Rafia Zahir-Uddin
Vice President of Corporate Responsibility, JPMorgan Chase
Age: 35
Industry experience: 14 years
Coming from the world of government administration, Rafia Zahir-Uddin has helped JPMorgan Chase to provide $1 million in community investments in Connecticut in 2023 as its vice president for corporate responsibility. She takes a hands-on approach in going to the communities and speaking to local nonprofits and organizations to establish local roots amid Chase’s expansion nationwide, including Connecticut.
She started her career in healthcare and public policy with AIDS United for almost three years, then went to complete her masters degree in public administration at Cornell University. Prior to joining Chase and being involved in bank philanthropy, Zahir-Uddin moved to New York City from Washington D.C. and served the city’s Department of Small Business Services as director of its workforce development division, assisting training and workforce development during the pandemic.
Q: With the expansion of JPMorgan Chase in various states such as Connecticut, how does Chase decide where to put community investments?
A: I Our foundation really focuses in on funding four key pillars, which are essentially jobs and skills or workforce development; supporting small businesses particularly owned by people of color, women, and veterans; neighborhood development, which often comes down to a lot of innovative interventions around affordable housing; and then the last is financial health, which is different than financial literacy, and instead looks at asset and wealth building interventions that could be overlaid into the other three pillars. We make sure we do equitable investments in communities and be able to innovate and scale them.
I think our biggest strategy to understand where and how to invest is really coming to communities and talking with local organizations. We don’t just come in and make a grant. We likely will have spent at least several months to a year if we don’t know the partners in the community, to develop those relationships, to understanding the local context, before we make a grant to any organization. For example, in Connecticut, we recognize that there’s no countywide governing structure, which can make it very challenging to look at how do you invest. So we are talking to organizations that have both a regional and statewide focus to build those partnerships and help understand where we can have the most impact with the grant dollars that we invest.
One example is we partnered with the Women’s Business Development Council over the last three years to help women owned businesses, especially businesses owned by women of color that don’t have resources to launch, grow and scale their businesses. WBDC is a trusted entity across the state, and we are supporting their Equity Match Grant Program to provide capital for growth, and Business Coaching Program that provides technical assistance for women owned businesses.
Q: What are and how big are the needs of communities in Connecticut?
A: To take into context, generally, we never have enough money to share in terms of grant capital because the needs in any community are always so vast. Connecticut is a unique state, as there are parts of Fairfield County that can often be considered an extension of New York City because so many people live in Fairfield County and commute to New York. Fairfield County’s housing challenges are very different from Eastern Connecticut and Litchfield County’s. That’s why we continue to support and have significantly invested in data sharing – research and white papers – of Fairfield County Community Foundation and The Housing Collective to really understand what are the housing needs [in different counties], but our grant capital is never going to be able to build the amount of housing that’s needed.
Another is jobs and skills. Connecticut has such amazing talent, as well as great employers. One of the nuances we saw is that employers in particular had a really challenging time with getting individuals back to work. And I think in places where transportation is an issue has a much more significant challenge than in places where transportation isn’t an issue. So the challenges and needs are going to be context-specific to where you are. But we try to be thoughtful in terms of where can we invest and be able to test, innovate, and scale promising solutions.
Q: How do you select organizations and process grants?
A: Think there’s no one size fits all, and it all happens in the community. I spend a lot of time coming to Connecticut, meeting with partners, and actually going to their organization – seeing their neighborhoods, talking to folks across their organization – before we even make a grant. I think developing trusted relationships comes first before we just provide grant dollars, and quite frankly, that happens quite a bit.
For example, prior to our investment in LISC Connecticut since 2022, we spent time going to Hartford meeting with their team, and with local CDCs [community development corporations] across the state that are led by people of color, to understand what are the challenges and pain points they are experiencing and where philanthropy could be helpful before making a grant. That took about a year to do. There’s no one one way to go about it, but it has to be community driven and we need to hear from partners to understand. We can do that through site visits, hosting community roundtables, hosting them in our branches, and visiting organizations and hearing from individuals impacted by programs to understand the needs of the local community.
Q: What is next for JPMorgan Chase’s philanthropy in Connecticut in 2024 and beyond?
A: We’re in the process of looking at our prospective partners right now.But I think in line with our branch expansion, we’re trying to better assess where do we have a footprint, where we really should be having conversations with local organizations and nonprofits that we haven’t had relationships with before. Are there parts of Connecticut or counties that we haven’t invested in thoughtfully, or do need to reconsider what our investment strategy looks like?
We are also thinking of better aligning one or two of our key pillars for more impact. One is small businesses that we’re really invested in and thinking about how do we better support businesses owned by people of color, particularly Black and Hispanic [-owned businesses]? That’s a huge emphasis for us. The second is around jobs and skills. Connecticut, in particular, has a higher unemployment rate than other states in New England (3.8 percent as of December 2023), and we are thinking about what are some of the supportive and wrap-around services that individuals need in order to get connected to employment in different counties.
Q: Chase is a big bank expanding in New England, including Connecticut. How would you compare the bank’s ability to provide for local communities in your areas of expansion versus the community banks that have local connections and philanthropic programs in their DNA?
A: I cannot speak for other community banks, but I will say that while we are a global bank, we really focus on partnerships or relationships with trusted local organizations and serve local communities. The corporate responsibility team, we like to meet with partners regularly, going to events, volunteering, understanding the local context and becoming a part of the local community. Building those relationships is something that we really pride ourselves on. We might be a global firm, but everything that we do is in the context of our local community is local.
Also, I think what is unique to JPMorgan Chase is that we look at our grants as ‘risk capital’ to test, innovate and scale promising solutions. I think that is a form of strategic philanthropy. Grant capital is just one aspect of corporate responsibility. We also have so much business expertise where we can bring in additional resources, technical expertise, information, or relationships that maybe a family foundation wouldn’t be able to do. An example is to bring my own experience in internal hiring practices to these organizations [through volunteerism] and help them to improve their recruiting process, and identify where do we need to develop relationships.
Zahir-Uddin’s Favorite Hobbies
- Running marathons
- Listening to podcasts, like “The Daily” by the New York Times)
- Trying different dessert places
- Hiking in national parks
- Reading “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho twice a year
