A New Chapter: Sandhya Nakhasi Leaving Common Future, Jennifer and Jess to Continue as Co-CEOs.

Common Future has always been driven by a simple but transformative belief: the barriers of access, affordability, and power that shape our financial system are profound, but they are not insurmountable. For years, we have worked alongside community lenders, practitioners, and movement leaders to redesign capital systems so that they better serve Black, Indigenous, and other communities who have long been excluded from traditional investment.

Today, we’re announcing a transition for Common Future: after three years as Co-CEO, and following three and a half years building Community Credit Lab before its acquisition by Common Future, Sandhya Nakhasi will be moving on from her role as Co-CEO on June 15, 2026. Her fingerprints remain indelably on our strategy, our operations, and our vision for what investment can do in service of a more equitable economy. Her approach has always been to leave systems better than she found them.

The integration of Community Credit Lab (CCL) into Common Future accelerated our ability to meet a key aim: investing in communities directly because they are inherently investment-worthy. Before the acquisition, Common Future was increasing our community’s investment-readiness through grantmaking, convening, and capacity building. In complement, Community Credit Lab brought the operational infrastructure to prove out our investment theses: the back-office systems, lending tools, and operational support needed to move capital in ways that are both accessible and community-centered. Together, we recognized that these capabilities need not be held by one organization alone; the infrastructure itself is most effective and sustainable when centralized. By offering a back office to lending partners across the sector, we could help lower the barriers to deploying flexible, affordable capital and accelerate the emergence of financial systems rooted in trust and community ownership.

The CCL Fund has facilitated over 200 loans to emerging fund managers and community-rooted organizations, currently holds more than $11 million in assets under management, and has deployed over $7 million, supporting Black and Indigenous entrepreneurs and the communities they serve. CCL has also been recognized in the Impact Assets list as an Emerging Impact Manager, and has been named a Transformative 25 Fund by Collective Action for Just Finance. 

The impact of CCL Fund can be felt in communities across the country. From Atlanta to East Cleveland, from the Mississippi Delta to Philadelphia, from Phoenix to Indigenous nations across Turtle Island, CCL is investing in dozens of partners building economic alternatives. 

• In Atlanta, The Ke'nekt Cooperative broke ground this year on an acre of land down the street from its current site, building what its founder calls the first Black-owned commercial eco-resilience district. 
• In East Cleveland, Loiter is operating a multi-enterprise community wealth hub across food, media, sports, farms, and resident-owned homes. 
• In the Mississippi Delta, Higher Purpose Hub is opening a 14,000-square-foot community-owned center to anchor a regional intermediary serving Black entrepreneurs, artists, and farmers across twenty counties. 
• In Philadelphia, the Kensington Corridor Trust has built a neighborhood trust model that is already being replicated, with Vesi in Trenton applying the same principles of community ownership, perpetual affordability, and resident-investor returns. 
• In Indigenous communities, Moonsoon Fund is working through CCL to deploy patient, non-extractive capital into Indigenous matriarch-led enterprises, with its first investment supporting trauma-informed care designed by and for Native communities, and the Cihuapactli Collective holds and operates a community space in South Phoenix anchoring Indigenous women's healing, food sovereignty, and reproductive justice work. 

Through Community Credit Lab, capital moves to Black and Indigenous communities across the country, into models that keep decision-making and returns in the hands of the people building them.

 “Among the many gifts Sandhya brought to Common Future was her ability to hold big vision and see things through,” Co-CEO Jess Yupanqui Feingold shared recently, “She taught us how to rewire systems—even those that seem as intractable as finance. She showed us how to keep heart at the center and community first in every decision. In so many ways, she has been the beating heart of this work, and she will be profoundly missed.”

In her tenure as Co-CEO, Sandhya became one of the field's leading voices on redefining fiduciary duty, most prominently in her Nonprofit Quarterly piece arguing for a framework that centers the communities capital is meant to serve, rather than the preservation of institutions. She carried that thinking through our Redefining Risk webinar series, moderating panels including Managing Organizational Risk in an Evolving Landscape and Redefining Risk in the Ownership Economy, and brought it to convenings including SOCAP, ImpactPHL, and Mission Investors Exchange. Her writing has also been featured in Next City, ImpactAlpha, and Proximate. She also co-authored our Co-Leadership Toolkit, a piece with Stanford Social Innovation Review, and many other foundational pieces for Common Future. Her legacy is not only the systems she built, but the possibilities she unlocked.

Though we will miss her dearly, we also know that, as a founder and builder, she is stepping toward new opportunities where her gifts will continue to shape the field. 

“I cannot adequately capture with words the sheer joy I have experienced working alongside Sandhya,” Jennifer shared, “She brought clarity, focus, and vision to the work in ways that are unparalleled. She is someone I consider a lifelong friend and sister and I'm excited to see what's next for her brilliance.”

As Common Future enters this next chapter, we do so from a position of strength. Our renewed strategic plan is underway, and the CCL Fund continues to grow as a core pillar of our strategy. Relationship-basedled lending is older than the financial system that displaced it. When Yes! Magazine featured CCL in 2021, this model was early-stage and regionally focused. Today, it is the foundation of every loan we make across the country and we are proving that repayment is better predicted by relational than financial data—the latter of which is biased at the start. 

Through it all, our commitment to co-leadership remains unwavering. Shared leadership has always been more than an organizational structure for us; it is a practical expression of our belief that power is strongest when it is distributed, relational, and built to endure.

For Sandhya, her departure “is a personal decision and one taken planfully with my Co-CEOs and the Board. When I stepped up to serve the organization, after co-founding and leading Community Credit Lab through its acquisition, I wanted to ensure that our strategies were complementary and aligned. With great support from my Co-CEOs and the leadership team broadly at Common Future, we've been able to achieve this strategically and operationally, with a renewed strategic plan in motion that centers the work of CCL. Now is the moment that feels right for me to step away and let the possibilities of a fully merged organization continue to flourish."

At a time when many organizations are grappling with a broader crisis of leadership and sustainability, Common Future remains committed to building a different model: one that invests in resilience, shared power, and the conditions leaders need to do their best work. From co-leadership to inclusive workplace policies such as the four-day work week, we are working to demonstrate that organizations can be both high-performing and deeply human.

Common Future will continue to be led by Jennifer Njuguna and Jess Yupanqui Feingold, who have led alongside Sandhya for the past three years as Co-CEOs. Jennifer is an attorney whose career has spanned community lawyering for health equity, education systems change, and nonprofit leadership, and has written for Nonprofit Quarterly on Black women in leadership and on advocacy for community-supporting policy, with additional commentary featured in MS NOW and The Grio. She serves on the board of Race Forward and is a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity. Jess brings more than 15 years of mobilizing capital and storytelling across the fields of impact investment, climate justice, public health, and social entrepreneurship, including five years as Common Future's Chief Strategy Officer, in which she led a rebrand and strategic growth; she has spoken at convenings of the Skoll World Forum, Nonprofit Quarterly, and Stanford Social Innovation Review and written for Forbes and Atmos. Together, they bring a rare combination: deep legal and systems-change expertise paired with a fluency in capital, narrative, and movement-building. Both are Board Directors of Community Credit Lab, ensuring continuity for the work Sandhya leaves behind. They lead alongside a strong bench of leaders who carry this work every day.

This transition is both an ending and a beginning. It reflects the very purpose of shared leadership: to create organizations that are stronger than any one individual and capable of evolving while remaining whole. As we turn the page, we do so with gratitude for Sandhya's extraordinary contributions and with excitement for what lies ahead. Common Future remains steadfast in its mission and energized by the opportunity to continue building an economy that includes everyone.