LISC’s 40-plus-year history as a community development organization has taught us that people thrive when their communities are supplied with a set of interconnected physical, social, and economic assets. Our approach is comprehensive, embracing affordable housing development, workforce training, initiatives for better health and safer public spaces, and much more. Last year alone LISC invested $2.8 billion in hundreds of historically underserved communities across the United States, with a focus on those communities and populations that are the most disconnected from mainstream financial resources.
Working closely with thousands of local partner organizations—non-profits with deep roots in their distinctive communities – LISC brings resources and technical assistance to city neighborhoods and rural areas that too often have been isolated from American opportunities. Our initiatives focus first and foremost on equity and inclusion, which we know are the basis for a prospering, resilient nation.
Our efforts are enhanced through federal commitments—in the form of both policy development that helps set the agenda for revitalizing disinvested communities and funding that puts that agenda in motion. Federal commitments are the linchpin of LISC’s public-private partnership investment model, helping us attract billions of dollars of private capital each year to places it would not otherwise go.
We care deeply about the fine points of federal programs and appropriations; we have seen the difference they make. Here we advance LISC’s policy priorities for federal action, which include a mix of aspirational ideas, legislative proposals that can pass a divided Congress, and proposals that can be implemented through administrative action. Updated from our original report released in 2020, these priorities cover seven areas of community development across 17 separate federal agencies, as summarized below. In addition, we have developed separate appendices to highlight how specific proposals will: 1) help close the racial health, wealth, and opportunity gap; 2) support economic recovery in our rural communities; and 3) support disaster recovery and climate resiliency efforts.