NEW YORK — The National Federation of Community DevelopmentCredit Unions is hearing an unprecedented level of complaint andconcern from its members about the most recent round of grants fromthe U.S. Treasury Department's Community Development FinancialInstitutions Fund.

According to federation CEO Clifford Rosenthal, a number ofqualified CDCUs made what they believed to be strongly competitiveapplications, only to have them fail to win any awards. Creditunions and credit union organizations, including the federation,shared roughly $4.7 million of the CDFI Fund's roughly $54 millionfrom 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 downfrom last year.

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

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