Local Initiatives Support Corp. HQ

Together with a diverse set of partners and stakeholders, LISC works alongside local communities to effectively channel capital, enhance infrastructure, and change the systems that create inequality of opportunity. Our local roots, national scale, and comprehensive set of products and services make us a valuable partner to communities looking to generate inclusive economic growth and neighborhood stability. Our financial strength, wide-ranging expertise, and ability to work across sectors make us a valuable partner to investors, funders and others who are looking to join the cause. Finally, our years of experience creating shared agendas and uplifting the perspectives of local leaders, position us to drive equitable development by ensuring that capital is responsive to community voices.
LISC will work to support equitable recovery and rebuilding through the following goals:
1) Invest in wealth building and resilience supports for individuals and communities that are Black, Indigenous and people of color.
2) Grow capital aggregation and deployment, establishing intentional impact parameters.
3) Augment the implementation capacity of the community and economic development ecosystem.
4) Continue attracting new partners and expand the diversity of community voices in the work
5) Pursue an ambitious policy agenda across all levels of government.

Driving this work is Project 10X, LISC’s ambitious initiative to help close racial wealth and opportunity gaps and invest in the wellbeing of BIPOC people and communities. LISC is on track with its goal to raise and deploy $1 billion in 10 years, with $663 million raised, and $121.3 million as of year-end 2021. Through Project 10X, LISC will continue to invest with a clear racial lens to scale proven solutions and seed new approaches to upend the racial health, wealth, and opportunity gaps.

LISC will build on our core work while striving to ensure that our contributions maximize equity and impact to address the racial health, wealth and opportunity gaps. Through Project 10X, we invest in businesses, community organizations, developers and projects that build equity for people and communities of color, and deepen our focus on individual and community ownership strategies, which are key to building generational wealth and equity.

Our Project 10X investments focus in four key areas that are drivers of health, wealth, and opportunity for people of color:

1. Generating lasting equity and wealth through homeownership and small business ownership: LISC invests in building equity and wealth for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) through investment in homeownership, community ownership, and small business ownership.

2. Building credit and savings and strengthening financial institutions led by BIPOC: LISC scales models designed to increase access to financing for underbanked communities, improve credit scores, build savings, and manage major expenses.

3. Investing in community assets such as health, education, arts and justice: LISC works to ensure that children and families have access to the facilities, organizations, and programs that are fundamental to improved outcomes in health, wealth, and opportunity.

4. Supporting quality jobs with good wages and benefits: LISC invests in businesses creating jobs that provide good wages and benefits for local residents, as well as programs that create pathways to living wage careers in high-demand industries for individuals who are unemployed or underemployed. This includes investing in the ecosystem that supports success.

Partnership lies at the heart of LISC’s model, and we will continue to support the work of local organizations and leaders that can equitably and accountably serve as conduits of opportunity for communities of color. We are augmenting the implementation capacity of the community development ecosystem, working with local non-profits, municipalities, anchor institutions, and businesses. We are actively pursuing new partnerships that can bring in resources and capital to support the work, and continuing to forge strategic partnerships with the corporate community, philanthropy, healthcare entities, and government to advance community development. Across all of our activities, we work intentionally to center community perspectives, whose experiences and knowledge are critical to address systems failures and drive innovation.

LISC is well positioned to meet the moment and continue playing an important role in working to close the racial health, wealth, and opportunity gaps in this country. LISC has thousands of cross-sector partners that support individual and community transformation. As an intermediary, one of our primary roles is convening, supporting, and enabling local partners to pursue community development activities. LISC’s connections to local organizations allow us to build coalitions and influence local policies to benefit the residents in the communities we serve. We will engage existing, and cultivate new, partners in our efforts to help close equity gaps in local communities.

LISC’s national-local structure provides us with an advantage. We have a breadth of knowledge on local market dynamics, an extensive network of community partners, a depth of technical expertise, a track record of successful program replication, and a history of effective capital deployment. With these assets, LISC is positioned to be a bold and effective leader in closing persistent racial health, wealth and opportunity gaps in the communities we serve.

LISC has been at the forefront of community development financing and innovation for over 40 years, and has a track record of delivering quality results. Since our founding in 1979, we have invested $24 billion and leveraged an additional $69 billion in public and private funding, resulting in 436,000 affordable homes and apartments; 74 million square feet of commercial, retail and community space; almost 900 schools, early childhood centers, and recreational spaces serving over 860,000 children each year; more than 110 Financial Opportunity Centers serving 25,000 residents per year; and more.

We strive to create and carry out innovative solutions responding to community priorities. For example, in response to the pandemic, we rapidly mobilized resources and partners to deliver relief to Americans hit first, and hardest, by the crisis. This includes deploying thousands of grants to women- and minority-owned small businesses in danger of closure and helping community-based organizations provide basic needs like food, housing, and technology access to people who were struggling to get by before COVID-19 hit our shores.

Since 1979, LISC has raised and directly invested $26.7 billion in funding and leveraged over $75 billion in additional private and public resources to support neighborhood revitalization projects and programs across our national footprint, through 38 local offices and a rural initiative spanning 2,400 counties in 49 states. LISC offers loans, grants, and equity investments, together with on-the-ground strategic and technical expertise, to hundreds of organizations in urban and rural communities in some of America’s most underinvested neighborhoods. These investments have impacted the lives of millions of Americans.

Lending is an essential instrument in LISC’s community development toolkit. As one of the largest community development financial institutions (CDFI) in the nation, we work in partnership with local grassroots groups, for-profit developers and government agencies to finance programs and projects that will have a positive, long-term impact. We leveraged these skills to provide rapid response in the wake of the pandemic, providing intensive technical assistance and underwriting to provide loans to women- and minority-owned and led businesses and nonprofits in underserved communities through the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). LISC also raises loan capital to support women- and minority-led small businesses and partners with Kiva to support capital access for micro-borrowers.

LISC’s response to the pandemic also included the rapid launch of our national Small Business COVID-19 Relief Grant Program. Since March 2020, LISC has secured and deployed more than $240 million in grants to small businesses and nonprofits in urban and rural communities, providing more than 16,000 entrepreneurs, the vast majority of which are women or people of color and located in underserved communities, with grants to help them stay in business and continue to contribute to their local economies.

With a $1.1 billion balance sheet and an ‘AA-’ rating from S&P Global Ratings, LISC has the organizational and financial stability, and proven track record, to manage and deploy significant pools of private and public funding. We have a strong infrastructure in place that allows us to centralize and manage various functions required for grant and loan administration, and to manage large and complex funds, including disaster relief funding.

LISC continues to advance Project 10X, our biggest, most ambitious and most urgent initiative ever. It is designed to upend the racial health, wealth and opportunity gap that keep tens of millions of Americans from sharing in our country’s prosperity and realizing their personal potential. Project 10X is both a moral imperative and economic common sense: it is a means to realizing America’s egalitarian and democratic ideals.