Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Begins with One Person, One Community at a Time
JPMorgan Chase Puts its People and Money to Work in Communities of Color
Abel Tapia turned 18 during the COVID-19 lockdown and never got to experience an official high school graduation or prom. His commencement in Spring 2020 coincided with widespread protests over the murder of George Floyd. As a young Latino man living on Chicago’s South Side, he felt proximity to much of what was happening.
Despite challenging external circumstances, Tapia earned outstanding grades and had a perfect attendance record. That made him eligible to apply and be selected to join The Fellowship Initiative (TFI), a program that offers comprehensive support to young men of color high school students to help them achieve education and career success. Facilitated by JPMorgan Chase, TFI helps create opportunity for young men of color by engaging them in a comprehensive, three-year hands-on enrichment program that includes academic support, college access and persistence services, leadership development and mentoring at a critical juncture in their lives.
As part of the program, Tapia was paired with Victoria Walden, a vice president at JPMorgan Chase based in Chicago. Tapia attended TFI sessions on Saturdays and received help with everything from tutoring to therapy to resume building. His relationship with Walden provided a positive role model who served as an intentional accountability partner. They met in person once a month, staying in touch by text message.
(L-R) Leonor Castillo, Abel's mom; Abel Tapia; and Victoria Walden, VP, JPMorgan Chase, Chicago
At Tapia’s request, they took a trip to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that gave him exposure to a different type of neighborhood as well as an all-important opportunity to try sushi. Later, his cohort travelled to Costa Rica on a cultural leadership expedition where Fellows stayed with families in a rural community, learned about the country’s history and played basketball with local kids in the evening.
“I could see Abel growing as a global citizen. He realized how easy it was to just pack a bag and go,” said Walden.
Tapia went on to study at Robert Morris University in Chicago with interests in photography and computer science.
“It feels amazing to graduate and be the first in my family to finish high school,” Tapia said. “I need to persevere and be a role model for my family. When my parents were my age, I was born, and all they have ever wanted was for me to succeed,” he said.
The odds were not in Tapia’s favor. According to a “Community Data Snapshot” report released by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning in 2022, only 11.6% of residents in South Chicago earned a college degree, as compared with 24% of Chicago’s population overall. The median income for residents in South Chicago — 75% of whom identify as Black, compared with 28.8% across all of Chicago — is $39,798, nearly half as much as the median income for all Chicago residents.
Since its launch in 2010, The Fellowship Initiative (TFI) — JPMorgan Chase’s flagship college and career readiness program — has engaged more than 600 JPMorgan Chase employees as mentors and helped over 750 young men of color across seven U.S. cities achieve academic and professional success. To date, 95% of Fellows have graduated high school and enrolled in college or pursued a post-secondary pathway, benefitting from the program’s combination of mentorship from JPMorgan Chase volunteers, academic and socio-emotional support, leadership, and networking opportunities.
In 2020, as part of its broader commitment to drive a more inclusive economy by investing in improved outcomes for young men of color, the firm committed to expanding the program for another 10 years into new cities, tripling the number of students served to 1,000 and supporting young women of color. While the numbers don’t reflect scale, the ripple effect of growing networks for even one young person with promise can be multifold; add in hundreds or a thousand and that can have a meaningful impact on families, communities, generations to come.
“Interacting with JPMorgan Chase employees who are invested in the TFI Fellows’ success can be life-altering for many of the students,” said Kyle Williams, head of Mid-Atlantic Healthcare, Higher Education and Nonprofit Commercial Banking and co-Executive Sponsor of TFI in Washington, D.C. “When we expose Fellows to new experiences, we hope it will inspire them to work harder and to set their goals to something loftier than what they may have originally considered.”
The firm’s efforts to support communities of color are intentional given the reality of racial and economic inequity across the country. National data shows Black Americans have twice the rate of unemployment as their white counterparts, according to the “Economic State of Black America in 2020” report put out by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee in 2020. The same report also shows that Black Americans earn less, own less and even die sooner than their white counterparts.
JPMorgan Chase committed $30 billion towards its Racial Equity Commitment to help close the racial wealth gap and drive economic inclusion by providing more opportunities for homeownership, increasing access to affordable housing, growing small business and bolstering financial health for Black, Hispanic and Latino communities across the nation.
“Stories like Abel’s and so many others inspire us all. These are our future leaders who have overcome adversity and shown remarkable resilience and grit in the process,” said Diedra Porche, managing director and head of consumer banking’s community and business development division. “As a firm, we’re doing our part to advance economic mobility for our leaders of tomorrow and their families, as well as ensure diverse communities such as Chicago’s South Side are part of the financial ecosystem.”
By the end of 2021, the firm deployed $18 billion of the $30 billion commitment, mostly in the form of increased lending to support affordable housing and making homeownership more accessible to Black, Hispanic and Latino families. The work happens at the local level, with Chase community managers and community branches that help connect unbanked and underbanked community members with financial services and tools to be able to establish equity, own their first homes, secure small business loans to start and scale their businesses, connect to educational and career opportunities and create wealth generation for their families’ futures.
The community branches, located in markets throughout the U.S., including most recently in Baltimore and Philadelphia, take a uniquely grassroots approach in communities that have faced historical barriers to banking to help offer greater access to affordable home loans, low-cost checking accounts and financial health education workshops. This includes local and diverse hiring, new or renovated branches and free community programming for residents and small business owners.
“Our commitment is changing the lens of how we define business success by integrating racial equity outcomes,” said Carolina Jannicelli, head of JPMorgan Chase Community Impact, who also facilitates the firm’s Racial Equity Commitment. “We’re seeing that mindset being adopted across the firm with businesses innovating beyond the original commitment. We have a long list of new products and initiatives that have been launched above and beyond the $30 billion. This shows our leaders and colleagues are leaning into the mission and answering the call to advance racial equity,” she said.
Despite the multi-pronged efforts and investments, there’s a sober acknowledgement that the problems are systemic, historic, and ingrained. The solutions cannot come soon enough. Meaningful progress towards healing the inequities that Black Americans continue to face cannot be solved by any one entity or sector. It is only through sustained collaboration between public and private sectors — government, companies, nonprofits, and community leaders — that we will truly move the needle. Each brings invaluable capabilities. The corporate sector has the resources and business driver mindset. Nonprofit partners offer their networks on the ground in the communities where the work needs to happen. The public sector can enact policies that undergird our systems. Without any of the three, we fail. With all three rowing together, we can drive meaningful change. We’ve seen it in Detroit, where our collaboration and investments working closely with public and nonprofit partners over close to a decade has resulted in thousands of Detroiters receiving services to improve their financial health. This includes access to job training programs, capital, and technical assistance to grow businesses. Our public-private partnership has also resulted in the creation of new jobs and affordable housing units.
If the challenges feel insurmountable and the impact of our efforts seem small, we must remember that the journey towards a more equitable tomorrow begins with one person, one mentor, one program at a time.
About the Author:
Khamla Erskine is the Community & Business Development Program and Operations Director at JPMorgan Chase and Executive Sponsor for JPMorgan Chase’s The Fellowship Initiative NYC. In Khamla’s 20 years at JPMorgan Chase, she’s held various strategy, technology, and program management roles within Risk, the Commercial Bank and the Investment Bank. Most recently, she led the Network Expansion Community & Business Development team and worked closely with various internal partners to expand the Consumer Bank’s branch network to 25 new states and Washington DC.
Khamla graduated from New York University’s Stern School of Business with a BS in Information Systems and a minor in political science and is a proud Stuyvesant High School alumnus. She is very active in her local community and has served as co-chair of the Village of Croton-on-Hudson Diversity & Inclusion Committee, and co-founder of Croton Face Masks Makers. Khamla is also a competition judge for FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics and volunteers with the International Rescue Committee. She was nominated for the Westchester County Executive George Latimer's WOW award in March 2021 for her contributions to the Westchester County, NY community during the pandemic.
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Acknowledgements:
A special thanks to Terry Edmonds for his support and collaboration on this piece.
LEFT: ALI Senior Fellow Terry Edmonds delivered the keynote address and met with The Fellowship Initiative graduate, Wilmer Aviles, at the June 23 graduation gala in New York City. Wilmer is a 2023 graduate of Park East High School in East Harlem. He will be a freshman at Gettysburg College in September.
RIGHT: Terry Edmonds meets with Khamla Erskine, Executive Sponsor of the JPMorgan Chase Fellowship Initiative, at the graduation gala on June 23 in New York.