By Yvonne Nolan

This fall, all schools are struggling to devise ways to safely educate students in the midst of the pandemic. The charter schools whose facilities LISC has helped fund and guide are no different. Yvonne Nolan, who directs LISC’s charter schools financing work, checks in with some of our partner schools, who are taking cues from their communities to forge a new kind of education, and points out the ways CDFIs can help with this difficult process.

by Reena Abraham

After years of guiding charter school facilities development, LISC has bottled its knowledge in a new platform: SchoolBuild: From Idea to Construction. SchoolBuild is an essential online resource to support charter school leaders as they dig into the process of creating a bricks-and-mortar facility, with advice on everything from cost projections to financing options and the many other steps required to bring a new school to life.

By Reena Abraham,Vice President for LISC Education

If you build them, we will come: that's the message, loud and clear, from hundreds of thousands of families whose kids are on wait lists for charter schools in low-income neighborhoods across the country. But expanding the number of high-quality schools to keep pace with demand requires visionary financing, writes LISC charter school funding expert, Reena Abraham, in a Huffington Post blog. In connecting schools to funding from tax-exempt bonds and federal New Market Tax Credits, LISC has helped open scores of classrooms and spur neighborhood development at the same time.