Creating Financial Opportunities for Working U.S. Families

The United States was built on the promise of opportunity. But opportunities in our modern world can feel out of grasp for many working families.

Our longstanding mission is to make opportunity universal to improve the well-being of humanity. For the past few decades, we’ve worked with partners across America to make this mission a reality.

In 2018, The Rockefeller Foundation, in partnership with the Chan Initiative, launched the Communities Thrive Challenge — which aimed to support community-driven solutions to create economic opportunity. One of the Challenge winners was the Montana Community Development Corporation (MoFi), a nonprofit organization that provides loans and consulting services to small businesses in underserved and distressed areas. With a $1 million grant, we supported its mission to revitalize communities in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Washington, and Oregon that often get overlooked.

MoFi helps small business owners who normally struggle to qualify for loans from large banks or credit unions. It ties its small business loans with business training to provide economic opportunity and security – teaching small business owners how to maintain credit scores, expand their business, and ultimately get financing from large financial institutions.

This opportunity creates more opportunity.

Small businesses are the biggest source of new jobs in the United States — responsible for 3 out of every 5 new jobs. By providing people with the funds and training needed to start and scale their own business, MoFi not only gives entrepreneurs a lifeline, but has created thousands of jobs within the communities it serves. Its clients have created 3,000 new jobs in 2024 alone.

We’ve seen through programs like Montana Community Development Corporation that opportunities compound when you provide people with funding, training, and access so often denied to them. And when you partner with local organizations who are committed to revitalizing their communities.

We’ve instituted these learnings in our work with Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs Inc. (ACE), which provides flexible financial solutions and business coaching to women, BIPOC, and low-income business owners in the metro Atlanta area. Our $5 million grant in 2023 was the largest in ACE’s history and supported its Recovery and Resilience Program, working to expand opportunity throughout Atlanta.

This strategy is also the driving factor in our work with the Economic Opportunity Coalition (EOC), a collaboration that helps American small businesses access capital and customers. Incubated by RF Catalytic Capital (a charitable offshoot of The Rockefeller Foundation) in 2022, the EOC has found success in bringing together unlikely partners to invest in economically underserved individuals and communities.

It’s helped to expand access to capital for Community Development Financial Institutions such as Optus Bank in Columbia, South Carolina. Since the EOC’s contribution, deposits have increased from $50 million in 2022 to $662 million today.

Creating opportunity is not an abstract idea. It’s giving Americans the ability to feed their families, to start a business, or to give their children a promising future. And it’s accomplished by investing in local organizations giving their community members the chance they deserve to thrive.