Since 2018, Echoing Green and the Citi Foundation have been partners in building a more inclusive social entrepreneurship sector by supporting emerging leaders that serve and represent communities of color. Over the course of the partnership, Citi Foundation has directly invested $2.5 million in emerging leaders of color; leveraged nearly 350 Citi employee volunteers to provide more than 3,000 hours of technical support to leaders; and helped convene nearly 300 people to share insights and learnings on building a supportive environment for leaders and communities of color. In 2021, the Citi Foundation expanded its support with a two-year, $2.5 million grant for Echoing Green’s newly launched Racial Equity Philanthropic Fund, which is working to scale social enterprises focusing on racial equity throughout the U.S.

This investment is part of the recently announced Pathways commitment.

Citi Foundation provided a $1 million grant to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) to launch the HBCU Career Incubator Program on 30 HBCU campuses. Over the next two years, this new initiative will provide 2,000 first-year HBCU students with the critical support they need to graduate and to pursue their chosen career paths. TMCF will partner with 30 public HBCUs and will work with campus coordinators, career offices, faculty, and staff to engage selected students in a one-year multi-faceted professional development program

The Financial Health Network launched the groundbreaking Financial Health Pulse Initiative (Pulse) in 2018 to use surveys and data analysis to provide ongoing snapshots of the financial lives of the people and communities of America, along with actionable insights on how to improve financial health. In 2020, the Citi Foundation committed $3 million over three years to support the next phase of the Financial Health Pulse Initiative to shine a spotlight on economic disparities across race, gender and age and identify solutions through comprehensive data sets to dismantle systemic barriers to financial health.

The Citi Foundation continues its long-time partnership with Living Cities as a founding supporter of the Closing the Gaps Network. The network will bring together municipal leaders from cities across the U.S. to understand how systemic racism impacts their cities and residents, and provides support to experiment, document and share lessons learned on how to address racial disparities and how to accelerate the adoption of best practices that close racial income and wealth gaps. The Network builds upon a previous effort, the City Accelerator, which engaged U.S. cities in testing innovations that that applied a racial equity lens to the delivery of municipal services and the design of inclusive public policies.