A working paper by the San Francisco Fed offers best practices for crafting Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) performance context—knowledge about the bank’s local markets, the needs of its community and the opportunities that exist within the local network of resources and organizations. The performance context is as much a self‐assessment as it is a regional assessment, not only identifying the needs in a bank’s assessment areas, but also determining which needs are within a bank’s capacity to address. The paper encourages banks to identify credit needs and opportunities for community involvement using a combination of quantitative measures from sources like the American Community Survey and qualitative accounts from community members and leaders.