Effective March 2, 2026, Sara Razavi serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for both Main Street Launch and Working Solutions CDFI. By aligning executive leadership, both CDFIs aim to deepen their strategic partnership, enhance operational capacity, extend their collective reach in California, and offer a model for amplified impact in the CDFI industry. Read more about this shared executive leadership agreement.
Sara assumed the role of CEO at Working Solutions CDFI (WS) in 2017 when she succeeded the organization’s founder. As part of a parent-subsidiary agreement, she also became CEO of Main Street Launch (MSL) in 2026.
Sara has over 20 years of experience in the social sector with expertise in operations, strategy, finance, small business, and partnership management. Sara has led the CDFI industry in considering consolidation as a growth strategy. Sara has spoken on many panels on the subject, and co-authored the working paper, “The Future of Consolidation in the CDFI Sector: A Proactive Strategy for Scale and Impact.” Under Sara’s leadership, WS has scaled significantly in capital deployment, asset size, and impact and is now poised to replicate the same growth and efficiency with the WS-MSL consolidation.
She serves on several CDFI industry committees and boards, including the Board of Directors of Scale Link, a financial intermediary for CDFI microlenders; the Board of Community Reinvestment Fund, USA (CRF); and the Advisory Board of the Center for Impact Finance (CIF) at the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy. Previously she was a founding Executive Committee member of the California Coalition for Community Investment (CalCCI), a statewide coalition of CDFIs, and a board member of Opportunity Finance Network (OFN).
Sara has a BA in Sociology and Theatre from UC Davis and an MBA from the University of San Francisco, where she focused on the intersection of social impact and finance. She is also active in her other passion, the arts, through the San Francisco Bay Area theatre community, primarily as a past board member and current advisor to Golden Thread Productions. Sara lives in Oakland with her wife and two young children.
