Our voice, our money, our practices: re-introducing the issues we care about

For nearly 100 years, Amalgamated Bank has fought for a more just and sustainable world. As a bank founded by a union of immigrants, Amalgamated has long considered itself the bank for the people, advocating for workers and immigrant rights while offering unique financial services and banking solutions catered to the needs of marginalized groups.

Recognizing the dangers of economic exploitation, Amalgamated expanded its vision from providing affordable and accessible banking services to all, to providing banking that furthers economic, social, racial, and environmental justice. This vision powers everything we do as a bank: from the clients we work with, to the organizations we support, to the products and services we offer, and to work culture we foster.

This is how we’ve built Amalgamated’s long-standing reputation as America’s socially responsible bank. We are unmatched in the banking world in our dedication to justice and equity for all people and our planet. Yet, every year we challenge ourselves to do better.

Over the years, we have used our voice as a bank to take a stand and position ourselves behind these issues of justice that we care about. This year, as we reflected on current events and a world getting through a pandemic, we noticed how much this crisis period has affected the rate of change and social progress. With this in mind, we revisited our issues we care about pages and found that they were not fully reflective of our evolved stances, nor did they fully encompass our scope of work in these issue areas. We concluded that an update to this work was essential to our mission as a bank.

We first noticed a notable gap in our repertoire of issues that we care about, indicating at least three key issues that absolutely needed to be added: racial justice, voting rights, and economic justice. How could we call ourselves social justice leaders without explicitly calling for the dismantling of inherently racist structures and institutions oppressing Black, Indigenous, and People of Color for hundreds of years? How could we ignore the attacks on democracy and tactical suppression of votes in marginalized communities to keep BIPOC, immigrant, or LGBTQ+ voices stifled? As a bank that centers its entire mission and vision around economic justice, how could we neglect to have a specific message around what this would look like to us?

In recent years, Amalgamated has led the finance sector on these issues through policy endorsements, campaign partnerships, and distribution of funds and philanthropic dollars. Our practices as a bank and an employer have evolved to ensure values-alignment across all scopes of work. Now, by adding these three new issues we care about, we’re keeping an open record of our work around these issues, re-committing to our stance, and using our platform to inspire others in the sector to follow suit.

At Amalgamated, we also recognize that historically marginalized communitsies live complex lives, where social and political issues intersect, at the same time compounding on each other. Issues are not siloed and can impact several people, groups, and organizations at one time. To reach a truly equitable and just world, it is important that we recognize the roles these overlapping dynamics play in our policies, activism, and organization. We challenged ourselves to think more deeply about the intersectionality of these issues and how we can better confront these issues from a holistic perspective.

As a bank, we understand the value of our impact specifically through our voice, our money, and our practices. We felt that the issues we care about should more clearly reflect our impact across these areas.
 
Standing in solidarity with our clients and stakeholders, we are working to end social, racial, economic, and environmental injustice through our products, people, and internal culture. We are committed to contributing to the thousands of groups across the country actively working on dismantling systems of discrimination and oppression.  Through the revamp of our issues we care about pages, we feel recharged in the pursuit of our mission as America’s socially responsible bank.