Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 with the purpose of encouraging banks to meet the credit needs of communities in which they operate, inclusive of low-to-moderate income individuals and geographies, consistent with safe an sound banking operations. Since then, the agencies (Federal Reserve, OCC, FDIC) have sought to clarify the CRA regulation several times with the last major revision to the regulation occurring in 1995. In 2014 the agencies and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System conducted a decennial review of the CRA regulation gathering input across the country from public stakeholders, and released a report to Congress in 2017 inclusive of all the public comments and recommendations gathered over a three-year process. On April 3, 2018 the U.S. Department of Treasury released additional recommendations based on stakeholder input, on the modernization of the CRA regulation.

Recognizing the need for the modernization of the CRA regulation, the OCC issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), August 2018 which solicited more than 1500 comments from stakeholders. Community-Up is included in the organizations that provided feedback on the ANPR.

In February 2019, Community-Up hosted a CRA regulatory listening session, inviting stakeholders, nonprofits, financial institutions, community advocates to provide feedback on how to best support Community Development through a CRA Lense. Also in attendance were the regulatory agencies; OCC, FDIC and Federal Reserve. This report details the feedback from that listening session.