For more than 50 years, OneUnited Bank has operated on the belief that financial empowerment in Black communities requires more than products and services—it requires confronting the systems that keep wealth out of reach. Now, the nation’s largest Black-owned bank is extending that mission into addressing how to close the racial wealth gap.
On May 5, OneUnited launches Who’s Your Ma Honey?, a 10-episode podcast and video series that the Boston-based bank frames as both a cultural reckoning and a direct extension of its community development work. The show streams on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Audible, and invites high-profile guests to surface buried experiences of shame—then reframe them as the origin story of their resilience and success.
The concept lands with particular weight coming from OneUnited. The bank, a designated Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), has financed nearly $1 billion in loans—the majority in low-to-moderate income communities like South Central, Compton, Liberty City, and Roxbury. Its mission has always been explicit: close the racial wealth gap, one transaction at a time. Who’s Your Ma Honey? argues that closing it also means addressing what happens in people’s heads before they ever walk into a bank…