Conversation With Dr. Karama Neal, USDA Rural Business Cooperative Service Administrator

The Cooperative Professionals Guild cordially invites you to join a conversation with Dr. Karama Neal, Administrator of USDA Rural Business Cooperative Service. Continuing legal education will be offered for the state of California.

Dr. Neal will be discussing USDA's strategic plan and Rural Development's priorities including:

Advancing racial justice, place-based equity, and opportunity

Addressing climate change and environmental justice, and 

Assisting rural communities to recover economically through more and better market opportunities and through improved infrastructure.

The webinar will also address implementation of funding for cooperatives from the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Dr. Karama Neal

Prior to joining USDA Rural Development, Dr. Neal served as president of Southern Bancorp Community Partners, a nonprofit community development loan fund and financial development organization promoting economic mobility in rural Arkansas and Mississippi. She spent twelve years at Southern and led their small business, consumer and other development lending, consumer and savings focused public policy work, and a variety of financial development services to help low and moderate wealth families and communities build wealth. 

In 2013, Dr. Neal started a statewide grassroots organization promoting passage of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act in Arkansas which was passed in 2015. This work was inspired by her family’s ownership of rural heirs property in the state. Before joining Southern, she had a career in the biosciences and worked for a period in biofuels informatics with a focus on feedstocks and balancing food and fuel priorities. For six years, Dr. Neal served on the board of the Little Rock Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
After completing her undergraduate degree in biology at Swarthmore College, Dr. Neal later earned a doctorate in genetics from Emory University and a master’s in bioethics and health policy from Loyola University Chicago. She also completed executive education in impact investing at the University of Oxford Said School of Business.