Tim Berry on JPMorgan Chase’s Philanthropy, Advocacy, and Efforts to Revitalize Cities
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Tim berry
To say that Tim Berry has a lot on his plate at JPMorgan Chase would be an understatement.
Berry is global head of corporate responsibility for JPMorgan Chase & Co., overseeing the firm’s government relations, sustainability and philanthropic efforts, as well as the JPMorgan Chase Institute and PolicyCenter. If that weren’t enough, he serves as chairman of the Mid-Atlantic region, leading the bank’s business expansion into that part of the country.
With more than $2.6 trillion in assets, more than 250,000 employees and doing business in 100 global markets, JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the U.S. Nevertheless, it has continued on an aggressive growth trajectory.
In this country, JPMorgan now has a retail presence in all 48 contiguous states, more than doubling the number of states it operated in just six years ago. The bank’s growth goals are closely aligned with its philanthropy and impact investing, as it remains on the lookout in both the U.S. and abroad for new communities to support as the company expands.
It is known for seeking out communities that are struggling, and investing heavily in their revival — the most notable example being a $200 million investment in Detroit, contributing to the city’s successful comeback over 10 years, in partnership with nonprofits, companies and the city’s mayor and political leaders. It also recently announced a $70 million commitment to foster economic development throughout France, building on its efforts to revitalize underserved communities in Greater Paris.
JPMorgan has also been a leader in state and federal efforts to make it easier for millions of Americans with criminal records to re-enter the job market, and then offering them jobs that pay decent wages through its Second Chance hiring program. The bank practices what it preaches. Ten percent of its new hires in 2020 had criminal records.
The bank’s overall philanthropic strategy continues to rely on CEO Jamie Dimon’s “four pillars” first created in 2013: building job skills, small business expansion, neighborhood revitalization, and financial health and wealth creation. In 2022, the bank made philanthropic expenditures of $417 million. About 80% of that total consisted of grants, and 20% was in impact investment.
While philanthropy and banking are key facets of his current job, Berry joined JPMorgan in 2017 without experience in either. For nearly two decades, Berry served as chief of staff to two Republican majority leaders, then-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). When Berry left the House, he received praise not only from McCarthy but also kudos across the aisle from Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who praised him as one of the House’s “most cordial, most positive and most effective” staffers. He also spent five years in the private sector as vice president for government relations at Time Warner and as executive vice president of Axios.
Berry discussed JPMorgan Chase’s philanthropic ambitions with IP last month. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
When you joined JPMorgan, you came from the world of government and politics, not philanthropy. What are your impressions now of philanthropy as a tool for getting things done?
When I joined, I didn’t have a full picture of how this company thinks about policy and impact, and how our co-responsibility team is really deliberately structured such that our government relations and policy team sits alongside our philanthropy team, our community engagement team, our impact investing team, our sustainability team, and all those pieces inform each other.
We're learning from the investments that we're making in communities, and think really deeply about relevant policy and how we can drive policy that's going to create systems change and have an impact in those communities. And it's all really deliberately tied together, and all of the work informs what's happening in each of those disciplines. I think for me, just in terms of my background, a discipline that I really was steeped in in my career is being able to take disparate sets of ideas or priorities and think about how to bring those to a place of commonality.
How do you thread the needle between philanthropy and advocacy?
I think there are priorities that we have as a bank that our government relations team works on, and other issues that are driven by our philanthropic investments. At times, there can be a bit of friction [between the business and philanthropic agenda]. But I think the best example, where it's been both great for us on the commercial side of the business and then effective from a purpose-driven standpoint, was the Second Chance initiative, our effort to employ folks that that had come out of the criminal justice system.
We had to specifically go to our regulators and get some changes to be sure that we could do the hiring that we wanted to do. We've worked with some folks in the Senate and the House that have authored legislation, which has been introduced. And at the state level, we've actually been working with partners and have been successful in getting state level Clean Slate legislation passed. That is a really good example of the kind of policy that both benefits us as a business and enables us to lean in on a bigger societal problem. About 10% of our annual hiring is out of that community.
How does your team work together to fulfill the bank’s philanthropic goals?
We talk constantly, and I travel a lot. They also travel a lot. Last week, everybody on our philanthropic team and our community engagement team was in town. We are connected all the time. We have such incredible people with such deep backgrounds. We have people that really know this work well and know the commitment JPMorgan has. The fact that we have really diverse backgrounds and are dedicated to the work is pretty critical to getting it done.
So Carol Lake being in London and head of the bank’s foundation doesn’t pose any difficulty?
No, no. Carol is deeply connected to our team in the U.S. But we think what’s important about this work is that it can touch down in lots of places. When it comes to financial health, workplace skills, affordable housing, those things are relevant everywhere. So what we did in Detroit and learned from Detroit is relevant in Paris. The facts are different on the ground, so you have to shape the work that you’re doing to the place where you are. But one thing we’re collectively focused on is taking all the things we’ve learned over a decade of really dedicated and disciplined investment and thinking about how we can have a toolset that can touch down in lots of places. How do we really focus on impact systems change, finding the right model that we can take to different communities, so what we’re doing in the U.S. can inform Paris, and what’s happening in Paris can inform places in the U.S.
For example, in Baltimore, we’re really leaning in. As a Maryland lifer, I’m personally excited about this. In Baltimore, we’re seeing a lot of what we saw in Detroit — strong civic leadership, a really strong and growing philanthropic community, a lot of partners that have bought into the success of Baltimore. It’s really an echo of what we saw in Detroit that made Detroit successful. We have learned a lot and can look at a place as a really good opportunity for us to invest and be confident about what we can achieve on the ground.
In Detroit, your investment was $200 million. Will you be making a similar investment in Baltimore? Or does the level of investment depend on the individual city?
Specific to either a place or an initiative, it really depends on what we think we can achieve. For Baltimore, we’re already heavily invested. I don’t know that there’s a top line number right now. We are working with partners on the ground. It’s a place where our business is investing heavily, we’re opening branches. Investing in a community on the business side is a critical component in how we think we can be successful on that ground. As we grow in these communities, we have the opportunity to bring expanded business, such as lending to small businesses, to affordable housing. Baltimore’s a good example where the business is really strong and growing.
Is there a metric a community has to meet where you decide the investments have paid off, and you can give it less focus? For example, it looks like Detroit is in a pretty good place. So would you consider Detroit a success and move on to other places like Baltimore?
Our heart is in Detroit, so it’s not like we’re ever going to say, “We’re done with Detroit.” But the whole goal for us is to achieve lasting, sustainable impact on the ground, making the philanthropy less relevant in that place. That’s definitely true of Detroit. It has momentum, it is growing, creating jobs, and we’ll always be involved. But we will continue to look for opportunities where our investment can sustain or jumpstart change, and where there are partners ready for that. Baltimore is a really good example of that.
Conversely, have there been communities where you decide to pull the plug on your philanthropy because your efforts don’t seem to produce those kinds of results? How do you evaluate that? And how much time do you give it?
I don’t know that there’s been a place that I could say we pulled the plug, especially given the growth of the business and the fact that we touched down in so many places. I think we’ll always be looking for opportunities to invest alongside the business. But we are always trying to evaluate our investments and whether they are having the impact we want them to have. We will turn the dial where we see opportunity or where we’re not making as much headway as we want. As Peter Scher (the bank’s former head of global philanthropy) mentioned to IP in 2017, you need alignment between the public sector, the nonprofit sector and the business community, and so the strength of civic leadership and political leadership and the willingness to lean in is always going to be important for us when we’re looking for partners.
One of Dimon’s four pillars is job training, and certainly, as you mentioned, having access to a skilled workforce benefits the bank. But as you’re aware, there’s much discussion these days about AI replacing many types of jobs, including back-office positions. How is JPMorgan thinking about AI, and will it affect your investment in job training? For example, you’ve trained and hired 50 Detroit residents to remotely staff bank call centers, earning $22.50 an hour plus benefits. Will JPMorgan continue to do this type of training and hiring in light of AI?
AI is something that we will track and keep an eye on. It's something that Jamie and our operating committee are very attuned to. There could be opportunities to use AI in a lot of different ways. But for us, we’re in a customer-facing business, so you just can't replace that. We just graduated a contingent of folks who are going to be working in remote call centers in Baltimore. In both Detroit and Baltimore, it’s been enormously effective. And the folks that are in those jobs are super high performing. It's something that we look at that has enormous opportunity for us to scale in lots of different places. So I think for right now, we're in a place where we're going to continue to invest and hire, and then we'll just have to see how the AI landscape develops. But I can assure you that we are very attuned to what the impacts could be from a workforce perspective, and then more broadly, in our business.
As consumers, we all are used to contacting a business and having to deal with chatbots or an English speaker from somewhere outside the U.S. But it sounds like JPMorgan believes that banking needs a far more personal touch.
We are a big company, and we have a variety of different locations and workforces, but to your point, it's similar to how we think about the branches. We deliberately hire people in the communities where we open branches, so when we open the community branch, in Ward Eight, in Washington, D.C., the branch manager is from that neighborhood, the people that work in that branch live in that community. I was in Philadelphia a couple months ago in a revitalizing community, and our branch manager is from that neighborhood; so are the people that work in that branch. For us to have people that know the communities they're from is incredibly important when we think about how we connect with our customers. For us, from a skills and workforce standpoint, it’s also incredibly important to reach out to those untapped pools of talent in these underserved communities, providing this opportunity and a career for them, bringing them into the JPMorgan Chase family.
How important is this impact investment and philanthropy to the bank’s reputational value?
It's reflective of the values that we have as a company. Healthy communities where people are finding jobs and small businesses are growing and people can find affordable housing are good for us as a company. Now, to the reputational point, it's important that people understand what kind of company we are, what we're trying to achieve, and the investments we're making so that we can be successful. The important part of that, I think, is that policymakers see and understand our commitment to form partnerships to try to build healthy communities.
JPMorgan has pledged ambitious sustainability goals, but the bank has faced criticism about its hundreds of billions of dollars supporting fossil fuel companies. JPMorgan has received letters from scientists, been the target of environmental protests and shareholder resolutions asking for divestment in fossil fuels. I'm not asking you to defend these investments; I just want to know, to what extent does it make your job harder, particularly when you're also trying to get larger policy changes and dealing with policymakers?
We have a deep commitment to trying to get the climate transition right. And a big part of that is financing trillions of dollars’ worth of new green energy research and infrastructure. So we're playing a huge part in the transition. At the same time, you have an economy that is heavily reliant on carbon-based fuels, and that includes vulnerable communities, where cost is a big issue. We're confident in our commitment to a climate transition that maintains affordability and gets us to the right place over time. But does it make my life harder with policymakers? You know, maybe. But the important part is we're very committed, and we know where we're headed.
Dimon has raised some concerns about future rocky times ahead for the U.S. and global economy. How does the state of the economy and the state of JPMorgan’s bottom line affect what you do?
I’ll leave the economic prognosticating to Jamie. But we know it’s incredibly important for us to show up in the ways we do when times are good and when times are tough. If you want people to trust you and know that you’re going to be there, it’s important to not abandon the field. We going to be as important or more important if the economy is in a downturn.
Is there anything you’d like to add?
We are a big international company, but what we are really, really focused on as a business on the commercial side and in our corporate responsibility work is how we show up as a partner to local communities, that we’re part of that community, embedded in that community, and that’s how they know us and think about us. For us as a company committed to change, it’s important that we have the right partnerships, make the right investments, and build the right kind of prosperity at the community level.
