HFLA’s 2024 Annual Luncheon featuring: Mehrsa Baradaran
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Professor Mehrsa Baradaran is a law professor at the University of California-Irvine Law. She has
written extensively on banking law, financial inclusion, inequality, and the racial wealth gap. Her
writing includes the books How the Other Half Banks and The Color of Money: Black Banks and
the Racial Wealth Gap. The book The Color of Money examines the financial structures and
policies that have helped create and maintain racial inequities in the United States.
She brings back the “…clear line from past discrimination to present poverty.”
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The relevance to HFLA and our Mission:
HFLA was founded in 1904 when 5 Jewish men in Northeast Ohio pooled their resources and brought the Jewish Free Loan Society model to Cleveland. Before the 1930s, access to commercial credit was severely limited to the vast majority of most Americans, and all but nonexistent for people of color. Without access to capital—no matter how small—many immigrant Jews would be unable to buy homes, access education, or start the small businesses that helped build wealth within the community.
These loan societies were “based on the biblical and Talmudic concept of providing the Jewish poor with interest-free loans.” Scholars considered the interest-free loan among the higher forms of tzedakah (a Hebrew word that means “righteousness” or “justice”) because it respects the dignity of the borrower, provides him with a means of self-sufficiency, and does not saddle him with a large debt.
Over time, Jews were not as actively excluded from the formal financial systems. Other races and groups did not assimilate as white and are still not able to access these systems freely. Today, 60% of HFLA’s lending happens in Black and Brown communities.
Meet some of HFLA’s Loan Recipients
In 2020, HFLA shifted our annual events to focus on telling the story of our borrowers and highlighting the financial barriers they face. Check out all of our past conversations below:
Know Your Price: October 25, 2023
Dr. Andre M. Perry is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, a scholar-in-residence at American University, and a professor of the practice of economics at Washington University. Perry is the author of the book Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities. “There is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.” The deliberate devaluation of Black people and Black communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. Dr. Perry takes readers on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are systemically undervalued.
Watch “The Cost Burden” with Jonathan Morduch here
Is having a job enough? For many in our nation and region, working a full-time job (or two) is still not enough to make ends meet. Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics, and Executive Director of the Financial Access Initiative at NYU spoke about his book, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.
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