Olamina partners with organizations that are committed to impact and have worked alongside underrepresented communities.
Current Loan Clients
Community Advisory Board
Olamina Fund is structured to close the funding gap for organizations led by and for community members. We value community relationships as a risk mitigant, and the importance of community representation when serving people. We also value models that place the community at the center of governance and the design of solutions.
As part of the governance for the Fund, we have built-in stakeholder representation through a Community Advisory Board, which advises on strategy, reviews opportunities from a community wealth building perspective, and participates in credit decisions as part of the Credit Committee, which approves all loans. We are also interested in shifting the power dynamics embedded within our current financial system. This diverse group of individuals not only contribute to the decision making of who we fund, but also whose financial contribution we accept in support of our communities.
Cheryl Cherry is the Eastern North Carolina Regional Director of Assistive Technology & Business Development for Self-Help Credit Union. Her diverse knowledge in the financial sector is largely due to many years of experience in various roles such as president, financial accountant, and lender and underwriter for consumer, small business, and mortgage loans. In her current role, she’s had the opportunity to go beyond the financial arena and oversee Self-Help’s assistive technology program, which provides low-cost financing to people living with disabilities.
Cheryl believes that the lack of African-American representation in executive-level roles, and the limited investment in African-American owned businesses by way of limited access to capital and intentional patronage for corporate America, have stifled growth and development in the African-American community for far too long.
Cheryl is interested in the Olamina Fund largely because of its deliberate impact on disenfranchised populations. She believes that people whose identities align with that of her own will benefit from Olamina. She sees serving on the Community Advisory Board as an opportunity that will afford her more ownership in a narrative that is important to her both personally and professionally.
Mariela Cedeño is the Interim Executive Director of Mandela Partners. For over a decade, she has shaped strategies that build the assets of community members, entrepreneurs, farmers, and values-aligned stakeholders. In her current role, she develops and promotes new models for investment, growth, and shared wealth that sustain and elevate community ownership, opportunity and health. Mariela developed Mandela Partners' economic ventures framework, entrepreneurship programming, and Community Capital Fund to increase access to low-cost, relationship-driven capital.
Mariela believes that under-resourced and BIPOC entrepreneurs are a powerful and untapped asset base. If we seek to build thriving, economically resilient, healthy communities, we cannot do so without reinvesting in the communities that have long suffered under legacies of system racism, disinvestment, and extractive economic policies. We need to value community voice and social returns, as highly as the current system values financial returns to investors.
Mariela sees Olamina as a vehicle to not only increase access to capital in BIPOC communities, but also invest in models which create space for BIPOC communities to control that capital. In joining the Community Advisory Board, she is excited about the opportunity to learn and see first hand what a differently imagined economy could look like.
Nikishka Iyengar is an entrepreneur and strategist working at the intersection of finance, equitable development, climate action and racial justice. She is the founder and CEO of The Guild, a community wealth building organization focused on closing the racial wealth gap and building community resilience through real estate, entrepreneurship programs, and access to capital for historically marginalized communities.
In order for finance to shift from extractive, exploitative and racist practices, Nikishka believes the risk-return tradeoff that underpins investment decisions needs to fundamentally change. Due to systemic and institutional racism, Black, indigenous and other communities of color have been deemed “riskier” and thus have either been underinvested in, or invested in ways that have been predatory. To repair this, Nikishka believes it’s essential to factor in the risks all stakeholders, especially Black and Brown communities and the planet bear, not just the risks capital holders bear. She also believes that communities have the solutions to their own problems and need to be invested in in ways that allow for self-determination.
Nikishka sees Olamina’s impact thesis as aligned with her work over the last five years that has focused on closing the racial wealth gap. She believes that there is a potential for high impact with the breadth of what Olamina is doing and the amount of capital it’s stewarding.
Prairie Rose Seminole is a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota, and descendent of the Sahnish/Arikara, Northern Cheyenne, and Lakota Nations. Their work is rooted in making a positive difference for Native people through public policy, community organization, and education. Prairie Rose currently serves as the program manager for Advance Native Political Leadership Action Fund, the only national Native American-led organization working to address the vast inequities and pervasive barriers that exist for Native people to achieve a more reflective democracy in U.S. politics. They have also served on the Midwest advisory council to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, advising on labor, nonprofits, and tribal government, and hosted a radio show focused on community building and reconciliation efforts.
Prairie Rose believes that moving from an unjust to a just system begins with deconstructing systems of oppression, acknowledging the truth of how these systems came to be. They see our economy as one that feeds off the ills that are destroying our earth, separating people, and contributing to the racial and cultural divisions across the country.
Prairie Rose has joined the Community Advisory Board for the opportunity to do work with a group that is willing to invest in organizations that have been left out of systems, and help build their capacity. They have seen little resources going into the hardest-hit communities, and Olamina’s interest in investing in these communities gives them hope.
Service Providers
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