Community Development Collaboration: Builing Systems for Better Access
The Gap Is Real
The numbers are stark and getting even harder to ignore.
A 2024 Goldman Sachs survey found that 77% of small businesses were concerned about their ability to access capital. That's not a fringe problem. That's the norm.
The infrastructure that was supposed to serve these entrepreneurs has been contracting. Between 2017 and 2025, the national banking network contracted by nearly 15%, dropping from 86,469 branches to 73,649. Small business lending dropped 22% when branch density declined by just 8% which underscores how much relationship banking still matters for founders who don't fit algorithmic underwriting models.
The racial wealth gap compounds this further. For every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households held only $15 in 2022. From 2019 to 2022, the mean gap in net worth between Black and white households grew from $841,900 to $1.15 million — a 38% increase that far outpaced inflation.
That gap isn't background noise. It's the structural context that determines who can self-fund a startup, who can offer collateral, and who gets a second chance when the first business doesn't work.
In 2023, Black, Asian, and Hispanic business owners were each roughly half as likely to receive all the financing they applied for compared to their white counterparts (32–34% vs. 56%).
These aren't edge cases. They're structural realities that shape who gets to build, and who doesn't.
From Scarcity to Abundance
At Access Ventures, we've spent years learning that the framing matters as much as the funding.
Traditional problem-solving locks teams into a scarcity mindset that focuses on what's wrong, what's broken, and what's missing. But designing for change requires the opposite: an abundance mentality that assumes opportunity and builds from strength.
We call this appreciative inquiry and shifting the question from what's wrong to what's strong.
Scarcity creates anxiety. Anxiety restricts imagination. And restricted imagination produces the same solutions that produced the same gaps.
Abundance assumes possibility. And from possibility, you can actually design something new.
How We Design for Change
Over the past decade, we've refined a design approach drawn from pioneers like the Stanford d.school and IDEO. Three principles anchor it:
1. Human-centered, always. We don't design solutions and fit humans into them. We start with the person and their context, their culture, their constraints. Every community is a living organism. Solutions that work in one zip code may fail in another. Empathy before execution.
2. Discovery before solutions. We surface questions before we pitch answers. We identify players, map gaps, and challenge the status quo before we ever propose a fix. Problems worth solving deserve to be understood first.
3. Cross-disciplinary by design. The challenges communities face don't fit neatly into existing categories. They demand new combinations — finance + community development, philanthropy + venture, policy + design. AV plays the role of beta-tester: willing to take first-mover risk on approaches that have potential but no guarantee.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We've supported and designed models that rewire how capital flows to communities:
SoLo Funds — Peer-to-peer small-dollar lending, reaching hundreds of millions in activity concentrated in underserved ZIP codes.
Kiva Louisville — 0% interest, community-backed microloans for entrepreneurs outside traditional credit markets.
Community Round Match Fund — The nation's first structure of its kind, unlocking community equity investment alongside 2,000+ micro-angel investors for founders traditional venture ignores.
These aren't charity. They're proof that capital can be structured differently, and that when it is, communities grow stronger.
Shared Responsibility
Community development isn't someone else's job.
Investors, philanthropies, CDFIs, local government, and entrepreneurs themselves all shape the architecture of access. No single solution works everywhere or always. Variables change. Communities evolve. Approaches must adapt.
The alternative of defaulting to off-the-shelf solutions because they're safer, is exactlyu how we stay perpetually behind.
More funders need to play the beta-tester role. More institutions need to tolerate uncertainty. More systems need to be designed for the humans in them and not the other way around.
We do not flourish alone.
(Originally posted October 2018, updated April 2026)
Keep Exploring
Entrepreneurship flourishes when capital, community, and institutions align. If you would like to continue exploring our content, here are other recommended episodes, blog posts, portfolio companies and downloads similar to this topic:
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resources for download
At Access Ventures, we've spent years learning that the framing matters as much as the funding.
Traditional problem-solving locks teams into a scarcity mindset that focuses on what's wrong, what's broken, and what's missing. But designing for change requires the opposite: an abundance mentality that assumes opportunity and builds from strength.
We call this appreciative inquiry and shifting the question from what's wrong to what's strong.