Allison Kelly

Allison Kelly has spent two decades proving that financial systems don’t have to be engines of inequality—they can be the tools that dismantle it. As CEO of ICA, she leads a venture capital-certified CDFI where she hasn’t just maintained the mission; she has scaled it. Under her leadership, ICA has more than tripled its net assets, investments, and revenue, turning a local impact fund into a national model for how to close the racial and gender wealth gaps.

Allison’s career, which has been spent in both the not-for-profit and private sectors, has been defined by a relentless focus on the "how" — how to move more capital, how to reach more founders, and how to make impact measurable. Before taking the helm at ICA, she served as Head of Strategy and Innovation at CDC Small Business Finance (now Momentus Capital). There, she didn’t just manage portfolios; she pioneered the effort to bring in over $40 million in new impact investments, specifically designed to fund non-SBA loan products for entrepreneurs who had been historically locked out of traditional banking.

Her foundation in the space was built during seven years at Pacific Community Ventures, where she held multiple leadership roles focused on the intersection of affordable capital and high-touch business coaching. During her tenure, she scaled the organization’s business advising program fivefold and forged a network of 30+ strategic partnerships that still support small businesses across the country today.

But the "throughline" of her career started even earlier. Before joining the CDFI world, Allison cut her teeth at the intersection of healthcare and for-profit financial services. It was there, navigating the complexities of large-scale service industries, that she first saw the friction between capital and community needs. That early experience became the catalyst for her pivot into social enterprise, fueled by a realization that the precision of the for-profit world could be harnessed to solve the most stubborn problems in the nonprofit sector.

Allison serves on the Board of Mal Warwick Donor Digital and the CDFI Coalition. She holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a Bachelor’s with honors from the University of Oregon.