Silicon Valley One - Fall 2007 - (Page 12)

Murals capture East Palo Alto’s ups and downs. carefully shepherded through the past three years of organization, applications and waiting. There’s always more waiting. The delays are the hardest part for both Liotti and East Palo Alto, the poor next-door relation of tony Palo Alto. Over the past half-century, as Palo Alto blossomed into the first community in Northern California to feature million-dollar middle-class homes and J. Crew and Restoration Hardware stores, East Palo Alto’s multiethnic community (55 percent Latino, 27 percent black; its third-largest group is Pacific Islander) was struggling. During the crack-cocaine holocaust of the late ’80s and early ’90s, East Palo Alto’s 2.5 square miles became malign, drug-infested killing fields. In 1992, the city’s 42 homicides won it notoriety as America’s per-capita murder capital. East Palo Alto has had its ups and downs in the decade and a half since. A Home Depot, IKEA and Starbucks, for instance, have sprouted up in the city, offering signs of economic investment. But the city has not shared in the prosperity of wealthier neighboring cities. The Bay Area housing boom has also had mixed results there, enriching some homeowners and raising revenues from property taxes, but driving up rents and making life harder for minority lower-income potential homeowners. What might have been, and may someday be, East Palo Alto’s downtown is a cluster of light industrial operations, charter schools, inexpensive housing and nonprofits such as Liotti’s NCUD. East Palo Alto doesn’t have a supermarket; it has a single bank and a rash of usurious storefront “payday” loan and check-cashing operations. People in a community that could least afford it have been forced to pay what is essentially a private tax to cash checks. This is the socioeconomic hole Liotti and his board at NCUD are trying to help patch with their nascent East Palo Alto credit union. It is a financial void the importance of which should not be overlooked or underestimated: In the early part of the decade, whenever Liotti and his friend Marc Prioleau, a Harvard M.B.A. and high-tech executive, would discuss their powerfully held spiritual callings to eradicate multigenerational poverty, they kept circling back to the lack of banking services and financial literacy. This, Prioleau said, was “the huge gap in poor communities like East Palo Alto.” Prioleau and Liotti, founding members of NCUD, chartered their nonprofit in 2004 with the mission “to relieve systemic and generational poverty in Northern California’s underserved communities.” Sounds noble, but there was something else, as well. NCUD focused a decidedly spiritual light on economic, community and leadership development. Liotti and Prioleau quickly realized that NCUD could be the vehicle to sponsor a community-owned and -operated credit union able to offer an alternative to the many local predatory financial institutions. A new community-based credit union, they felt, could offer the kinds of checking, savings, mortgage, micro-loan and financial education services that could help catalyze the renewal of East Palo Alto. But where to start? Liotti’s position on the pastoral staff at East Palo Alto’s St. Samuel Church of God in Christ, and his halfdecade of living in the community, served him well when he approached the Rev. Paul J. Bains, his senior pastor at St. Samuel. Bains, a leading local cleric, might 12 o n e innovation through philanthropy www.siliconvalleycf.org http://www.siliconvalleycf.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Silicon Valley One - Fall 2007

From Emmett D. Carson Home Run Back From the Brink Checking In on Corporate Giving Central Valley Air Gets a Breather Why I Give Five Minutes With ... Full Faith and Credit Giving and Receiving What If?

Silicon Valley One - Fall 2007

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