Clifford N. Rosenthal. Cliff Rosenthal joined the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions (Federation) in 1980 and served as its chief executive since 1983. Mr. Rosenthal helped design and later managed one of the earliest community development finance intermediaries in the United States – the Capitalization Program for CDCUs, which currently has more than $50 million invested in low-income credit unions. Under his leadership, the Federation has developed a broad range of programs, ranging from Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) and microlending support to a campus-based professional development program, the CDCU Institute™. He has personally assisted in the organizing of a dozen new CDCUs, and is the primary author of Organizing Credit Unions: A Manual.
He co-founded of the national Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Coalition, which spearheaded the formation of the federal CDFI Fund under the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and served as its first elected Chairman. Rosenthal also initiated the New York State CDFI Coalition, which won the establishment of a state CDFI Fund in 2007.
From 1989 through 1991, Mr. Rosenthal served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve System and has been a member of the Community Advisory Board of the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank and its predecessors for more than a decade. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of the Southern New Hampshire University School of Community Economic Development, serves on the Board of Directors of the Social Investment Forum and on the advisory board of Wall Street Without Walls. In October 2002, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Rosenthal to the Consumer Council of New York City, and in 2008, to the advisory board of the city’s Office of Financial Empowerment.
Rosenthal has received the top individual award from the credit union movement (NCUF Herb Wegner Award, 2005) and the Opportunity Finance Network (Ned Gramlich Memorial Award, 2008). He was a Charles Revson Foundation Fellow for the Future of the City of New York (1983-84) and received postgraduate training in the management of financial institutions at Columbia University, where he also obtained his B.A. and M.A. degrees.
