These are some leaders in our state and they can give us their point of view. When they are done we'll head to the reception.

We're pleased that some of you who don't know us are still here. I am a serial entrepreneur in the social development area.

Knowing the two panelists these are extremely involved in community development. We'll start with Stephan Fairfield. Then we'll hear from Margo Weisz.

I'll just go through the agenda and make some brief comments. I'm glad you've all come to Texas because we're all behind here.

We've got a difficult task in that we have a culture that doesn't understand community development. The southern culture that doesn't trust the government and the western culture that is rugged individualism.

We have the opportunity to take some of the insights from today and leapfrog to the next generation. We need these. There is so much that can be done in Texas because so little has been done heretofore (not withstanding the great work of this small community).

We have relatively affordable housing compared to Florida and California. We need to leverage that into a competitive advantage. Houston is not the first place that people think you have to go for your first job.

We are now beginning to think of these as quality of life issues and think about bringing these ideas into the community development world. How can we develop tools that help our clients land in these outlying and edge cities?

TIF financing and the set asides for affordable housing could be leveraged so we can help these families locate to better school district and employment centers.

At the same time we need to focus on the things where we contribute the most value to. We have determined that home ownership is leveraging the best outcomes. Thinking about collaborative business models we are looking at what others are good at. Lets help grow each others expertise.

I'm doing some work in Lovett, Texas. They are looking at a micro-loan program. If we have a special expertise that can be brought to play we should do that.

We have swapped stories and we were talking earlier about replicating what Margo is learning on a project now.

I missed breakfast for sleep but I sat on the runway for an hour and a half.

People Fund is a pretty typical CDFI. We have about $7m in assets. We do some business loans and some loans to non-profits. I heard here today that not all innovations work but it might be surprising what might work. It's just trying things. When something sticks it might be that thing that changes things for you.

We heard about a product for Charter Schools and they had no idea if it would take off. It attracted a ton of capital and there is a huge need in the community. It is really just getting out there and trying thing.

People think we are on top of it but we just listen to what Mark is doing and copy it.

The days of the big public money are gone. Accessing private money will require different strategies then accessing public money. We did some calling to large CDFIs and what we found out is the golden nugget is that all of them had come across some defunct public fund and they absorbed it. After that they attracted more interest. That is how the last group got really big.

I don't have the answer to this but how to we now access private money?

A lot of the talk in the field over the last several years is that we have to access the capital of wall street. I don't think that is going to happen on our own. We are so busy doing what we are doing we can't stop and figure out a way to get in there.

What I am hearing today is national platforms that allow for local CDFIs that know their communities and how do we access national platforms? We don't provide mortgages now but when I heard what they were doing I thought this is something we can do.

How can we get some innovators at a national level and see how we can share in that?

Do you go deep or wide? What is your strategy? I think they are not mutually exclusive. I think we have to think about getting higher volumes but that doesn't preclude us from going deep in our markets. We know our markets well. The barriers to success for entrepreneurs in low population areas is not just an access to capital issue. We need to address the other issues and stop thinking of it as an access to capital issue. Maybe some national products to address one and then we think about how we can use this to address our communities. Maybe we become smarter about how we provide the subsidy and provide those products.

People Fund and how we have addressed these issues. Intuitively we are sitting on these issues and making these decisions we need to change our messaging. When you say we make loans you are not going to get that high a hit rate. People need to be emotionally moved to give money. We changed our name to People Fund last year because the work that we do is about the people. Providing an opportunity for all people to be able to play. We don't think of it as a name change but an identity change. The second strategy is go both deep and wide. Going deep for us means offering more kinds of programs. We started offering some programs that are important to our mission but less capital intensive. We started becoming really relevant in our markets. The other reason was to be in the field and doing the lending but we need to raise the consciousness of the work we do - we had to do macro work while we did some micro work. We had to prioritize the ongoing thinking of these issues but we had programs that think on a larger level about why we do what we do.

The last thing is about accessing private money. We have had some success with high net worth individuals but we just negotiated a line of credit with JP Morgan that we can use as a letter of credit. If we can get those first 10 folks in we will not need that line of credit.

There are different ways that people think about their lives. People that are advocates of the community development field there is an opportunity with the baby boomers and how do we get a connection between them and what we are trying to do? How can we as opportunity financiers attract the people that have great talent that can help us?

As people are becoming rich in China they are discovering the emptiness of being rich. As people can begin to participate in being an agent of change in their society they can get excited about that.

Alfreda - do you feel like having a little drink? We need to give Elizabeth a hand. We have some ideas about what we want to work on tomorrow.

Kirsten - don't want to get in the way of having a great night. Of all the things you have heard today think of one thing you want to work more tomorrow. There were a number of ideas that were mentioned today so think about what you want to do.

Which of the following work groups would you be interested in joining?

A. Group to explore & work on one or more collaborative ventures
B. Group to explore and work on one or more new fundraising approaches
C. Group to explore and work on new policy initiatives
D. Other