Mission and Vision

 

CFNE’s Vision

 

Economic justice for all through thriving cooperative enterprises.

CFNE’s Mission

 

We work for economic, social, and racial justice by advancing community based, cooperative, and democratically owned or managed enterprises with a preference to assisting cooperatives in low-income communities by:

  • Providing financial products at reasonable rates
  • Developing business skills
  • Offering an investment opportunity that promotes socially conscious enterprise

CFNE’s Strategic Plan

 

CFNE’s new 2021-2023 strategic plan prioritizes racial justice. This means we will work to ensure that BIPOC communities have equitable co-op development opportunities. Currently these opportunities are unevenly distributed across our region because centuries of institutional racism have extracted BIPOC community wealth and federal funding for co-op development is limited to the USDA and therefore to rural, predominantly white communities.

Racial justice is critical both from a reparations framework (righting historic wrongs) and from a universal design framework (centering the needs of excluded communities benefits everyone). We will continue to provide great support to predominantly white communities, while focusing additional effort on BIPOC communities.

CFNE will concentrate both externally and internally in this work. Externally, we will evolve our capital access, partnerships and ecosystem development programs, while internally we will ensure that all board and staff members thrive by examining our recruitment, retention, and training practices; reexamine our HR policies; and create systems to mitigate and address micro-aggression and other forms of interpersonal oppression. This work cannot occur in isolation, so we invite you to reach out and share thoughts on how we as individuals, institutions, and communities can do better.