NEW YORK — The National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions is hearing an unprecedented level of complaint and concern from its members about the most recent round of grants from the U.S. Treasury Department's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

According to federation CEO Clifford Rosenthal, a number of qualified CDCUs made what they believed to be strongly competitive applications, only to have them fail to win any awards. Credit unions and credit union organizations, including the federation, shared roughly $4.7 million of the CDFI Fund's roughly $54 million from this round of grants. According to the federation's figures, credit unions saw 15% of their applications succeed in winning 9.6% of the total CDFI grant pie this year, which Rosenthal said is down from last year.

“We are planning to meet with the CDFI fund and see what's going on,” Rosenthal stressed, adding that while the federation had been among three credit unions or CU organizations to have won grants of $1 million, other qualified and well-deserving credit unions had been passed up.

“We have long been perplexed and concerned that regulated institutions whose deposits are insured like credit unions only get a small portion of the CDFI distributions each year,” Rosenthal said. “That doesn't make sense to us.”