DreamSpring recently attended the 2025 Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) conference in Washington, D.C., joining more than 2,100 community lenders, investors, and advocates working to expand access to capital to small businesses. This gathering for community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and our strategic partners is an annual highpoint in support of economic opportunity through entrepreneurship.
Throughout a jam-packed week, DreamSpring Acting CEO Marisa Barrera, Chief Engagement Officer Amber Kani, and Founder Anne Haines joined ecosystem partners and peers to discuss today’s market needs, funding priorities, and identify opportunities to strengthen support for small business owners. Those conversations reaffirmed our shared goals and surfaced new ideas and avenues for collaboration.
Marisa and Amber were delighted to connect with key funders and collaborators, including Mastercard’s Strive USA program, Target Foundation, Truist Foundation, Wells Fargo, BOK Financial, Goldman Sachs, Woodforest National Bank, Bank of America, and the Microfinance Impact Collaborative. Our partnerships are integral in shaping DreamSpring’s approach to lending and how we can continue to build support systems for entrepreneurs.
A roundtable hosted by JPMorgan Chase brought together CDFIs from the United States and United Kingdom, where the CDFI approach is still relatively new, to compare approaches to capital, sustainability, and scale. Amber shared how DreamSpring is working to grow its lending programs while staying connected to the needs of clients and partners.
The roundtable, guided by Theo Hadjimichael, Matt Woodcock, and Peter Udale of Responsible Finance, opened with reflections on the work of CDFIs on both sides of the Atlantic. Participants included leaders from Community Reinvestment Fund, TruFund, Washington Area Community Investment Fund, Allies for Community Business, Pursuit, Business Enterprise Fund, and LEAF, along with partners from JPMorgan Chase and the U.K. Department for Business and Trade.
We celebrated as LiftFund was recognized at the conference with OFN’s 2025 Outstanding CDFI Award. Each year, the award selects “a CDFI that has gone above and beyond within the last 18 months in serving their communities and driving the CDFI industry forward.” In LiftFund’s case, the award uplifts a decades-long commitment to serving small business owners in communities where traditional financing is out of reach.
The conference’s closing plenary featured a conversation between DreamSpring Founder/Senior Advisor Anne Haines and Janie Barrera, founder of LiftFund. Together, they’ve spent more than 70 years in community lending. Their dialogue traced the evolution of the field from their early days in microfinance to today’s broader lending landscape, with mission and values playing a central role through it all.
OFN41 was an exciting snapshot of today’s microfinance field and an invaluable way to connect with the people and organizations who make our work possible. The insights we walked away with are helping DreamSpring, and the CDFI industry as a whole, better support entrepreneurs in a landscape where new challenges and opportunities are emerging every day.
We’re grateful to OFN for convening the field, as well as to the partners and peers who made the time for honest conversation and reflection. Our work continues, and so do the connections that help sustain it. We’ll see you at OFN42!
