After a battle with a major illness, Al Piña decided to use his successful Fortune 25 corporate skills, as well as his military service experience, that led to several business and military awards and medals, to give back to community and country.
He began working with minority community organizations around the United States for the past 16 years to including serving in a senior executive role with the largest community development corporation in the United States. Through either his leadership, or his participation in financial institutional CRA commitments, it has resulted in over $700 billion of additional Bank commitments for community re-investment into minority communities throughout the United States.
Al Pina started out his community economic development career as V. P. of Development for the National Council of La Raza and a team member that launched the countries first minority focused housing and commercial real estate CDFI. Al Piña went on to serve as Vice President of Development for the country’s largest Community Development Corporation (TELACU-Los Angeles).
In 2005, in partnership with the Greenlining Institute, Al Piña took his efforts to Florida and founded the Florida Minority Community Reinvestment Coalition, which is Florida’s first state wide minority focused community economic development collaboration with over 105 participating minority community organizations. As Chairman of FMCRC, Al Piña is utilizing this position to advocate for increased community reinvestment for Florida minority communities. Al Pina led the negotiating team that was successful in the development of over $120 billion dollars of community reinvestment commitments to Florida’s minority and underserved communities by Regions, Wachovia/Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase and Fifth Third Bank.
Seeing the importance of access to capital for minority communities towards reducing the rising racial wealth gap, Al Pina had a focus on access to capital for minority communities throughout the United States. Since 2005, Al Pina has assisted in the development and launching of over 16 minority focused community development funds, with over $6 billion dollars of capital. He also was a development team member of two national Hispanic investment funds with a combined investment capital of $310 million. In addition, Al Pina launched and led the efforts for Florida’s first ever minority focused affordable housing fund through a Tampa based CDFI.
Understanding the importance of job creation in low-moderate income communities to battle poverty, Al Pina launched Florida’s first minority focused job creation event Let’s Do Business Florida. In partnership with over 150 minority organizations and major banks and corporations, Let’s Do Business Florida focuses on job creation through increased construction contracts to minority construction firms and the development of self-sufficient minority nonprofits to allow them to create incremental income streams to fund job creation programs.
Al Piña has worked with minority communities around the United States advocating the For-Profit Community Development Model. Al Pina has worked with over 180 minority community economic development organizations throughout the United States to assist in developing and expanding their asset base that would allow them to increase their capacity and ability to be self- sufficient.
In 2014, to focus on increasing home equity wealth for minority homeowners and to demonstrate Al Pina’s market based affordable housing model that could be replicated by other nonprofits to generate both profit and affordable housing, FMCRC launched into affordable housing development. In less than 4 years, Al Pina’s Assets & Hope (
www.assetsandhope.org) Market Based For-Profit Affordable Housing model has resulted in increasing home values in predominate minority neighborhoods by over $220 million that significantly increased minority household wealth.
In 2018, FMCRC launched into affordable housing rentals to demonstrate how the FMCRC Market Based For-Profit Affordable Housing model could be utilized to provide affordable rentals while at same time producing a monthly income stream and significantly increasing the non-profits asset/equity position. In 2014, FMCRC started out with less than $25,000 of equity and now have over $7 million of assets that is a result of FMCRC’s affordable rental base (comp market values of rental assets). In 2020, FMCRC launched Section 8 affordable housing business model to demonstrate how the For Profit Model could produce high quality affordable Section 8 housing (in predominately middle-upper income census tracts) while at same time producing profit and significantly increasing the equity levels on the FMCRC balance sheet.
