Douglas J. Bystry has been lending in low-income communities since the early nineties. This is how he got here, and why he ended up writing about it.
Doug ran a nonprofit for eight years at the start of his career. He believed in that work and still does.
What those years gave him was a look at how these organizations operate day to day, which isn’t always how they describe themselves in an annual report. He is still not sure most boards know the difference.
He founded Clearinghouse in 1996 and structured it as a for-profit company. At the time that was close to unheard of in this field, and he was asked about it constantly.
There are roughly 1,400 certified community development financial institutions, CDFIs, in the country now. Very few are set up the way Clearinghouse is. Doug has raised and deployed over $2 billion across his career, a good deal of it through the company, and paying taxes hasn’t stopped any of it from getting done.
He structured it that way because he couldn’t see why the work needed an exemption. Thirty years on, he still hasn’t found a good answer.
CDFI Fund, list of currently certified CDFIs, August 2026
Lake Forest, California · Thirtieth year
Mission-driven, and taxed
Across his career, not Clearinghouse alone
Including extensive work in Indian Country
Doug co-founded FVLCRUM Funds, a $300 million fund working on the minority wealth gap. He sits on the COIN Advisory Board at the California Department of Insurance, which is working to get more insurance industry money into community investment. Before any of this he served on a city council and as a Housing Commissioner in Orange County. He is a UCLA graduate.
He didn’t plan on writing a book. He kept ending up in rooms where he was the only person who had run an organization both ways, and the same questions came up every time.
The book is where he works through them, one sector at a time.
Alongside speaking and consulting, Doug wants to spend more of his time in classrooms. He is available as a guest lecturer and is interested in teaching nonprofit management at the college and university level, where the questions in the book tend to get their sharpest answers.