Erica Grieder: 'We just had the audacity to call': Harris County’s new partnership with Unity Bank sets good example

Sometimes, any scrap of progress requires a hard-fought, bitterly contested battle. Other times, it just involves picking up the phone. Such is the case with Harris County’s new partnership with Unity National Bank, one of just a handful of Black-owned financial institutions in the entire state. Under a plan announced this month, Unity will facilitate $5 million in investments, as well as take over a small slice of the county’s banking services in partnership with Cadence Bank, which is Harris County’s main depository. This is believed to be the first such partnership between a minority-owned bank and a Texas county — and, according to everyone involved, making it happen was easier than one might think.

“This was really simple. It was just a matter of reaching out and asking some of these banks, ‘Are you interested in doing business with the county?’” Harris County Treasurer Dylan Osborne said Tuesday. “We’re basically putting our money where our mouth is,” he continued. Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a fellow Democrat, agrees. “That’s my new mantra — integrate the money!” he told me. A 2020 study commissioned by the Commissioners Court found that just 50 cents of every $100 that the county pays to private businesses each year goes to those owned by Black men and women — a symptom of longstanding racial injustice, but also one of the ways in which that ill is perpetuated. The idea of partnering with a minority-owned bank has been percolating in Harris County for several years, Ellis said. And Unity National Bank was a natural fit for such a partnership. The Third Ward-headquartered institution, founded as Riverside National Bank in 1963, has always had a mission to provide financial services within Houston’s Black community.