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The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy
We’ve never done anything big in this country without little banks. Yet the number of community banks in the US has been steadily declining for decades, giving way to big banks that have little connection to the communities they claim to serve. The massive, unprecedented shift toward such a highly concentrated banking sector has weakened our ability to take action at a community level and leaves many people, especially those who have been historically marginalized, without access to capital.
In The Banks We Deserve, journalist Oscar Perry Abello argues that community banking has a crucial role to play in addressing urgent social challenges, from creating a more racially just economy to preparing for a changing climate. At their best, community banks unleash the agency and aspirations of the communities that establish them. Abello challenges people working on racial justice, community development, or addressing climate change to start more community banks or credit unions as part of their work, while also calling for policies and regulatory reforms that will help tilt the landscape back in favor of community banking.
The Banks We Deserve tells the stories of new community banks — like Adelphi Bank, in Columbus, Ohio, the first new Black bank in 20 years; or Walden Mutual Bank in Concord, New Hampshire, the first new mutual bank since 1973 and the first chartered specifically to finance a more sustainable food system; or Climate First Bank, in St. Petersburg, Florida, which has grown exponentially since opening for business in 2021. He hopes these stories inspire others to take some of these same daunting-but-not-impossible steps.
For a community or industry that is being ignored by big banks, the idea of starting up a new bank or credit union rarely figures as an option. In The Banks We Deserve, Abello shows advocates, organizers, and innovators that it can be done, that it is being done, and describes a path to support more community banks and credit unions.
In The Banks We Deserve, journalist Oscar Perry Abello argues that community banking has a crucial role to play in addressing urgent social challenges, from creating a more racially just economy to preparing for a changing climate. At their best, community banks unleash the agency and aspirations of the communities that establish them. Abello challenges people working on racial justice, community development, or addressing climate change to start more community banks or credit unions as part of their work, while also calling for policies and regulatory reforms that will help tilt the landscape back in favor of community banking.
The Banks We Deserve tells the stories of new community banks — like Adelphi Bank, in Columbus, Ohio, the first new Black bank in 20 years; or Walden Mutual Bank in Concord, New Hampshire, the first new mutual bank since 1973 and the first chartered specifically to finance a more sustainable food system; or Climate First Bank, in St. Petersburg, Florida, which has grown exponentially since opening for business in 2021. He hopes these stories inspire others to take some of these same daunting-but-not-impossible steps.
For a community or industry that is being ignored by big banks, the idea of starting up a new bank or credit union rarely figures as an option. In The Banks We Deserve, Abello shows advocates, organizers, and innovators that it can be done, that it is being done, and describes a path to support more community banks and credit unions.
152 pages, Paperback
Published February 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 16, 2025
Read for a work book club and impact investing through debt course. This book has changed how I think about the importance of my job, the necessity of creativity in creating loan products and lending institutions, and ways to break out of discriminatory lending practices. Every lender (and honestly person who uses a bank) should read this book! Excited for our book clubs conversation with the author.
“Reclaiming community banking is about more than just access to credit. It’s also about the measure of economic self-determination that comes from a community having the ability to extend credit based on relationships - based on our belief in one another. The injustice of disinvestment isn’t just about the lack of capital flowing to certain communities. It’s also about how the whole system undermined the ability of those communities to wield at least some of their own power to influences the flows of credit and capital.”
“Reclaiming community banking is about more than just access to credit. It’s also about the measure of economic self-determination that comes from a community having the ability to extend credit based on relationships - based on our belief in one another. The injustice of disinvestment isn’t just about the lack of capital flowing to certain communities. It’s also about how the whole system undermined the ability of those communities to wield at least some of their own power to influences the flows of credit and capital.”
August 21, 2025
I’m so glad I got to read this!!! I’ve appreciated Oscar Perry Abello’s work at Next City for a long time—he always finds such creative stories about community development, and shares them in a tone that is hopeful without feeling like a puff piece in the way some affordable housing journalism can. When I found out he wrote an ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT BANKS, I knew it had to go on my TBR.
As Oscar notes in the Banks We Deserve, banking is not a profession we typically associate with creativity or patience. However, this book is all about the field’s most promising moments, where lenders are “given the time and space to work with clients to understand their business more deeply and get both the business and the bank to a place where an application would be approved. (xii)” This is something that many people I’ve spoken with in the field find to be rewarding, and these six chapters offer many examples of the ways entire communities can bloom as a result of this banking-as-unusual sort of practice.
Planners, cooperators, and CDFI workers, temper your expectations
I do want to give one professional note here, which is that I thought a lot of financial institutions were going to appear in this book that weren’t mentioned in much detail. When Oscar says The Banks We Deserves, he really meant BANKS—not loan funds, not cooperative incubator seed funds, like literal depository institutions that are just at a smaller scale than your massive nationwide banks. These are important parts of the field to cover, and admittedly not the ones I’m the most familiar with in my professional or volunteer time. This isn’t to say there aren’t mentions of more typical CDFIs, or of how the cooperative world is supported through community banks and credit unions. It even makes sense why there’s this absence: only depository institutions can have the FDIC backing to pay very little interest on the money in their depositor’s accounts, savings they can pass on via affordable loan rates to small businesses and community developers. However, just know that if you’re hoping to read about what LISC or even SEED Commons is doing, you’ll need to find another book.
Things I never knew to imagine!
This is not to say that there isn’t lots of creative things to find in The Banks We Deserve! Before reading this, I would’ve had no idea there were entire banks formed just to support solar lending needs!!! (I also didn’t realize that the power companies still “own” the power created by solar arrays…LORD our world sucks.) There are banks for certain neighborhoods, but also banks for certain sustainability goals, and all of them are created to meet a need that no one else is filling. This is a failure of capitalism, first and foremost, but Oscar shows that it’s also often a failure of imagination. When community banks expand to service new groups of clients, or open to create new sorts of loan products, they are proving concept to a banking field that largely isn’t “interested in learning how to evaluate the financial viability of a business model that incorporated unorthodox practices.” (42)
This quote is particularly about lenders who supported organic farmers, but it could be applied to so many things in this world!!! Sometimes, it’s not (just) a risk gap, it’s a knowledge gap. This is why I’m really inspired by groups who are trying to spread information about how more lenders can support “novel” housing development models, particularly shared equity housing. (For anyone interested, Grounded Solutions Network’s Innovative Finance Team does a lot of great work around this sort of education.)
Lending precedes capitalism…could it also succeed it?
Very early in the book, Oscar shares a quote that really encouraged me:
This sort of topic, of which parts of the things we find harmful now could be refashioned to serve a more just world in the future, was one of my favorite threads in Everything for Everyone by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien. Like even in the wonderful version of the future where we make it to a post-monetary barter system, how do we do that with integrity? Who supports that system, and is there anything I might learn from the lending world that could be of service in a more just world? Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but it’s what I have these days.
Like Everything for Everyone, The Banks We Deserve left me feeling really encouraged that a field that comes naturally to me and my autistic sense of fairness actually COULD become fair again, and helpful instead of merely extractive for many oppressed communities. I’m curious to keep thinking about this with others in the field, especially as I learn more over the years. I do also think this book poses a very clear question about degrowth—like at what point have we created enough new mutual or cooperative banks, and should we instead be supporting the ones that exist?
Some political ickiness
This book is really pro-small businesses and pro-community banks in a way that can be insidious if you don’t watch out. In the planning/community development world, it’s easy to get really excited about one thing going well, and then plug our heads in the sand about the accompanying problems. I’m not disputing that many of these community banks are doing great work, but there are limits to how supportive vs. extractive any bank can be, like that is the very business model!! I’m even learning that the nature of loan monitoring and workouts can create its own difficulties for borrowers. One community bank might be great for Latinx businesses or small cooperatives on the origination side, but turn out to be really repressive on the asset management side.
Back to the original point, the reverence of “the compassionate capitalists” can be a slippery slope. Like you start off trying to support “mom and pop landlords” who are the “good guys” compared to private equity landlords, but you end up fighting against your local tenants union to prevent just cause eviction legislation. Real life issues in the nightmare known as the affordable housing “industry”!!! Whenever I’m like “hmmmm this seems like sneaky neoliberal framing, but I can’t figure out why”, I can usually rely on the Citations Needed podcast. Thankfully, they have helpful episodes on “small business rhetoric” and “mom and pop landlord sob stories”, both of which feel relevant for some of Oscar’s blind spots.
Also, I had to roll my eyes at the Minneapolis/Arise story—like reframing a Black credit union as the recompense for POLICE MURDER is just such Gen X revisionist/elitist history. I really want the people peddling this snake oil to read Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Marcia Chatelain tells it better than me, but Black capitalism didn’t save us in 1970s, and it won’t in the 2020s, either.
Final thoughts
This is a solid 4 stars for me!! I wish some items were discussed earlier (PUBLIC BANKING), and that some items were discussed in detailed chapters (cooperative funds and more traditional CDFIs.) However, I can also appreciate something that is short, sweet, and focused. Would recommend to people in any related sectors, and would love to see more books like this in the future!!
As Oscar notes in the Banks We Deserve, banking is not a profession we typically associate with creativity or patience. However, this book is all about the field’s most promising moments, where lenders are “given the time and space to work with clients to understand their business more deeply and get both the business and the bank to a place where an application would be approved. (xii)” This is something that many people I’ve spoken with in the field find to be rewarding, and these six chapters offer many examples of the ways entire communities can bloom as a result of this banking-as-unusual sort of practice.
Planners, cooperators, and CDFI workers, temper your expectations
I do want to give one professional note here, which is that I thought a lot of financial institutions were going to appear in this book that weren’t mentioned in much detail. When Oscar says The Banks We Deserves, he really meant BANKS—not loan funds, not cooperative incubator seed funds, like literal depository institutions that are just at a smaller scale than your massive nationwide banks. These are important parts of the field to cover, and admittedly not the ones I’m the most familiar with in my professional or volunteer time. This isn’t to say there aren’t mentions of more typical CDFIs, or of how the cooperative world is supported through community banks and credit unions. It even makes sense why there’s this absence: only depository institutions can have the FDIC backing to pay very little interest on the money in their depositor’s accounts, savings they can pass on via affordable loan rates to small businesses and community developers. However, just know that if you’re hoping to read about what LISC or even SEED Commons is doing, you’ll need to find another book.
Things I never knew to imagine!
This is not to say that there isn’t lots of creative things to find in The Banks We Deserve! Before reading this, I would’ve had no idea there were entire banks formed just to support solar lending needs!!! (I also didn’t realize that the power companies still “own” the power created by solar arrays…LORD our world sucks.) There are banks for certain neighborhoods, but also banks for certain sustainability goals, and all of them are created to meet a need that no one else is filling. This is a failure of capitalism, first and foremost, but Oscar shows that it’s also often a failure of imagination. When community banks expand to service new groups of clients, or open to create new sorts of loan products, they are proving concept to a banking field that largely isn’t “interested in learning how to evaluate the financial viability of a business model that incorporated unorthodox practices.” (42)
This quote is particularly about lenders who supported organic farmers, but it could be applied to so many things in this world!!! Sometimes, it’s not (just) a risk gap, it’s a knowledge gap. This is why I’m really inspired by groups who are trying to spread information about how more lenders can support “novel” housing development models, particularly shared equity housing. (For anyone interested, Grounded Solutions Network’s Innovative Finance Team does a lot of great work around this sort of education.)
Lending precedes capitalism…could it also succeed it?
Very early in the book, Oscar shares a quote that really encouraged me:
“The earliest human writings discovered so far are five thousand years old from ancient Mesopotamia, and they weren’t poems or letters. They were loan contracts and accounting ledgers. In those days, Sumerian temples operated like local industrial conglomerates, acquiring land, taking in donations of raw materials and livestock, and hiring farmers to cultivate crops or craftspeople to manufacture goods. (xxii)”
This sort of topic, of which parts of the things we find harmful now could be refashioned to serve a more just world in the future, was one of my favorite threads in Everything for Everyone by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien. Like even in the wonderful version of the future where we make it to a post-monetary barter system, how do we do that with integrity? Who supports that system, and is there anything I might learn from the lending world that could be of service in a more just world? Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but it’s what I have these days.
Like Everything for Everyone, The Banks We Deserve left me feeling really encouraged that a field that comes naturally to me and my autistic sense of fairness actually COULD become fair again, and helpful instead of merely extractive for many oppressed communities. I’m curious to keep thinking about this with others in the field, especially as I learn more over the years. I do also think this book poses a very clear question about degrowth—like at what point have we created enough new mutual or cooperative banks, and should we instead be supporting the ones that exist?
Some political ickiness
This book is really pro-small businesses and pro-community banks in a way that can be insidious if you don’t watch out. In the planning/community development world, it’s easy to get really excited about one thing going well, and then plug our heads in the sand about the accompanying problems. I’m not disputing that many of these community banks are doing great work, but there are limits to how supportive vs. extractive any bank can be, like that is the very business model!! I’m even learning that the nature of loan monitoring and workouts can create its own difficulties for borrowers. One community bank might be great for Latinx businesses or small cooperatives on the origination side, but turn out to be really repressive on the asset management side.
Back to the original point, the reverence of “the compassionate capitalists” can be a slippery slope. Like you start off trying to support “mom and pop landlords” who are the “good guys” compared to private equity landlords, but you end up fighting against your local tenants union to prevent just cause eviction legislation. Real life issues in the nightmare known as the affordable housing “industry”!!! Whenever I’m like “hmmmm this seems like sneaky neoliberal framing, but I can’t figure out why”, I can usually rely on the Citations Needed podcast. Thankfully, they have helpful episodes on “small business rhetoric” and “mom and pop landlord sob stories”, both of which feel relevant for some of Oscar’s blind spots.
Also, I had to roll my eyes at the Minneapolis/Arise story—like reframing a Black credit union as the recompense for POLICE MURDER is just such Gen X revisionist/elitist history. I really want the people peddling this snake oil to read Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Marcia Chatelain tells it better than me, but Black capitalism didn’t save us in 1970s, and it won’t in the 2020s, either.
Final thoughts
This is a solid 4 stars for me!! I wish some items were discussed earlier (PUBLIC BANKING), and that some items were discussed in detailed chapters (cooperative funds and more traditional CDFIs.) However, I can also appreciate something that is short, sweet, and focused. Would recommend to people in any related sectors, and would love to see more books like this in the future!!
September 3, 2025
For a pretty short book, I felt like Abello could have done more here. Community banking is such an under-reported subject for how important it is, and I'm glad he wrote this book, but it seems a little undercooked. 2/6 chapters are (non-sequentially, by the way) dedicated to how local lending can help with the climate crisis when they probably could have just been one longer one and every chapter opens with and revolves around a case study even when the structure of the text might benefit from disconnecting with them a little.
It's a good primer on what and how community banking accomplishes things and I look forward to Abello's next publication.
It's a good primer on what and how community banking accomplishes things and I look forward to Abello's next publication.
March 27, 2025
I loved hearing how we got here and why we need better!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews