Collaboration as infrastructure: Lessons on strengthening partnerships in the U.S. small business support system
Mastercard Strive ―
Explore how collaboration, shared technology, and network partnerships are strengthening the U.S. small business ecosystem and expanding access to capital at scale.
By Sara Hiller
The U.S. small business support ecosystem is both rich in diversity and challenged by fragmentation. A familiar phrase in community finance captures this paradox: “If you’ve seen one CDFI, you’ve seen one CDFI.”
This adage is true but overstated. Each CDFI is tailored to meet the unique needs of its local community — a strength that fosters deep trust and impact at the grassroots level. But this same hyper-local focus can be a double-edged sword, complicating collaboration and limiting the industry’s ability to scale or evolve collectively.
While CDFIs share the same mission to support underserved communities, their approaches often differ. Increasingly, however, they are finding ways to collaborate — whether informally through sharing insights at industry events or through more structured partnerships. For funders and ecosystem builders alike, the question is no longer if collaboration matters, but how to make it more sustainable and inclusive. Smaller CDFIs, in particular, face challenges: with limited resources, they often struggle to dedicate time and capacity to ecosystem-level efforts that don’t directly serve their clients, leaving them siloed despite shared goals with other CDFIs.
Recent history has shown that when collaboration does occur — often because of a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic or a natural disaster — CDFIs rise to the occasion. They come together, engage funders, and mobilize unprecedented levels of support and capital for communities in need.
“We saw [CDFI collaboration at scale] happening during COVID-19 — it took a crisis of that magnitude for CDFIs to be recognized as institutions that truly impact underserved communities,” as one grantee reflected in a 2024 national survey Mastercard Strive USA conducted on the small business support ecosystem. “Organizations came together to create initiatives like the California Rebuilding Fund with 10 CDFIs, the Southern Opportunity and Resilience Fund with 11 CDFIs, and the New York Forward Fund with about 10 CDFIs. People set aside concerns about their markets and funding sources, focusing instead on serving communities that needed our services. Unfortunately, we’re reverting to old patterns, as if we learned nothing from that experience.”
Our question is: how can collaborating become standard instead of situational?
A handful of case studies around new collaborations involving Mastercard Strive USA grantees point to potential new models for supporting long-term partnerships. These case studies represent three successful models of collaboration that have emerged in recent years — anchored around funding shared technology, an implementing partner focused on partnerships, and network organization — demonstrating that collaboration can emerge from many different contexts. And importantly, that philanthropic funding for underlying infrastructure is often required to power lasting partnerships.
Funding technology infrastructure can enable better collaboration in crises
When Hurricane Helene swept through western North Carolina in September 2024 leaving a trail of destruction that damaged homes, businesses, and infrastructure — ultimately costing nearly $60 billion — Dogwood Health Trust responded swiftly with $30 million in unrestricted recovery grants.
Dogwood’s financial support was deployed quickly thanks to a foundation of trust that had already been built through their previous support in forming the Resilient Appalachia Data Initiative (RADI), a platform launch led by Appalachian Community Capital (ACC) designed to equip regional CDFIs and the small businesses they serve with the data insights needed to lead the transition to a more sustainable and inclusive regional economy. ACC funded the RADI launch in part with support from Mastercard Strive USA, which supported the digital infrastructure and governance structures that formalized the RADI collaboration — and signaled Mastercard’s belief in ACC’s ability to coordinate ecosystems across remote Appalachia.
RADI is composed of 16 CDFIs from remote areas of Appalachia that have come together to form their own regional ecosystem far from a metropolitan area, allowing for reach directly into rural communities. The CDFIs provide the local presence and key relationships, while RADI brings technical resources to deploy funding quickly — a lever that was quickly pulled post-Helene due to the pre-existing relationships.
The same partners who co-created RADI instinctively became the core group responding to the Helene crisis, working within an already-established shared framework, as opposed to building one from scratch. Because Dogwood had already invested in RADI’s data hub, it could quickly identify gaps and suggest bringing in Community Reinvestment Fund, USA (CRF) to strengthen the recovery effort. ACC and CRF then came together to disburse Dogwood’s recovery grants, with ACC providing on-the-ground relationships with local CDFIs and CRF supplying the digital infrastructure. The collaboration ultimately led to the deployment of $55 million in recovery grants disbursed to more than 2,100 small businesses across 31 counties (with the additional $25 million coming from the state of North Carolina and the Duke endowment).
“The urgency of the moment brought clarity and unity, allowing stakeholders to set aside day-to-day concerns and come together around a common problem,” said Jesse Fripp, chief strategy officer for ACC. “All of the partners brought experience from different disaster recovery efforts to the table — while they didn’t have a set playbook, they drew on formal and informal learnings from past crises. The team focused first on immediate needs — getting short-term cash into businesses — while keeping a long-term vision in mind. A shared framework was established: grants first, then bridge capital, followed by long-term recovery and growth capital.”
ACC is now building long-term bridges between businesses and CDFIs through new initiatives, using initial crisis contact points to create sustained engagement.
Although the Hurricane Helene recovery efforts were spurred by a crisis, there are takeaways from the response that can be used to proactively build infrastructure for more permanent collaborations, Fripp says. He envisions a future for ACC where collaboration is driven by technology-enabled referrals and deep specialization. With trust and technology as the foundation, partner organizations can focus on their core strengths while seamlessly leveraging each other’s complementary capabilities — building a more unified, effective coalition.
From a funder’s perspective, it’s essential to invest in preemptive trust-building and flexible funding structures that enable rapid response when urgency demands it — as was the case following Hurricane Helene.
Funding an implementing partner to enable sustainable collaboration
Another impetus for meaningful CDFI partnerships has been government funding. These programs require collaboration to effectively disseminate funds into the small-business community. For example, Hyphen incubated the 2022 Initiative for Inclusive Entrepreneurship (IIE), with support from Mastercard Strive USA, to ensure that implementation of the U.S. Department of Treasury’s $10 billion State Small Business Credit Initiative reached its target recipients — low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs.
The initiative emerged from a moment of urgency that Hyphen quickly acted on, assembling the right partners before IIE’s current organizer, the Milken Institute, came onboard to steward the initiative from pilot to permanence.
Hyphen secured the funders that were essential in pulling the coalition together, then Milken ensured the collaboration was sustainable and extended beyond the initial launch. Milken has sustained the partnership, which is a hugely important piece of the puzzle — figuring out how to institutionalize collaboration so it doesn’t end when the initial momentum does. For Milken, that meant aligning with partners’ long-term priorities.
They asked questions like, “Where is your organization going in the next five years?” This helped Milken understand where their partners wanted to build relationships, which markets they aimed to enter, and how they wanted to be seen as leaders. Milken then ensured that the incentives within the partnership supported those growth goals — through the IIE — so that the collaboration remained valuable regardless of the initiative’s outcome.
“They need to know that even if we don’t succeed in this initiative, they will still get something out of it. It needs to be core to them growing and to advancing their mission to stick with it — making sure their work is centered so they continue to get something out of it, even with all the uncertainty,” said Rachel Halfaker, the Director of the Center for Financial Markets for Milken Institute.
For these types of collaborations to continue beyond the timeline of any specific public policy, robust communication pathways between organizations are essential. This includes mechanisms like lenders referring small businesses to technical assistance providers — and vice versa — as well as fostering cross-sector integration rather than siloed, parallel efforts, Halfaker said. Without these, the ecosystem will remain fragmented and entrepreneurs will experience duplicated services, gaps in support or fall through the cracks.
“You can’t solve small business challenges with state policy alone. You can’t rely solely on federal programs, trade associations, or technical assistance providers. Collaboration must be designed to bridge these silos, otherwise, the ecosystem will continue to replicate the same structural barriers that have long existed,” Halfaker said.
Milken’s role shows what happens when funders invest not just in specific projects anchored on specific policies, but in the partners who sustain the broader work.
Funding established networks to drive new Innovations
A third approach to driving more collaboration is building and investing in formal networks of CDFIs. These networks can often do what individual CDFIs cannot on their own due to their size and resources. For example, two of the largest industry networks are tackling major sector-level challenges through two new initiatives: Inclusiv’s Loan Participation Marketplace and Opportunity Finance Network’s Innovation Initiative, both backed in part by Mastercard Strive USA.
Inclusiv’s Loan Participation Marketplace centers around coordination to increase liquidity and lending by helping credit unions manage risk, expand their loan portfolios, and manage liquidity. Inclusiv’s lending team provides ongoing support and guidance to credit unions interested in buying or selling loans, and shares in the overall risk by acting as a co-investor. The Marketplace is an integral part of Inclusiv’s broader Small Business Capital Initiative, a training program designed for credit unions that want to expand or launch their small business lending programs.
OFN’s Innovation Initiative is a multi-year program focused on supporting experimentation, new tools, and actionable models to solve the CDFI sector’s most persistent challenges: capital sources, data fragmentation, technology gaps, and limited operational capacity. Running through 2029, the Innovation Initiative centers on three components: an Innovation Council, Center, and Investment. It includes investments into four foundational areas: capital solutions, financing products, technology and operational efficiency innovations and data, systems and analytics.
To achieve this, OFN has launched a CDFI Capital Solutions Accelerator, a six-month program that pairs CDFIs and other entities with early-stage ideas with technical experts, peers, and funder networks to develop and advance transformative solutions for the industry. It will also open a round of funding next year to support all four areas of the Innovation Initiative, partnering with investors and capital partners to channel resources into new products, technologies, and models that can strengthen the small business support ecosystem at scale.
For OFN, it’s about trying new approaches to solving the persistent challenges for its CDFI members and the communities they serve, and as an industry, developing the structures, resources and mindset to institutionalize innovation as a core function of leadership — an equation the industry has rarely been able to solve.
And for funders, networks like Inclusiv and OFN offer a practical and scalable entry point — ready-made platforms where investments in coordination and shared infrastructure can generate outsized impact across the small business support ecosystem.
The critical role of funders
These three models illustrate what is possible when collaboration becomes business as usual instead of situational.
Funders have a critical role to play in this evolution: by shifting away from competitive funding structures toward models that incentivize shared goals and collective impact, they can better close the persistent funding gaps that small businesses face. By funding the infrastructure that makes collaboration possible — from data systems to networks to trusted coordinating partners — funders can help ensure the small business support ecosystem remains resilient no matter what challenges arise.
“Funders can help us design programs that intentionally support collaboration among CDFIs and ecosystem partners,” says Harold Pettigrew, the president and CEO of OFN. “The value individual CDFIs offer is not just impact — it’s insight, execution, and long-term presence in communities that matter. So CDFIs working with one another can be a force multiplier for philanthropic capital, enabling sector-level impact that helps all CDFIs achieve their mission of supporting underserved businesses everywhere.”
Sara Hiller is a senior grants manager manager on the Mastercard Strive USA team at DAI.
