CPBA’s Executive Director Trinity Tran joins Shelterforce‘s Laboratories of Democracy panel to talk public banking and the state & local policies moving the needle on housing and community investment right now:

“Nobody thinks their tax dollars should be making Jamie Dimon richer while our streets are crumbling and our neighborhoods are deteriorating.”

https://shelterforce.org/2026/07/09/laboratories-of-democracy-emerging-state-and-local-policy-visions-a-shelterforce-webinar/

Trinity Tran: Afternoon, everyone. I’m Trinity Tran, she/her. I’m the cofounder/executive director of the California Public Banking Alliance and Public Bank LA. We have been laser-focused on building the blueprint for socially and environmentally responsible public banks here in California for years and working with our merry band of heroes with communities and local governments to get this really exciting emerging public policy off the ground. We’re in a moment right now where this conversation is really critical. We’re seeing, obviously, federal funding getting gutted on top of local budget deficits, on top of state deficits.

Many of the core funding streams in our communities have been impacted by this fall volatility, from affordable housing, social services, infrastructure. The question and the conversation [is] around how do we pay for it? What can we do at the local level to leverage public resources at scale to be able to build the things we need? That conversation is so relevant, so urgent right now. That’s what we’ve been organizing around. Right now, cities, counties, states are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds. Right now, almost all of it flows to Wall Street banks. They use those funds to generate profit for shareholders while our communities are struggling with basic necessities.

We’re working to change that here in California. Our grassroots-led team passed the California Public Banking Act, which was the nation’s first law, allowing local governments to form their own public banks. We’re working with communities and local governments to get these banks off the ground. We’re also working on the CalAccount program, which, once it’s implemented, [will] be the nation’s first universal banking services program to provide zero-cost, zero-fee, zero-penalty bank accounts for all Californians. That’s going to be crucial, especially for the millions of unbanked [or] underbanked folks here in California who are locked out of the system.

That’s part of our system-changing work. We’re trying to move beyond just patching up the faults of the current system and building a new, evolved system that really works for our people and our planet. This is the moment to do this. With all of these converging financial pressures—from the federal level to the state level to the local level—this is the exact type of bold solution that we think is needed. [I’m] looking forward to digging into public banking a bit more in this webinar and why now is the moment for this fight.