By Stephanie Kabore Turquin, Senior Vice President | Chief Financial Officer
When people think about Community Development Financial Institutions, they often focus on the visible outcomes: the small businesses we help grow, the affordable housing developments that transform neighborhoods, and the low-income communities we help strengthen. Yet behind every loan disbursed, every grant administered, every equity investment, and every borrower served is a financial infrastructure that makes those outcomes possible.
As CFO of TruFund, I think of finance as an enabler, the bridge between mission and execution. Finance ensures that an organization’s ambitions are supported by the capital, discipline, and infrastructure required to turn impact goals into lasting results.
It is easy to lose sight of finance as an enabler when you are deep in the day-to-day work of financial management. In an organization that deploys capital through lending, New Markets Tax Credit financing, and equity investment in historically underserved communities, keeping that connection clear is mandatory.
What Financial Stewardship Actually Looks Like
Financial stewardship means managing the resources entrusted to us responsibly and in service of the mission. It means understanding where the organization stands today, anticipating challenges that may lie ahead, and helping ensure that the resources, capital, and financial flexibility needed to fulfill our objectives will be available tomorrow. We manage capital from multiple sources - including federal and state programs, philanthropic investors, commercial banks, and mission-aligned lenders - each with its own requirements, covenants, and expectations. Keeping all of that in balance while continuing to deploy capital into underserved communities requires transparency and a willingness to ask hard questions.
In practice, that means monitoring our balance sheet ratios in real time, knowing our covenant headroom with every lender before we make a new commitment, and building a risk management framework that protects the organization without slowing down the mission. Above all, it means being honest with our board, our funders, and our partners because trust is built on transparency, not on comfortable reporting.
Financial stewardship also means ensuring that we have access to diverse and reliable sources of capital. Strong relationships with banks, investors, philanthropic partners, and public funding programs help create the liquidity and flexibility needed to continue serving communities through changing economic conditions.
The Intersection of Finance and Impact
One of the things I have come to appreciate since joining the CDFI sector is that every financial decision carries a human dimension. When we evaluate our capital structure, we are also evaluating our capacity to serve.
A recent example illustrates this well. We structured a participation loan that required us to think through multiple, sometimes competing considerations simultaneously - protecting our balance sheet, managing liquidity, ensuring the deal was financially viable, and, above all, making sure the community impact we were trying to achieve was not compromised in the process. None of those questions could be answered in isolation. That is what makes financial leadership in a CDFI different from financial leadership in a traditional financial institution. The stakes are community-level.
Building for the Long Term
The CDFI sector is operating in a challenging environment. Capital markets are tighter, federal funding is under pressure, and the communities we serve are facing real economic headwinds. In this context, financial resilience is what allows us to show up consistently, even when conditions are difficult.
At TruFund, we are building the financial capacity needed to support our next phase of growth and impact. Central to that effort is a finance team equipped with a clear understanding of our mission, one that can anticipate challenges, manage through complexity, and partner across the organization to support sound decision-making.
A Final Thought
Finance is sometimes described as the language of business. In a CDFI, I think of it as the language of trust - accountability not just to our investors and our board, but to the borrowers and communities who are counting on us to show up. When we get the financial foundation right, everything else becomes possible.
That is what drives our work in the Office of the CFO at TruFund. Not just managing numbers but making sure the numbers serve the mission.
