Dena Jo Squyres, like a typical 16 year-old girl, enjoys hanging out with her friends, shopping and playing softball. But Dena — a student at the Cherokee Nation’s Sequoyah High School in Oklahoma — can add entrepreneur, saver and spokeswoman to her list of after-school activities.

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Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) provide financial services to economically disadvantaged people and communities throughout the United States. While CDFIs share the goals of promoting community development and meeting the needs of underserved populations, the types of institutions, corporate structures, products, and markets served vary widely.

Despite enormous growth in recent years, CDFIs are still relatively unknown. The CDFI Data Project is a collaborative effort by the industry to quantify its size, activities and impact. The data is used to improve how the institutions function and to attract additional support for the field.

CFED coordinated the CDFI Data Project in its early years and wrote the first report—Community Development Financial Institutions: Providing Capital, Building Community, Creating Impact FY 2001—published based on its work. CFED remains on the project's advisory committee.

The latest report from the CDFI Data Project, CDFIs: Providing Capital, Building Community, Creating Impact, analyzes fiscal year 2004 data collected through the CDFI Data Project from 517 CDFIs.

For more information about the CDFI Data Project contact Beth Lipson of Opportunity Finance Network. The project is funded by the Ford Foundation and the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.