Mission
Reinvestment Partners' mission is to foster healthy and just communities by empowering people, improving places, and influencing policy. We address the problems of poverty and social injustice in the areas of food, housing, community development, health, and financial services.
History
Formed in 1986 as a project of the North Carolina Legal Services, Reinvestment Partners has played a key role in shaping the attitudes and policies of North Carolina’s banks toward CRA and community development. Through challenges of bank mergers, we have secured agreements totaling more than $40 billion in mortgages, small business lending, and community development investments for low-wealth communities. These agreements have led to countless partnerships between banks and nonprofits.
In 1999, Reinvestment Partners began its fight against predatory mortgage lending with its research and protests helping to secure North Carolina’s model anti-predatory mortgage laws. In 2001, we printed the book Too Much Month at the End of the Paycheck: Payday Lending in North Carolina as the beginning of our five-year campaign to end payday lending in North Carolina. We published This is My Home: Opportunities and Challenges for Manufactured Housing in the pursuit of improvements in financing and protections in this housing sector. We targeted refund anticipation loans as a predatory product and contributed to its national demise over a four-year campaign. We are persistent in our pursuit of our mission.
We provide financial literacy through media and community outreach. Reinvestment Partners is the producer and distributor of Nuestro Barrio, an innovate approach of providing education through entertainment in a telenovela format. It has been distributed into more than 25 million households nationwide and won awards for its effectiveness.
Our agency is active in housing and community development. We financed North Carolina’s first nonprofit manufactured housing land trust community in Burnsville. We are engaged in the redevelopment of our East Geer Street neighborhood through commercial revitalization and remove blighted properties throughout Durham and North Carolina.
Reinvestment Partners is a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site that provides job development training and employment to workers providing free tax preparation service. We are also designated by the IRS as a Low-Income Tax Clinic (LITC) that provides educational services statewide on tax filer rights. This program informs our advocacy on client needs and utilizes our media program.
Reinvestment Partners says "no" to what is wrong, "yes" to what is right, and helps build the alternative. We work with whom we can, when we can, with what we have to make a difference in our communities.
