Wall Street Without Walls covers the machinery of community development finance: how capital actually reaches mission-driven borrowers, what it costs them, and who bears the risk at each tier of the stack.
Most writing about this field is either promotional or academic. Practitioners get press releases announcing that a fund closed, or journal articles three years after the fact. Very little explains the deal — the sources and uses, the fee load, the covenant that looks harmless until year four, the reason a CDFI Fund award changes an underwriting committee’s answer.
That gap is what this publication exists to fill.
Who we write for
Our readers run the numbers. They are CDFI and loan-fund staff, nonprofit chief financial officers and executive directors, and the investment officers who deploy program-related and blended capital. They are not looking to be persuaded that community development finance matters; they already work in it. They are looking for the specifics.
We assume familiarity with basic credit concepts and we define anything narrower — a leverage loan structure, a QLICI, a participation agreement — the first time it appears.
How we work
We write from primary sources: CDFI Fund program documents, Federal Reserve community development research, Treasury and IRS guidance, SEC filings, and the audited financials of the institutions we describe. Where a figure comes from an interview or an institution’s own reporting, we say so.
We do not accept payment for coverage, and we do not write about a transaction we cannot document. When a programme’s terms are likely to change — rates, allocation rounds, certification rules — we date the claim so a reader arriving later knows what they are looking at.
We publish a few substantial pieces a week rather than a daily news feed. The work is meant to remain useful after the news cycle has moved on.
Corrections
We correct errors of fact promptly and note the correction on the article. If something here is wrong, tell us through the contact page and we will look at it.
What we are not
This publication is not affiliated with, and is not a successor to, the Wall Street Without Walls initiative or the Capital Markets Access Program, a nonprofit effort active from roughly 1998 to 2012 that connected finance professionals with community development organisations. We write about the same subject and use the same descriptive name; we have no organisational continuity with it, its funders, or the Federal Reserve Banks that hosted its training programmes. Where we cover that organisation’s history, we do so as editorial reference.
Nothing here is investment, legal, or tax advice. We describe how structures work; we do not recommend a course of action for any reader’s particular circumstances.