Jamie Dimon says American Dream is ‘slipping out of reach’—JPMorgan will spend billions to fix it

The bank’s chairman and CEO on Tuesday unveiled the “American Dream Initiative” (ADI), a sweeping multi-year effort to expand economic opportunity across the United States. The announcement marks one of the most ambitious community investment programs in the bank’s 225-year history—and comes with a pointed message from its chief executive about the state of the country.

“The American Dream is alive, but it’s slipping out of reach for too many people—and for future generations,” Dimon said in a statement. “This slows economic growth, hurts communities and prevents many people from getting ahead.”

The initiative will span six focus areas: small business growth, affordable housing, financial health, careers and skills, healthcare access, and support for local institutions. But JPMorgan is leading with its biggest strength—small business banking—as the initial centerpiece of the program.

The nation’s largest lender to small businesses says it currently serves 7 million such firms and intends to grow that number to 10 million over the next several years. A representative for JPMorgan told Fortune that the 10 million figure is projected to be hit within five years. To get there, the bank is committing nearly $80 billion in lending to small businesses over the next decade, including direct loans and capital channeled through Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) as well as mission-driven lenders. This is above the baseline figure, JPMorgan confirmed to Fortune.

JPMorgan also plans to hire 1,000 additional small business bankers across its 5,000-branch network and nearly double its corps of Senior Business Consultants to 150, with targeted expansion in markets like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

“Small businesses are essential to economic growth and opportunity in communities across America,” said Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. “We are supporting entrepreneurs by combining local, on-the-ground engagement with the scale, capital and expertise of the nation’s leading small business bank—so they can start, grow and scale in the communities they call home.”

Through its Coaching for Impact program, JPMorgan plans to mentor and graduate nearly 115,000 small business owners in more than 80 cities over the next 10 years, marking an eight-fold increase from the program’s 2020 launch. On the financial literacy front, the bank aims to reach roughly 5 million customers, students, and small business owners with financial education, up from 1 million over the past five years.

The ADI also takes aim at the regulatory burden. JPMorgan says it will advocate for policies to eliminate $100 billion in red tape costs under the SBA’s Made in America Manufacturing Initiative.

Alabama is among the first markets getting a deeper investment. The bank has operated in the state for more than 50 years and plans to triple its Chase branch count there to 35 by 2030, including new locations in Decatur, Foley, and Trussville. It will also open its first Community Center in the state, designed to host financial workshops, skills training, and small business pop-ups.

“JPMorgan Chase has been helping Alabamians pursue their American Dream for more than 50 years, and we know we have a role to play in the decades ahead,” said Brian Lamb, the firm’s head of Specialized Industries.

Nearly a decade of JPMorgan initiatives

The American Dream Initiative is also positioned as a complement to JPMorgan’s previously announced $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative, which targets investments in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, and healthcare—industries the firm views as critical to America’s long-term competitiveness. Together, the two programs reflect Dimon’s thesis that national economic strength and broad-based community opportunity are inseparable goals.

The American Dream Initiative is the latest chapter in a long JPMorgan playbook of large-scale, branded community investment programs—each one bigger than the last. It arguably started with Detroit, when JPMorgan made a landmark $200 million investment in the city’s economic recovery when it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2013. The firm later described it as “one of our most comprehensive and integrated business and philanthropic investments to date,” and the model it developed there became the blueprint for everything that followed. The Detroit bet combined lending, philanthropy, and policy advocacy under one roof, exactly the structure ADI now deploys nationally.

In 2018, JPMorgan scaled the Detroit model into AdvancingCities, a $500 million, five-year initiative to drive inclusive economic growth in cities that had been left behind. The program awarded multimillion-dollar grants to cities including Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, Louisville, and Baton Rouge, with investments focused on small business lending, affordable housing, and workforce development. The firm relaunched AdvancingCities again in 2025, suggesting the model has enough institutional support to persist across cycles.

JPMorgan’s most politically charged initiative came in October 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, when the firm pledged $30 billion over five years to close the racial wealth gap among Black, Hispanic, and Latino communities. By early 2024, Dimon reported the firm had surpassed $30 billion in progress and announced plans to embed the programs into regular business lines, essentially graduating the initiative into standard operations. Admittedly, a large portion of that $30 billion was driven by existing products like homeownership refinancing and affordable rental housing preservation, and ADI may take similar form today.

The bank, which held $4.4 trillion in assets as of Dec. 31, said it will continue announcing new investments, partnerships, and policy solutions across all six focus areas in the months ahead.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.