by Amy Rennison - Key Players -

WHO’S WHO IN MICROFINANCE: Ron Grzywinski

Ron Grzywinski is a co-founder of Shorebank, America’s first community development bank and current Chair of the Board of Shorebank Corporation.

He was born in Chicago, in the city’s South side in 1936. He gained B.S. in English, with a minor in history from Loyola University

After working briefly for IBM, he turned his talents to banking. His banking career began at the First National Bank of Lockport, and he moved to the Hyde Park Bank in 1967.

The significant step into community development banking came in 1973, when he and three other colleagues – Milton Davis, James Fletcher and Mary Houghton – purchased the South Shore Bank (eventually re-naming it ShoreBank) in Chicago’s South Shore neighbourhood to fight redlining. Redlining is a term coined in the 1960s to describe the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate an area where banks would not invest or provide financial services, which were often racially determined areas. By providing African Americans, low-income residents and inner-city businesses with access to financial resources and information unavailable anywhere else, ShoreBank revitalised Chicago’s disinvested South and West Side neighbourhoods.

Since inception, ShoreBank has grown considerably. Although it remains headquartered in Chicago, ShoreBank Corporation has subsidiary banks in Cleveland and Ilwaco, along with affiliated nonprofits in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Ilwaco and Portland; business development services in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; an international consulting arm with ShoreBank Advisory Services, whose consultants have been working in more than 40 countries around the world providing financial literacy and wealth building programs to job training, retention and placement programs. In 2003, ShoreBank sponsored the creation of an equity fund that invests in local banks in Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.

By 2004 it had provided USD 2 billion in cumulative lending to underserved communities and had also spread into environmental and conservation lending, with the establishment of ShoreBank Pacific, the nation’s first commercial bank formed to support environmentally sustainable development.

Mr Grzywinski’s other notable achievements include being the only banker in 1977 to testify in favour of the Community Reinvestment Act which required banks to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they did business, including low and middle-income residents.

In the 1980s he worked in Bangladesh with Muhammad Yunus through a grant from the Ford Foundation to help design and incorporate the Grameen Bank.

In 1985, he worked closely with then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to set up the Southern Development Bancorporation, a community development bank serving rural Arkansans.

In addition to ShoreBank, Mr Grzywinski currently works with the boards of the Southern Development Bancorporation in Arkansas, the Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh, XacBank in Mongolia, the Aga Khan Foundation in Pakistan, and the Ashoka Global Academy in India. He is a charter member of the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion.

In 1988, Mr Grzywinski received the Medal for Entrepreneurial Excellence from the Yale School of Management. In 2005, he received the John W. Gardner Leadership Award from the Independent Sector, the first person from a for-profit business to win this award. In 2006, Ron (along with ShoreBank co-founder Mary Houghton) received the Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award at Harvard University. In November of 2007, he was added to the “America’s Top Leaders 2007” list by US News & World Report.

Amy Rennison, MicroCapital writer

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