Editor’s note: Entrepreneur and finance executive Bill Bynum, a UNC-CH graduate, is delivering a keynote speech at the NC Rural Center’s NC Rural Assembly event, which takes place Thursday and Friday in Raleigh. In an exclusive interview with WRAL TechWire, Bynum talks about his North Carolina roots and his mission to help people find success.
RALEIGH – Bill Bynum, 60, grew up in small mill town in central North Carolina. But for the last 25 years, he has served as CEO of HOPE — a credit union, loan fund and policy center dedicated to providing credit and other services to underserved populations in the lower Mississippi Delta, home to some of America’s most entrenched poverty.
While other financial institutions across the nation are closing in low-income communities, HOPE is bucking the trend. Since 2007, HOPE has provided more than $163.3 million in mortgage loans, and financed medical centers, schools and manufacturing facility expansions.
Bill Bynum, CEO of HOPE
Based out of Jackson, Mississippi, Bynum is set to appear as a speaker at NC Rural Center’s Revving the Rural Engine: Local Leaders Driving Innovation at the Hilton North Raleigh Midtown on November 15-16.
WRAL TechWire’s Chantal Allam recently got to chat with him about growing up in Bynum, the Klu Klux Klan, his early days at UNC with Roy Cooper, and his mission for advancing economic opportunity for the disenfranchised.
- What originally motivated you to get into this line of work?
I graduated from the UNC Chapel Hill [in 1980], and had my eye set on law school, but I got wait-listed. I decided I needed to work, and I kind of stumbled into a career with a group in Durham called Self-Help. It helped employees that were losing their jobs in the mid 80s with all the plant closings. The jobs of businesses didn’t close oftentimes because they weren’t viable. The wages were lower in other countries south of the border, so we would work with them and develop business plans to try and structure an employee buyout.
Sometimes when we would go to traditional banks to get financing, we would get a polite response. Sometimes I thought it could have been more polite. More often than not, we were told no. We were working with women, rural people, people of color – not your traditional business owners. But the fact that prior ownership decided to walk away, it was hard to get financing. So we decided to structure our own financial institution.
A group of employees had a bake sale, and that was the first deposit in Self-Help Credit Union – $77. (It was the nation’s first statewide development bank). The next thing we knew, we had more deposits than we had employee-owned businesses. So we broadened it to rural businesses, woman-owned businesses, businesses that are owned by people of color, and it became a bank for the underbanked.
- In 1994, you moved from North Carolina to Mississippi to become the founding CEO of the Enterprise Corporation on the Delta, and a year later founded HOPE. Since then, it’s grown into a $300 million community development financial institution with more than 38,500 members, providing more than $406 million in business loans. You’re obviously doing something right. What is it?
It’s just doing what is right.
HOPE Credit Union
Regardless of their circumstances, people need the same thing. They need a good job, housing, a good education, access to quality healthcare. And at some point, all those things require financial tools. People, just because of who their parents were or where they were born, shouldn’t have to pay predatory rates for basic necessities.
We’ve made financial services available in a responsible way. People appreciate that and respond to it. It’s owned by the members, those are the primary shareholders. So rather than a handful of wealthy individuals being the primary beneficiaries, the profits go back to the members in the form of lower rates on their loans and higher returns on their deposits. It’s a sound business model. Unfortunately, there are gaps in the market that we position ourselves to address.
- Your reach is wide. You work to improve lives in economically distressed parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama.
We’ve been busy. We work in a region that is home to more than a third of the counties in the US that have had a poverty rate of 20 percent for at least three decades. The entrenched poverty is often mired in a history of discrimination and disenfranchisement. There are a lot of gaps to be filled in this part of the world.
- How were you able to grow the credit union?
It’s been by necessity. We’ve been able to attract people who care about their communities, who roll up their sleeves and are innovative about how to do this work. We see the financial services industry shifting, and there are gaps in the market. We’re strategic about where we target our efforts and go into communities that invite us in. So it’s a joint effort. It’s us doing the things we can, and people saying we need your help, and together we work to try to close gaps.
- How many other credit unions are there out there, doing what you do in the Deep South?
Not enough.
There is a network of economic development credit unions across the country. They’re typically going to be smaller. Banks are still the primary source of credit and financial services. There are some banks that try to do the right thing, but when they don’t, it’s really important that you have community development financial institutions like HOPE. We are a credit union.
There are other community development financial institutions, which are banks that have a priority of serving economically distressed people and places. There are a couple of thousand across the country, but they range in size. There are none that are as large as some of the smallest banks. We’re climbing up a steep hill.
- Take us to the beginning. What was it like growing up in Bynum, North Carolina?
Bynum is a small mill town in Chatham County, not far between Pittsboro and Chapel Hill. I understand the town was named after the people who owned my ancestors. (That’s how he got the surname Bynum.)
I grew up with family, and had a grandmother, great grandmother and cousins all around the neighborhood. The schools were still segregated. I went to the all-black school for a few years; then I went to the predominantly white school for a few years, then the schools integrated when I was in 7th grade. I had friends in both black and white communities. It was a good place to grow up.
It was interesting, though. Every Thursday night, the Klan was still around and they’d have a meeting down the road at a barbecue joint. It got your attention. I was still in the first grade. Folks would come by and throw rocks in our window. It was unsettling, without a doubt.
As the schools integrated, we worked through that. I got involved in student government. I was my senior class president at Northwood High. I ended up at UNC Chapel Hill. I was there around the time that Roy Cooper was. He was the student attorney general, and I was the chairman of the black student movement on campus. We got to know each other a little bit.
- What message will you be bringing to the NC Rural Center summit?
It’s probably the same message that I’ve been sharing when I started this work in North Carolina some 30 years ago. We have a lot more in common that divides us. Everybody needs and wants the same things for their families and their communities. They want their kids to do better than they did. That used to be a certainty 40 years ago. Now it’s a coin flip.
There’s incredible disparity, particularly across the South in terms of someone’s ability to climb the economic ladder, and we need to address that, because the country is getting more diverse. We cannot survive leaving large segments of the population on the outside of the economy, looking in. We need to be intentional about closing those gaps. Financial tools are a part of that, and those financial tools help foster quality education, access to healthcare, decent affordable housing. When kids are in a good environment, they do better in school. They’re more healthy and productive, and that’s something that benefits us all.
- What advice would you give to rural leaders coming up?
People need to move away from the divisive rhetoric that we hear so much in the news and in the political arena, and talk to our neighbors, and realize that we have a lot in common. It really falls on us to make sure that our community and our children are positioned to succeed and prosper. It’s great when politicians get along and compromise and invest in rural people and places, but [they] are disproportionally left behind. So it’s up to us to come together and hold them accountable and to invest in our own communities.
My experience has been, when we join forces and pool our resources to help our neighbors, we all win. That’s increasingly apparent to me that’s what it’s going to take for rural communities, and the country as a whole.
- Do you get back much to North Carolina?
I get there when I can, but I stay pretty busy back in the Deep South. I’m looking forward to coming back to the Rural Center. I learned a lot during my time there. I met a lot of people, and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with them and also spending time with friends and family. I’m going to see my mother.
