Community Development Insights
The Sector Has the Ambition.
It Doesn't Have the Bench.
March 2026: An analysis of publicly available CDFI and community development research — Federal Reserve, OFN, Aeris, Social Current, CAMEO/Citi Foundation — points to a consistent finding: the capacity crisis in community development is not about strategy or mission clarity. It's about who's available to execute.
Ninety-five percent of CDFIs want to grow. They want to expand their borrower base, add development services, move into new geographies. The strategic vision is not the problem. What the data shows, across every independent source, is that the organizations doing this work are under-resourced at exactly the level where the hardest decisions get made — the senior operating layer where financial management, stakeholder alignment, program execution, and funder accountability have to happen simultaneously.
This isn't a new observation. What's new is the pressure.
Federal funding that underwrote significant portions of operating models is now uncertain. Seventy-two percent of CDFIs cite staffing as their primary constraint. Interest in senior leadership roles has declined steadily since 2016. And the organizations most exposed to this convergence — mission-clear, financially stable, genuinely doing the work — are being asked to navigate a level of complexity the sector wasn't built to absorb at this pace.
The conventional responses don't fit the moment. A full-time COO hire assumes a budget and a timeline that most organizations don't have. Technical assistance providers offer frameworks but rarely work inside the operational reality long enough to move something. Waiting for the next funding cycle is a decision, even when it doesn't feel like one.
What this moment requires is a different kind of engagement: someone with senior strategic and operating capacity who arrives already fluent in the language of community development finance — who can move between a board conversation, a capital stack question, and a program design problem without losing the thread.
That's not a consultant relationship. It's not an interim executive placement. It's something the sector has needed for a while and hasn't quite had a name for.
The data is in the infographic here.
The pattern it describes is what Trapeza was built to address.
—
Kate Tully is the catalyst behind Trapeza, a fractional strategic operator practice working with CDFIs and community development organizations at moments of inflection. She is a problem-solving junkie with a cultivated sense of curiosity and adventure. She also reads too much.
Where Community Development Organizations Are Stuck
A synthesis of publicly available sector research — Federal Reserve CDFI Survey (n=448), OFN field reports, Social Current workforce analysis, Aeris performance review, and CAMEO/Citi Foundation capacity studies. Pain point frequency reflects how consistently each challenge surfaces across independent sources.
These pain points are not independent problems. They form a single compounding dynamic: demand is rising, federal funding is contracting, and senior talent is scarce and expensive. The organizations caught in this vice are not failing organizationally — most are financially healthy and mission-clear. What they lack is the senior strategic and operating capacity to navigate complexity that is genuinely unprecedented in the sector's history.
The conventional responses — hire a COO, engage a TA provider, wait for the next funding cycle — are inadequate to the moment. What these organizations need is someone who can arrive as a peer, work from inside the context, and hold the financial, operational, and community accountability dimensions simultaneously. That is a specific kind of capacity. And it has historically not had a name.
This is the work Trapeza was built for.
If your organization is at one of these inflection points — or heading toward one — the conversation starts at the table.