What is the Philly Community Capacity Building Fund (CCBF)?

The Philly CCBF is dedicated to supporting the trusted non-profits that the City relies on to provide a range of community services from affordable housing to supporting small businesses on our neighborhood commercial corridors. These organizations are on the front lines fighting poverty, preventing homelessness, and revitalizing communities. We owe it to our low and moderate-income residents and communities to ensure that these organizations have stable, reliable, and flexible funding to be able to meet the evolving needs of communities, retain qualified staff, and increase their impact. That’s where the CCBF comes in: the CCBF will provide multi-year general operating support to qualified non-profit Community Development Corporations (CDCs) to build their capacity so that they can expand on what they do best: serving our neighbors and building a more equitable Philly.  

Why do we need a Philly CCBF?

The City of Philadelphia relies on a network of community-based nonprofits for the provision of essential services supporting low-and-moderate-income residents and communities. The City does this because these trusted community institutions have the on-the-ground relationships and capacity to provide services more effectively, efficiently, and far less costly than the City itself. However, the City currently funds mainly specific programs of these organizations. While this support is key to providing these services, it is insufficient to support an organization overall and comes with restrictions that undermine the flexibility necessary to respond to community emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, these contracts have to be renewed every year, so nonprofits lack the predictability of consistent funding while their staff lives in uncertainty as to whether their livelihood is secure.  

Currently, many CDCs are forced to rely on tightly constrained programmatic funding that does not adequately cover the infrastructure costs of running an organization, does not provide the flexibility that a responsive organization requires to meet the evolving needs of community residents, and is a barrier to moving needed programs to scale. This situation presents a difficult position for many CDCs, but also for the communities they serve and the City as a whole. Philadelphia relies on its CDCs for the delivery of so many important services and to meet so many community needs that once an organization has to curtail its services – and with it the community knowledge and trust – it often cannot be successfully replicated by another entity. 

So, what do we need to do?

Given the coming turmoil on the federal level, now more than ever we need to capitalize the CCBF with an annual investment of $7.5 million! Maintaining and growing flexible public and private multi-year support will enable CDCs to continue to deliver core services in a way that advances equity, including enabling local residents and businesses to build generational wealth, build and preserve affordable homes to advance self-sufficiency, advancing economic opportunity by supporting and growing local businesses and commercial corridors, creating safe, green and clean streetscapes, and elevating community voices & leadership while maintaining organizational stability and enabling long-term planning to facilitate investments that are beneficial to the community.