters, Government Affairs Associate, Policy, NCRC

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Ashong 0:08
All right, welcome everyone. All right. Why don't we get started? Thank you again for joining our NCRC Membership Benefits Webinar. I am Diana Ashong. I am the Membership Engagement Manager. I'm also joined by several colleagues, including Caitie Rountree, Director of Membership and Events, Ralph Cyrus, Membership Engagement Specialist, as well as Lauren Wolters, our Government Affairs Associate and Jason Richardson, our Senior Director of Research. Great. All right, next, just a few housekeeping notes. Once again, put any questions in the Q and A module at the bottom of your zoom screen. Know that this webinar is being recorded. After this event, we'll send out the recording to everyone. So give us a little bit of a week or so, just to make sure that's all set, and we'll share that to all those who have participated in this webinar. So don't worry if you want to go back, we have the recording as well. Next. Okay, well, we will get officially started. So why are we here? Why did you guys join? Why did you want to learn more about NCRC, our membership? So a little bit background about our organization, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. We are a nationwide network of over 700 members. We were founded in 1990 where all of our member organizations and individuals are dedicated to create and deliver opportunities for all Americans to build wealth. And our top of the line mission for our organization and the membership we have is to make a just economy a natural priority and local reality as well. To do this, we go through several avenues in what we do as an organization. Organization, firstly, we advocate policies that support community development and financial inclusion, as well as building partnerships with community leaders through, for instance, our community benefits agreements. These are blueprints for how lending institutions will provide equitable chances for lending and investment. Another avenue we do our work is provide training and technical assistance to our members. And lastly, we also bring and convene stakeholders to advance some of these ethical solutions that we we as an organization foster, but also your input as members. Next. All right, why join NCRC? Why be part of our national coalition? Well, one of the first reasons, I would say, is the access to a national network of your industry peers. You have the ability to interact and build relationships with other like-minded organizations beyond your local area. And then the second point is, NCRC has the expertise and staff to help guide you in expanding your knowledge base, your skill set, to make a just economy a local reality for your community. And the last incentive as well, is most importantly, we are here for you. It's a relationship between us and our organization, putting our heads together to see what's next, explore best practices, identify the current landscape challenges and solutions, as well as any future trends we'll see in the industry.

Next slide, great. So with that said, I am going to turn it over to our director of membership and events, Caitie Rountree, she'll highlight a few of our benefits before we move over and have Lauren and Jason highlight some popular benefits, like Policy and Research Services. All right, Caitie, off to you.

Rountree 4:23
Thanks, Diane. As Diane mentioned, I'm Caitie Rountree. I'm the director of membership and events, and I have the privilege of talking to you about some of the benefits that we see members relying on most heavily. I'll talk about a few of those, but then I am, as Diane said, going to turn those over to our special guests to talk about the value that we provide to NCRC members through our research and policy work. Before that, I'm going to tell you a little bit about our events, our training and our capacity building opportunities. NCRC loves to connect our people to each other through events. I'm very fond of saying that the real benefit of NCRC is actually not provided by staff. It's by our members to each other and to the other stakeholders that we're able to bring together and connect them to. So one of the most visible ways that we do that is through the Just Economy Conference. This is the national event for folks working to make a just economy a national priority and a local reality. Over 1,000 people, community leaders, financial institutions, local and fellow government agencies, academia, all coming together to network, share ideas, learn and ask hard questions to chart out a better future. This coming year, you can join us in DC, April 13 through 14th. Members get a steep discount and get to participate in Hill Day on April 15, where we send delegations to meet with congressional offices on our issues and on the issues that matter to your organizations. And right now, we're taking proposals for sessions. Now is the time to submit your best ideas for conversations that you want to lead at the Just Economy Conference. Do that by July 25, which is our deadline coming up very soon here. NCRC also convenes events regionally, through our summits. Every fall we go to a city where NCRC has been partnering, and we work with our members there to convene a summit around local economic justice topics. And this year, we're actually doing something a little bit different in Nashville, Tennessee. Many of y'all are experiencing that we're in a moment as a nation that is unlike any other. And NCRC, after listening to our members and really identifying some of the critical needs in this current environment, decided that we would use the summit this year to gather a small group of members to identify strategies to respond to the lasting impact of shifting federal funding priorities. But those summits happen every year, and again, they're typically very focused on local and regional issues. This year, we're doing something a little bit different with that time.

Training: our National Training Academy provides premier training throughout the year, both in person and online. We provide unique learning opportunities on a really large variety of topic areas. It's a comprehensive training program that meets the needs of organizations committing to increasing access to credit and communities. We do so by increasing the knowledge and skills of organizations seeking to expand their services. Check out our course catalog of live and recorded trainings. There is a really deep bench of resources there, everything from strategic planning to trauma-informed service provision, HUD certification for housing counseling agencies. There's a lot in there, so do take a look at that. We also provide capacity-building opportunities to our members. We have a housing counseling network. We are a HUD intermediary for housing counseling agencies. We build our housing counseling members capacity through sub-grants. Sorry, I lost my train of thought there. We have 25 housing counseling agencies across 17 states that have served over 14,000 households over the last few years. With 15 years of experience, NCRC plays a role as a head intermediary and technical assistance provider to the network members. And we're a one-stop shop for applications, disbursements and reporting assistance for you. Right now, we actually have an application live for housing counseling agencies through the end of August. They are welcoming applications for folks who are looking for national intermediary for their housing counseling agencies, with a particular focus on agencies that are serving rural communities, and we'll share that link there. We also provide capacity-building sub-grants to our members through the field Empowerment Fund and the Fellowship of Equitable Development. The field Empowerment Fund empowers NCRC network members to level up established service lines through a catalytic injection of grant funding that bridges the financial delta. The purpose of the grant is to build on an existing program or service area so as to concretely upgrade the organization's baseline for service delivery in a way that allows the improved community benefit to be sustained beyond the grant period. Current opportunities have passed, but keep an eye out for future opportunities down the road. That's been a really impactful grant program for our members. The Fellowship for Equitable Development is a member-designed fellowship project that pairs master students from urban planning, community development or public administration, university programs with your organization. So this collaboration helps drive forward your mission, gives you extra boots on the ground and bright young minds, and also supports the next generation of community leaders. 2025 application period has passed for member organizations and students but check back later in the new year for the 2026 opportunity. And now I'm going to turn it over to Lauren to talk about our policy work and how that provides value to our members. Thanks, Lauren.

Wolters 10:43
Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today and learning about how we can help you here at NCRC. My name is Lauren Wolters. I'm a Policy Associate here. This is our team for our policy support. We have Eden Forsyth, our Chief Policy Council, Kevin Hill, our Senior Policy Advisor, Dr Nicole Nelson, another Senior Policy Advisor. Unfortunately, Bakari will be leaving us this week, but he was an excellent addition to the team. We also have Manan Shaw and myself. We are both government affairs associates and policy associates next. So what do we do? You just met our team, and within our team, we have the diverse background of education and experience in policy analysis and government affairs. So because of our education, our background on the Hill experience working within NCRC for several years. We are professional advocates, and so our job is to help you to efficiently advocate for your communities. So part of our job is we analyze policies and we form strategies to advocate for or against relevant legislation. One example of this is we work a lot on section 1071, of the Dodd Frank Act, which is just a transparent data transparency requirement, making sure that there isn't discrimination in lending. And we had a grassroot campaign that our members did, and we were able to advocate efficiently and put enough pressure on the Senate that they actually removed a line that would have delayed the implementation of 1071 for 10 years. So that was really big win for us, for our members, for transparent lending, and so we periodically run campaigns like that on issues that are really important for economic justice. Additionally, we share our expertise and knowledge through blog posts and articles on our website, and we are also a liaison between you and Capitol Hill. So as Caitie mentioned earlier, you can join Hill Day, which was a huge success. This past year, we had, I believe, over 150 meetings that we scheduled. Each one of our groups had two to four meetings, and several of them were actually with the representative or Senator themselves. So that was really an amazing opportunity that community advocates can't had to come to DC to talk about NCRC and our issues, as well as the issues affecting their local community. And so that is definitely a huge benefit that you can be a part of when you join NCRC. Next. Awesome. So these are some of our policy priority areas, and these are areas that we are national leaders in and that we collaborate with other national organizations who have expertise in these fields. So obviously, our first priority is strengthening and safeguarding the Community Reinvestment Act. That's the core of our organization. Like I mentioned a little bit earlier, protecting section 1071, which is the small business lending data rule, which, again, just requires that lending organizations report the demographic data of who they're lending to to make sure there's no discrimination. We also support opposing congressional efforts to use the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn rules such as the CFPB medical debt rule, as well as the overdraft fee rule. That's something - those are policies that really are beneficial for increasing economic equity. And so those are policies that we advocate for protecting. Additionally, one of our main priorities is increasing access to homeownership. So we advocate for grant legislation that helps with building affordable housing, renters assistance, those types of programs. We also work on accelerating investments in community development funds through CDFIs, making sure that they have the funding needed to be able to invest in their community and make sure that marginalized communities have access to this really important funding. And our last policy priorities, we demand funding for community development programs, especially with DOGE and all the cuts that have been going on recently, we've really been on guard making sure that CDFIs receive their funding, that the Women's Business Development Centers, any of the so called dei programs that these programs that maybe a lot of people don't know about, but that are targeted just because of their goal of creating equity. We know these are policies that help people, and that's something that we are actively working to protect. Okay, next. So how to work with us? We would love to work with you and support you in your advocacy efforts. So first you can get involved with comment letters and sign-on letters. These are letters that we sent to government agencies, to senators, to committees in Congress. The CFPB released a proposed rule just a little bit ago, and they want to delay the implementation of 1071 for a year now, since the 10-years one did not pass through Congress, and obviously that's something we oppose. We would like to get this implemented as soon as possible. And so we have a letter that's going to be going to the CFPB, and it will be ready for sign-on within the next week. So keep an eye out for that, if you sign up to be a member. We also want you to share your stories with us. When we went to hell day, that was the main feedback that we got from congressional offices, is they want to hear about the work that you guys are doing in their community, and the struggles that you're having and how you've been affected by congressional policies, by DOGE cuts, by stuff the presidential administration is doing. And so you have the opportunity to share your stories with us, and we can share them with your representatives so that your voice is truly being heard by your elected officials. Additionally, we have a monthly legislative/regulatory call. This is where we discuss bills that have happened in Congress, what's been going on on the federal level, as well as bank merger updates and things that are happening kind of in the private/financial sector. So this is a really great opportunity to get current intel on what's been going on and what we're anticipating is coming up in the legislative world. Additionally, you can follow us on social media. As you can see to the left, myself and Manan, we do tiktoks. I am starting a new series called Lauren's Legislative Lookback, which I will be doing at the first or second week of every month, reviewing what went on in the previous month. So in our next video, I'm going to be talking a lot about reconciliation and everything that just happened in the House and Senate. And I'm also going to be doing an email newsletter that you can sign up for as well if you don't have Tiktok um. Additionally, like we've mentioned a lot, joining Hill Day is a fantastic opportunity. We had incredible feedback that members absolutely loved it and had a really good experience. And it is, again, just such an incredible opportunity to get step foot on the hill and to speak with your legislators in person and to make sure that your voice is being heard. And we also have many incredible partners, such as the National Alliance for Fair Housing, Small Business Majority, Americans for Financial Reform, that we work with regularly on these campaigns and these issues that we care about, and as was mentioned earlier, as a member, you have access to a lot of the campaigns and the coalition work that we do with these other incredible organizations, so it helps to expand your network. And last fall, you can stay informed about the legislative recap updates through my look back and through our ledge ridge calls next. All right, so that's all I have for you today. If you have any questions, you can scan the QR code for my little business card, and please feel free to reach out to me. I'd be happy to answer any questions about what we do here at the policy team.

Rountree 19:40
Thanks, Lauren and Jason, I'm going to turn it right over to you to talk about the work that you do to support our members through research.

Richardson 19:47
Thanks a lot. And Lauren, that was really great. I can't wait to to see the Lauren's Legislative Lookback series. That sounds like fun. My team is the research team at NCRC. And. So it's myself, Dr Mitchell, Jad Elibi and Joe Dean. Next, please. So we support members in a variety of ways, and we also do a lot of our own research. We produce research on redlining racial wealth gap. We work with an NIH grant supporting our partnership with the University of Michigan and our look at redlining and public health issues. We also do a lot of research using small business and mortgage data, bank branch locations, and most recently, we produced a new report on gentrification over the last 40 years, looking at displacement across American cities during that time. I'll post a few links in the chat in just a minute, so you can take a look at them later. But also, I'm sure we are sharing these slides. I know somebody asked about that. You can click on these links. It'll take you to a lot of our other work. Next, please. One thing that we do really well, I think, is we support members. We help them understand the community that they're in. We produce custom reports for members all the time. It's really quick. We can take a look and see who is lending in your community, who is not lending, where they're lending, and who they're avoiding. Usually, we work a lot with mortgage data, but any other data that you have of your own, we can also help you with. We do have a lot of skill working with large data sets and data visualization, so if you're ever not sure if, if NCRC can help with something, just shoot me an email. In most cases, I can help - I can help you understand what's what the data you need is, and kind of put it into a better context for you. We also do a lot of work with folks who are just kind of struggling to understand how to measure their own impact, and it's really common. We published a blog just recently with a member in Houston where we were able to show the positive impact they have on their housing counseling clients by comparing their outcomes to those of a sample data set. So again, just contact me if you have any sort of needs that you think we might be able to help with, and I can usually figure out a way to get you what you need. Next, please. And this is just more kind of talking about the major areas of our work. In general, my team does four main things: we support members; we also support internal departments like the policy team and the membership team; we do our own research on things like redlining and gentrification; and sometimes we take on contract work. If you have a grant, for example, that includes a research component. And I'm talking about beyond the normal member support that we do pro bono. But if it's a larger effort, like our report from a couple of years ago on lending on the reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, that was a much bigger lift, but the member organization had funding to support us through that, so we can do that as well. Next, please. Just like Lauren, I've got my QR codes. Take go ahead and just connect with me there. If you have any questions, just follow up with me offline. I see there's a couple of questions in the chat. Also, I'll try and get to those next. Thank you very much.

Rountree 23:18
Awesome, thanks so much, and we're going to come back to questions towards the end, but for right now, we're going to talk about who can be a member, how to become a member, and some details like that. So Ralph, take it away.

Cyrus 23:35
Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm, as said earlier, I am Ralph Cyrus. I'm the Membership Engagement Specialist here at NCRC. So if there's ever any questions you may have you want to get to know, figure out how to what this department does, how to access this said benefit, feel free to reach out to me, and I'll if I, if I can't help, I'll be able to direct you to people on staff who can help. I'm just going to take you over a quick review of the membership page on our website, so that you know how to navigate this. Give me one moment. Just to let you know about who is eligible to be a member you are. If you are a member, if your organization is a 501 c3 nonprofit tax status, or if you work at an educational institution, a university, a college, and if you are either a local or state government agency, so you can be a city, some type of municipality or state agency, the you guys are all, all welcome to join us as members. For-profit institutions are not available to be a member, but we do have we and I will explain that more but we do have options for you. Next slide, please.

So before I tell you what the next steps are, I'll just explain a little bit on what are a What are, what is, what membership entails, some some of our, some of our benefits, and then we can go over, we can go over the website itself.

Rountree 25:50
Thanks, y'all. We are taking some questions. I can see folks answering those in live time. Some of these will follow up with over email as well. I'm just going to look through some of these have been answered, but I'm going to check and see if there's any that feel like it'd be helpful to share with a group. Let's see. Patricia asked a great question about where NCRC members are. Ralph showed that member map. I just want to say again, we have members in 43 states and two territories all across the country, which means that there very likely is another NCRC member in your community, and we would love to connect with you about who those folks are. And as Ralph said, we've got a map up on our website where you can go and take a look at that. I Yeah, yeah, monitoring the chat and for a handful more questions to come in here, but we're very grateful for your time today. Doreen, I love your question about how many staff are working at NCRC now? And love knowing that you've been around since the John Taylor days. We are about 60 strong. So it's a, you know, we're a medium sized shop that has a, I think, an outsized impact. And I'd say, really, that that the impact that we're able to have is because of the 700+ members that we work with, and it's been really cool. I've been here since 2011 to watch NCRC work alongside our members to grow our ability to do this work. So all right, so you alright, and then I'm going to share it back to Ralph here.

Cyrus 27:48
Alrighty. So when you go to the membership page, it'll have an option for you to click the join now option that'll that'll scroll it'll let you scroll down. Show you a little bit about what the billing details are and the different membership tiers that we have. As I said earlier, you can be a nonprofit at a different different budget levels. If you see budgets under $500,000 that membership tier is $175 a year. Budgets between $500,000 and a million are $350 and in budgets over a million would be $900 a year. The government, government tears would be, if you're a local agency or municipality, you will be at $900 or or if you were at a state, state government agency, that would be $1,500 per year. And then, once again, the educational institution, universities, colleges, research centers, those would be $900 a year. On this page, you could sign up there. It'll once you choose the option that looks, I'll go back real quick, just so you can see, you can see the option that looks like the best for your organization, feel free to put your information. You will, you'll, you'll have the option to pay by card. If you would like to pay by either ACH or check, feel free to reach out to membership. We can make sure you get an invoice along with instructions on how to mail in or send an ACH payment as well. And on this page is also some frequently asked questions that people may have, what the how do you become a member? What kind of organizations typically join NCRC? What other membership benefits entail that we haven't already talked about, that you know you want to look for yourself, to to know about, feel free to to look through and and get a review of the of what our work is, and then also, you know, how to pay, how to where to go for, you know, cancelations, requests, invoices, all that information is listed in the Frequently Asked Questions. So I would you know, once you go to that page, just take the time to look, review, check any of the membership benefits, and also how to access, share access membership access with members of your staff as well. Now I do want to highlight this. I had mentioned that for-profit institutions cannot people who work at for-profit institutions, lending institutions as well, they cannot join as a member. But we do have a special membership tier called the Just Economy Club. It is for individuals. They can show that they want to support NCR C's work. They can, they get their own discounted tiers for our events, like the just economy conference, you know, some special webinars that we do and they as well as they can call on, to call, you know, to reach out to staff if they want to work on selected research items as well. So feel free to if you are, if you know people who work at for-profit institutions, they still want to be involved or if you work there yourselves and they're still interested, just know, like we're not, we're not turning them all away. I will show you what that website looks like. It's they could. They could join either at the monthly, the yearly or one-time tier that they feel comfortable at, and choose the amount of per donation that they would like. But those options are available for them as well. And if they are interested, their donation is tax deductible, I would, you know, encourage them to check with their advisor first as well. I'm now going to show you what we've been calling the Member Hub. It's a, it's our online membership forum where we try to, where we try to, you know, gather our members. We share a lot of our a lot of the resources available for members in this forum, and I'll show you how to access it. Basically, you would sign up, sign in at the top of your your at the top of the page. And then you would, you would do the following options. It'll take you, once you're signed in, you'll have the ability to go to the settings account. It'll show you how to access your account. You can change your password, change your name, change a mailing address and phone number as needed. And then if you ever need help with your account, you will go to subscriptions, and then from there, it'll show you whether what's the status of your subscription, whether or not you're whether or not it's active or not. You can then renew, renew through card online. If you want to manage your members, you can add who from your staff has access. Or you could take that link where it says invite members, you can copy that link and then share it with any members of your staff. They'll be able to go ahead and create an account under their email that's attached to your team subscription. And then you could basically handle any of your new old needs. There. Also, if you need an invoice or receipt for each of your transactions, there's a record of it through the settings and from the My Account tab, you can go to the member hub, and we have a variety of resources and tools available for you to access. From there, you could submit a member store, where you let us know about anything that you're interested in, or you could, you could sign up for any of our variety of our newsletters that we have available. Ones are, are just know about the recent, recent news related to our work and your work that you that we want to keep you updated with. Updates from the things that NCRC staff are working on, as well as just research that we've been putting out. You can also you can subscribe to different newsletters. And if you want to adjust your which ones you're subscribed to, you can also do it here as well. So that was just a quick overview about what the Member Hub is and how you can access it. And my last video to you is just going to be how to access the if anyone is interested in the Just Economy Club, here is how they can access it. I apologize. It's, it's the the last, last video I wanted to show you was our membership map. So on the membership page, you can, you can scroll down there is a map of our members throughout the country. You see where ever they are. You can, you know, personally, choose a state, and just scroll and see who is a member by state. Or you could search in a bar by a state or a city and check out you know, if you want to know who's the members in your city, you'll search by that and it'll show you which options are available. So we're the membership page is a little bit of a one-stop shop of options, of information for what you as a member can utilize, and how to access it. And if you ever, ever need any help navigating that. Feel free to reach out to the membership team. We're, we're more than happy to walk you through it, or get you connected to to the resources ourselves. And now I will return, I'll return the video back to Caitie.

Rountree 37:16
Awesome. Um, alright, well, thanks to our pause earlier to take questions. I'm not seeing a ton here. I'm going to ask I see one - Aaron will follow up separately, but there's a question about how to how long it processes to become a HUD affiliate. We'll connect you to those staff who can give you more of an in-depth answer to that and guidance on whether that's the right path for your organization. And Dorian, I see Lauren is going to follow up with you offline, on a number of your policy-related questions. So, yeah, I think we are moving through here really, really well. I'm going to ask Jason and Lauren if there are any last comments from y'all, as y'all have been reading through questions, and you can let me know via the chat or a thumbs up raised hand if you want to jump in. And then after that, I will we'll also share the link to survey to let us know how you feel this this event went as attendees and whether the information was helpful, what else we could be doing to help make sure that you know how to best take advantage of your membership. And yeah, thank you again to Jason and Lauren for sharing your expertise, and to each of you for your participation today. Jason, Lauren, any last, last comments?

Richardson 39:01
No, I think that was great. But if anybody has any more questions about the work my team does, feel free to shoot me an email and I'll and I will get right back to you.

Lauren 39:12
Wonderful. Well, we're out of time for today, but as we close, I just want to reiterate, while NCRC can provide a number of resources to equip your work to create a just economy, joining NCRC is also an invitation to join over 700 other organizations in a bigger movement. Bridging America's historic racial and socio-economic, wealth, income and opportunity divides will take all of us standing together. We're so grateful for our members who have already joined us, and we invite the rest of you to join us today. All right, thanks, y'all.