After the Storm: New Orleans Center Named for CDCU Icon

NEW ORLEANS – A new community center built by ASI FCU with credit union grant money will be named for Cliff Rosenthal, executive director of the National Federation of CDCUs and father of the community development credit union movement, officials announced here last week. Rosenthal helped organize assistance from the CDCU movement to assist the credit union’s non-profit arm, A Shared Initiative Inc., to buy the property and build a community center for residents of the city’s Upper Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. The Federation provided a $100,000 grant for the project, and also raised as much as $1 million from credit unions and private foundations to help rebuild low-income credit unions devastated by the massive storm of two years ago. As head of the Federation, Rosenthal has helped provide millions of dollars in grants and loans to CDCUs and was one of the founders of the U.S. Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, for which credit unions have played a key role. Rosenthal was also instrumental in the creation of a CDFI program for New York, approved by the state legislature last week. The Treasury’s CDFI Fund presented a $585,000 check last week to ASI FCU to help offset some of the $4 million of losses to the credit union caused by Katrina, and subsequently, Hurricane Rita. The Clifford N. Rosenthal Community Center will house a new branch of the credit union–the only regulated financial institution in the Upper Ninth Ward--and other community organizations, including Total Community Action, Weed and Seed, and NeighborWorks. The center will also house a café to teach local youth about entrepreneurship. The credit union’s non-profit has also purchased nine residential lots in the devastated neighborhood where it plans to build modular homes for sale as affordable housing.