In honor of Women's History Month, we profiled some of the extraordinary women who conceived and shaped our current community development, social justice and anti-racist movements. Their stories may not be widely known, but they should be. And their intelligence, insight, passion and unrelenting efforts blazed the path we walk today.
>Top image: Sr. Corinne Florek (left) receiving a Community Impact Award from Community Vision.
Sister Corinne Florek invites you to use this time of global upheaval and long isolation to slow down. Breathe. Recognize that relationship is primary.
“There are always these moments of the dark night of the soul,” she says. “And in order to build your ability to love and to trust, you have to go through this. The ego needs to let go. You need to realize that there is a deeper…I want to say, energy. There's a loving energy that created this world and is holding it. And you are part of that.”
It’s been a rough year, and we need to hear this.
There are some other things to know about Corinne Florek, too. She is a Catholic sister who joined the Dominican Sisters of Adrian, MI, in 1966 upon graduating from high school in a Detroit suburb, where the sisters had been her teachers. And she is a pioneer of community development finance.
As Florek was preparing to take her final vows and contemplating graduate school in the late ‘70s (she’d worked briefly as a teacher), a sister noticed her college math background and thought she might be a good fit to work in the community’s finance office. So she enrolled in an MBA program at Notre Dame University, graduating in 1980.
For the next 40 years, Florek learned the tools and guiding values of community development investment as they were being created. Indeed, she helped create them.
For starters, Florek served on the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Portfolio Advisory Board, helping to direct foundational investments in a range of organizations in the 1970s—from nonprofits to credit unions—as well as in fledgling community development financial institutions (CDFIs) in the 1980s. For three years, she managed women-led craft cooperatives in Kentucky. And she spent an eye-opening year at the Institute for Community Economics when director Chuck Matthei was nurturing into existence some of the first community development loan funds and land trusts.
As director of economic development at the anti-poverty Catholic Campaign for Human Development in Washington, DC, Florek managed a low-interest loan program, a new addition to its traditional grantmaking. She ran a microenterprise loan fund for women in San Francisco. For years she managed community investment funds for the Sisters of Mercy.
And in 2008, Sister Florek helped found the Religious Communities Impact Fund (RCIF), which today pools and invests the community development funds of 35 congregations of women religious. Florek served as RCIF’s director until last year.
For people whose own lives are entwined with this history, Florek and her work have been a guide star.
Annie Donovan, LISC’s chief operating officer and a former director of the CDFI Fund, calls Florek “the godmother of CDFIs,” ticking off a list of powerhouse organizations the Adrian Dominican Sisters helped put on their feet with visionary investments. Having met Florek early in her career, Donovan says the relationship helped her refine her own personal mission, with an emphasis on empowering people and communities.
“She’s still doing work that’s on the edge,” says Donovan. “She has a ‘Spidey sense’ for the new and emerging, and who’s going to succeed. If Corinne Florek is there, I’m interested. And she lives rooted in her values and has been consistently faithful to them over a lifetime. She is an anchor.”
Cliff Rosenthal, longtime head of the Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (now Inclusiv), choked up when reading a proclamation honoring Florek and the Adrian Dominican Sisters in 2011. They’d made a $30,000, no-strings-attached loan to the federation in 1981, when it had lost federal funding and investors were running for the doors. “Can you imagine what that meant to us?” Rosenthal said. “We were an organization that was flat busted. We had no track record, we had no net worth, we just had a concept. And the Adrian Sisters paved the way for us.”
To understand the sisters’ investing, says Florek, you have to understand the resolutely counter-cultural way they live. They make decisions democratically. They are self-supporting. The sisters go out to work, as teachers, social workers, nurses, or, as the case may be, in a role combining social-justice ministry with investment management. Their earnings go into a common fund—straight to the congregation—and in return the congregation allots individuals a modest living allowance. The common fund pays for upkeep of the mother house and other shared expenses, including, critically, supporting sisters in their old age.
They need that money. But they don’t necessarily need it right now. And so they send a portion of their dollars out on mission, lending it at nominal interest rates to nonprofits, credit unions, and loan funds that are doing transformative work among those who are economically poor. “I'm not trying to make money off of you,” Florek explains. “I'm trying to say to you, ‘Here. Use this money to help your community thrive. And then, I'll need it back for my community to thrive.’"
There’s a gentleness in the way Florek talks, but rigor in what she has to say. She believes the sisters’ model of cooperative living and sharing can and should be emulated, right here on planet Earth.
To do that, we’ll need to loosen the vice-grip of ego, but also to let go, figuratively and literally, of money. “Money is not sacred,” Florek remarks. “We use it as an idol. Everything is valued according to money. And that’s not where the value lies.” She counsels CDFI leaders to be “wary” of modeling their work on the traditional banking sector. And she criticizes as “extractive” impact investing approaches that insist on reaping financial reward from under-resourced communities. “When you get into wealth thinking,” she says, “you're stuck in this attitude, it’s got to have no risk, and if it has a lot of risk, I have to make a lot of money out of it. My argument is, if you have money to invest, you've already done well. You want to keep growing your wealth. Why? You have enough. You're comfortable. Now it's time for you to give back to the community.”
And why make loans at two percent instead of just giving it away? Says Florek, "I invest because it says to people, 'I believe you have a future.'"
Another fundamental distortion of “wealth thinking,” in Florek’s view, is the idea that individuals produce value in isolation. It’s simply not true, she says. Everything happens in the context of community. In telling her own story she’s quick to remind listeners that she never acted alone, naming and embracing the mentors, friends, thinkers, and especially sisters who’ve shared in her life and work. This relationship-minded lens is a defining aspect of her investing “Spidey sense.” To assess a potential investment, she says, “I talk to people. In the early days, it would be, ‘Why do you think this? And what's your plan B if this doesn't work?’ I was gauging their level of commitment. And the other thing is, you better have a whole bunch of people supporting you. This better be the community. I'm not going to fund one person's idea.”
Florek is at work on a book, tentatively titled Investing for Justice: The Pioneering Efforts of Catholic Religious Women. Through their direct investing, and via collaborative vehicles like RCIF, the labor of women in religious communities comes full circle to support other women and their children, a key social-impact criterion for the investments.
Getting back to this terrible past year, Florek turns to a female image to reassure us that it’s ok: yes, systems seem to be breaking down, but that can be creative in a world that needs to change. “As hard as this is, as painful as it is,” she says, “it is nature and that loving energy that I call God saying something new has to be birthed. And in the birthing, every mother knows, there's a point at which you think you're going to die in order to bring forth new life.”