Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive app it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to David Riling, and our topic today is creating community wide change through banking.

David is the president and CEO of Sunrise Banks, a mission driven values based bank with locations in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. David has worked in the community development banking industry for more than twenty five years. He's a social entrepreneur and innovator who strives to forge meaningful partnerships, drive sustainable economic growth, and create financial empowerment for all. David, welcome to the Awarepreneur show.

Paul, thanks very much. Great to be with you today.

You didn't start this work yesterday, did you?

I didn't. I've been in the journey a while.

So grateful.

I think I have a graduate degree and falling forward or

breaking forward. Made made a few mistakes along the way, so we wanna hear about those. There's also some wonderful successes. David, somebody hearing your impressive bio, and they wanted to get a little bit of sense, like, what you've done and also why banking? Why using banking as a lever for change? Like, why is that so important to you?

Oh, you know, money is important and capital is important to so many different things. And when you can match money and values and purpose together, it just has tremendous impact. And so, gosh, my journey into this space, quite frankly, started quite young working construction, but ultimately it was building some homes in Tijuana, Mexico that I ultimately figured that with a skill of construction and in helping someone do something to improve their situation was really kind of that, that purpose. That was kind of the spark, but I have to tell you, I was a teller one summer, and that's really where I saw the canvas and what you could do with banking, the intersection between community and government and nonprofit and all the various people around this ecosystem that there was just a wide canvas to be able to to paint a new picture to do good.

Yeah. Turns out in the modern world, money touches a lot of things, doesn't it?

It does. Yeah. Follow the capital or follow the money. Yeah.

Follow the money. Yeah. So pretty early on, you decided to follow the money. And did that lead you right to Sunrise Bank? Like like, give us a little bit of sense of what was your journey to becoming leadership at this very cool institution that we're gonna unpack today?

Well, Paul, it it is kind of a convoluted journey, and quite frankly, bank robberies, of all things, was probably the the mainstay of of my banking career. And the fact is that one summer that I was a teller, bank that I was in got robbed twice, once to the left of me and once to the right of me. And while most people might think that's scary and so forth, I thought it was super exciting. I just thought this whole banking thing, you had money and you talked to people, you know, every minute of the day, and then you had bank robberies. I mean, just how it was just exciting, exhilarating. Fast forward, you know, through through university and college, I started a business in college and built that up and then sold it upon graduating, which was a clue that I didn't quite understand about myself at that time that I was really an entrepreneur, but I just had this imagination that I was gonna be a banker. But after I sold that business, I was a trainee at a bank called First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles. And in the first two weeks that I was on the job, the bank I was in got robbed three times.

And in the mindset of a 21, 20 two year old, I was like, well, apparently banks get robbed a lot because the money is here. And that was about the extent of my analysis of the situation. It just so happened the third time that bank got robbed, the customer service manager went out and had a smoke. And I was a trainee on the floor. And boy, by that time, I knew the FBI agents by name. And, you know, you separate the tellers and lock the doors and you do these various procedures, which were fairly rudimentary at this point in time because I had practiced them. I I handled the situation. Well, the district manager got wind of that, and I found myself the next Monday morning reporting bright and early into the branches of First Interstate Bank in South Central Los Angeles, which which at the time was the bank robbery capital of the world and which held true.