Help Send CDFIs to SXSW – Vote in PanelPicker!
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Let’s take CDFIs to the big stage! To help spread awareness and education of community lending across the nation, vote for SXSW sessions that highlight the mission of our industry
South by Southwest (SXSW) 2024 kicks off in Austin, Texas, on March 8. This conference began as a music festival and has transformed into a gathering space to share ideas, innovations, and solutions across tech, culture, society, education, and more. It brings together a global community annually, to network, collaborate, and ideate solutions for the future. We are thrilled to have several CDFIs and ally organizations submit sessions that highlight community lending. SXSW presents a huge opportunity for our industry to share our mission and impact with a large, diverse, and future-oriented audience.
For these sessions to make it onto the program, you need to vote for them! Community voting on PanelPicker is open now through August 20. Community voting gives the audience the chance to help shape the agenda by voting on the sessions you want to hear most.
How to Vote
- You will need to create a PanelPicker account, which is free and quick. If you have voted in the past, you can use your previous login.
- Once registered, search in the platform for the session(s) below.
- Upvote the session by August 20. We encourage you to vote for all of them!
Sessions
- From Startup to Sustainable: How to Get That Money
You have a business, now what? Now it’s time to get that money. Black- and Latino-owned businesses start with less capital than white-owned businesses because they rely on savings and family instead of outside credit. NCRC Community Development Fund and Working Solutions are turning that tide by providing business support services and funding opportunities to communities of color at all stages of the business lifecycle.
Join Marisa Calderon and Sara Razavi as they discuss the many options available to smartly and sustainably finance your business in a rising interest rate environment.
- Film, Art & Enterprise: Innovation to Community Revitalization
We plan to define what a “Community Wealth Building Ecosystem” is and how it can be a blueprint for revitalization in under-resourced communities. The components of this ecosystem consist of business incubation, finance, direct services (Infrastructure), in-direct services, and community reinvestment. This presentation will describe how the Creative Economy can be a catalyst to this wealth building ecosystem that will drive community revitalization and investment in under-resourced communities of color.
- The Partnership That Could Save Equitable Media
President Biden has praised the Black press for its “brave” and “unflinching” role in exposing racial and economic injustice in the fight for civil rights. Especially now, diverse local news and media ecosystems are central to knowledge equity and essential within vibrant communities. But this recognition has not been matched by efforts to address economic and financial threats to local media. Philanthropic efforts to fill the funding gap are laudable but insufficient. We explore how to partner with community lenders to create holistic and value-aligned financing for local and diverse media.
- SXSW Winners on Building a Tech Platform to Drive Social Impact
When CNote won the SXSW Super Accelerator Pitch contest in 2017, the women-led technology platform had just launched. Today, CNote is moving hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Apple, Mastercard and Netflix to community financial institutions that advance economic equality, racial justice, gender-equity and climate change initiatives.
Co-founders Catherine Berman and Yuliya Tarasava share how they’ve unleashed the power of technology and data to deliver capital to CFIs while enabling corporations to amp up their social impact—and how they plan to hit $1B on CNote’s platform.
Get your votes in before the deadline on August 20 and spread the word.
To Austin, we go!
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