Welcome and Opening Remarks

Good morning. I'm Gloria Brown, Vice President of the Dallas Fed. It's a pleasure to welcome you here. Some of you may know this is the fifth in a series on scale and sustainability. I'd like to thank our community affairs staff who helped to organize this event.

The previous workshops have looked at a various range of topics. This workshop is designed specifically for you. We have a different culture and environment in Texas and we hope the innovative models will peak your interest and give you ideas that help you improve your scale, sustainability and impact. We hope you go back to your own community with tools and techniques you can use locally. I'm delighted to see you all here. I'm going to turn this over to Alfreda Norman.

We are thrilled you are here despite the rain. We've looked at all the CDC's and CDFI's in Texas and we invited all the individuals we thought could sit down and talk about the future. We're thrilled that we have such good speakers here and there are more people coming once their planes arrive.

We've got some exciting things going on. This whole thing has started in the Chicago Fed.

Christopher is scribing what we're talking about and all of this is going on the web site where all the other meetings are recorded.

We've also got a wonderful way to ask for your opinions. We're going to give you your own polling tool that will instantly pull up the information and put it on the screen.

We've assigned a number for you and if you can come pick up a pad with the number on it that will be the way we can keep track of the voting. Please come up and pick a pad.

We're really counting on this. A lot of time we have the whole room filled and in this setting is to have a lots of back and forth and dialog. All of our panelists are going to be in the Oprah style - a relaxed setting. Feel free to get refreshments at any time. The rest rooms are through this door. Our staff has red ribbons and if you need anything please come up to us and ask and we'll help you out.