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Clifford N. Rosenthal is an internationally recognized innovator, advocate, and developer of programs to provide financial access for low-income and underserved people. He has worked and volunteered for more than 40 years in the cooperative movement, initially in organizing food co-ops for Native American and migrant farmworker organizations, and for more than 30 years in the credit union movement. From 1980 through 2012, he managed Inclusiv (formerly, the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions), the association which now counts more than 500 credit unions serving low-income and minority communities. In 2012 he was recruited to establish the Office of Financial Empowerment at the newly created federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
He developed the first concept paper calling for the creation of the federal Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund and co-founded the grassroots CDFI Coalition. His work has been recognized with the highest awards of the National Credit Union Foundation, the Opportunity Finance Network, the Insight Center for Community Development, the Lawyers Alliance of New York City, and other organizations. In 2019, he was inducted into the African-American Credit Union Coalition Hall of Fame, and in 2024 he was inducted into the national Cooperative Hall of Fame. The Clifford N. Rosenthal Community Center in New Orleans honored his work in recovery from Hurrican Katrina.
In 2024, he published Community Capital: Race, Equity, and the Credit Union Movement (with Michael McCray). In 2018 he published the seminal history, Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement. His first career was as a Russian historian. With Barbara Engel, he coauthored Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar, which has been used in universities since 1975. He was part of the translating team for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Rosenthal's wife, Elayne G. Archer, was a teacher, editor, and the author of Crossing Troubled Waters, the journals of a British war widow, and Who's On Today? about the life of a Brooklyn commune.
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