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National Programs
Affordable Housing Preservation Initiative
LISC established its Affordable Housing Preservation Initiative in 2001 to strengthen efforts toward the preservation of affordable rental apartments whose uses were in jeopardy because of expiring federal subsidies, and to promote preservation-oriented public policies. Since then, LISC has helped nonprofit community development corporations acquire and preserve housing developments, build partnerships with housing authorities and other organizations, and advocate for government policies that can reduce the loss of affordable homes and apartments.
Contact Information:
Vince O’Donnell, Vice President
Email: VODonnell@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
LISC AmeriCorps
In 1994 LISC began its sponsorship of an AmeriCorps program as an additional strategy to help community development corporations (CDCs) help themselves. LISC AmeriCorps is part of the National Service Network, administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Members help promote volunteerism and civic engagement by encouraging neighbors to take active roles in helping to transform their communities.
LISC AmeriCorps members help to develop affordable housing and provide home ownership counseling to prospective first-time low-income homebuyers. They also participate in community building activities inneighborhoods and with residents to form crime watches, neighborhood groups, tenants associations and collaborations between local service providers. Members work with youth to provide opportunities to participate in sports, other recreation programs and after school activities that include tutoring, homework assistance and reading enrichment for underachieving students.
Contact Information:
Stacy Rapp, Program Director
Email: SRapp@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site
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Community Investment Collaborative for Kids
Quality early care and education is a proven means for preparing children for future academic success and a necessity for working parents. Yet virtually every low-income neighborhood lacks an adequate supply of quality child care facilities. To help meet these needs, LISC's Community Investment Collaborative for Kids(CICK) offers financial and technical assistance to develop and improve child care centers. CICK brings public officials, child care providers, philanthropies, and other stakeholders to the table to devise comprehensive and innovative solutions to child care supply and quality problems.With CICK’s support, LISC has invested $24 million in planning and developing 140 new facilities serving 15,000 children in lower-income urban and rural neighborhood nationwide. That investment has generated an additional $150 million in public and private resources for these projects.
Contact Information:
Amy Gillman, Senior Program Director
Email: agillman@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
Community Safety Initiative
No neighborhood plagued by crime and disorder problems will be attractive to residents or merchants. Indeed, addressing those issues is as critical to successful community development as making sure people have affordable housing, good schools, recreational areas, jobs and health care. LISC's Community Safety Initiative (CSI) helps to establish partnerships among law enforcement, residents, business owners and members of other neighborhood institutions. Since 1994, CSI has helped establish police/community partnerships in over a dozen cities nationwide.
LISC's Community Safety Initiative builds long-term partnerships with key parties in troubled communities to reduce persistent crime, disorder and fear. In neighborhoods as diverse as Brooklyn's East New York, Seattle's Chinatown-International district, and Kansas City's east side, CSI has been the catalyst for physical improvements and strategies that have reduced crime, increased public confidence, and attracted new businesses.
Contact Information:
Julia Ryan, Program Director
Email: JRyan@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
Educational Facilities Financing Center
Access to good public education ranks high on everyone's list as a foundation for a healthy neighborhood. Yet, attaining sufficient facilities stands as the biggest hurdle for both new and existing public charter and alternative schools. With initial support from the Walton Family Foundation, LISC established the Educational Facilities Financing Center (EFFC) in 2003 to undertake a three-pronged approach to LISC's efforts in the educational facilities arena.
Supporting Individual Schools:
LISC financed its first charter school in 1997, and since then has approved $30 million in financing for individual schools throughout the country. Through its network of 33 local offices, LISC will continue to address the immediate needs of charter schools by providing facilities financing for schools in local LISC communities.
Developing Local Facilities Funds:
The EFFC is investing in the development and expansion of local educational facilities funds and nonprofit charter management organizations through its national Educational Facilities Loan & Guaranty Fund. The EFFC and local LISC program offices are working closely with coalitions of public and private funders to create financing infrastructures that can serve the facilities needs of multiple schools in specific markets.
Fostering Public Policy Initiatives:
Long-term sustainability of alternative education reform models requires consistent funding streams and increased access to public facility financing. The EFFC is helping to create and enhance state and federal financing mechanisms and documenting best practices in facility financing, including publication of The Finance Gap: Charter Schools and their Facilities in 2004 and The Charter School Facility Finance Landscape in 2005.
Contact Information:
Reena Bhatia,Vice President of Educational Programs
Email: rbhatia.org
For more information please visit our site.
Family Income & Wealth Building
A sign of a thriving community is that residents feel confident that their lives will improve, their incomes rise, and their job prospects widen while they are living there. However, achieving economic stability is a process that builds upon itself, and it requires long-term planning and commitment from individuals and families. Economic stability is a combination of adequate income and good financial management behavior. LISC includes the following elements in its definition of economic stability for the low-to-moderate income residents we serve:
- Sufficient family income for daily living expenses, to allow for asset accumulation, and to address minor emergencies.
- Employment skills that lead to higher paying jobs or a smooth switch to a new job if employment is terminated.
- Smart debt, with market-rate interest, that leads to appreciating assets (such as a house) or that can be paid off in a reasonable period of time.
- A plan for post-secondary educational opportunities for their children.
- Realistic opportunity for retirement at age 65, with income beyond Social Security.
LISC's Family Income and Wealth Building program is designed to connect low-to-moderate income families to the financial and labor market mainstream. The core of LISC's model is offering employment and career services, financial education and coaching, and low-cost financial products that encourage investment and savings.
Contact Information:
Kevin Jordan, Director
Email: kjordan@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
Foreclosure Response
In the past few years, the foreclosure crisis in the national housing market has grown exponentially, not only adversely affecting major financial institutions, but also jeopardizing the livelihoods and homes of many low-income families and the stability of entire neighborhoods. A concentrated number of foreclosures in a given neighborhood can quickly lead to abandonment, declining property values, tax delinquencies, and increased crime. Many communities that have taken years—in some cases decades—to renew are at risk of deteriorating rapidly in light of widespread mortgage foreclosures.
LISC supports local foreclosure response efforts by providing technical assistance through outside consultants and in-house national staff expertise; coordinating training opportunities and sharing best practices; supporting the implementation of the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP); providing loans and grants to revitalize neighborhoods and support innovative programs; conducting research and data analysis; and supporting the National Community Stabilization Trust.
Contact Information:
Emily Bolton, Senior Program Officer:
Email: ebolton@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
Green Development Center
LISC's Green Development Center provides financial resources, technical information, partnership opportunities, education, and policy support to LISC programs and the community development field, all in support of efforts to accelerate the integration of sustainability principles in the development oflow-income neighborhoods.
As the largest organization supporting community development in ournation's urban and rural communities, LISC believes that greener homes, businesses, jobs, and schools are key components in achieving sustainable communities of choice and opportunity - good places to live, do business, work, and raise families. Since 2004, in addition to its investments in commercial and community facilities, LISC has invested over $665 million, resulting in over 20,000 units of green affordable housing.
Investing in sustainability at the neighborhood level can:
- Preserve family income and wealth by lowering utility bills and decreasing reliance on cars
- Reduce asthma rates and improve overall health by providing cleaner indoor air
- Improve mobility for even the most vulnerable citizens by offering access to quality public transit and well-connected, walkable streets
- Connect residents to green jobs and career opportunities, and
- Transform blight properties through urban agriculture while also providing a source of healthy, locally grown food for communities.
Contact Information:
Madeline Fraser-Cook, Director
Email: mfcook@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
Housing Authority Resource Center
LISC started its Housing Authority Resource Center in 1998 to broker relationships between local housing authorities, LISC local offices, and other community developers in neighborhoods across the country. By providing access to best practices, information, and training the Center has helped connect these worlds to develop creative and collaborative solutions to local affordable housing problems.
HARC teams with local LISC offices and the National Equity Fund (NEF) Public Housing group to build the development capacity of local housing authorities that are considering public housing redevelopment, new housing development (including homeownership) and commercial revitalization. LISC and NEF help identify financing structures that will leverage public resources with private investment as well as direct project financing such as predevelopment loans, bridge lending, lines of credit, working capital, and tax credit equity.
Contact Information:
Mary Paumen, Senior Program Director
Email: mpaumen@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
The Institute for Comprehensive Community Development
The Institute for Comprehensive Community Development is a venture of Local Initiatives Support Corporation. It was established in 2010 to advance the field of comprehensive community development and the positive impact it has in urban and rural communities across the country. The Institute does this by:
- Building the capacity of community development practitioners;
- Providing on-site support and technical assistance to comprehensive community development initiatives in cities across the U.S.;
- Applying lessons learned through research and performance evaluation to continually improve on-going comprehensive community development initiatives and to develop new initiatives;
- Supporting the development of public policies which integrate government programs in order to effectively facilitate and support comprehensive community development;
- Communicating broadly the best there is in practice and theory in the field of community development.
The Institute is a place where the community development field can take what it learns from practice and use it as a base from which to provide training, to promote research in comprehensive community development, and to investigate the public policies that would best advance this work locally and nationally. The Institute is the locus where practice and theory meet, and where experimentation and innovation – grounded in real-world experience – flourish.
Contact Information:
Eileen Figel, Director
Email: efigel@instituteccd.org
For more information please visit our site.
Youth Development & Recreation
Research is proving that gathering places, recreational facilities and sports opportunities are necessary for the healthy development of young people – especially those in poorer neighborhoods where other social options are few and destructive opportunities are everywhere. Those facilities and opportunities are also important to parents, who, through their child’s participation in sporting events can meet their peers in the community.
LISC is addressing that issue through the Grassroots program, a partnership between the National Football League’s Youth Football Fund, the NFL Players Association and LISC that works with community groups to create or rehabilitate playing fields in underserved neighborhoods. Since 1998, the NFL’s Youth Football Fund has contributed $28 million to restore or build more than 225 community fields in more than 32 cities nationwide. That contribution has prompted other supporters to kick in roughly $100 million in additional funding to support field redevelopment. LISC identifies the fields and the community groups committed to building them. Improvements typically include improvements such as the installation of synthetic turf, irrigation systems, lights, bleachers, scoreboards and goal posts.
Contact Information:
Beverly Smith, Senior Program Director
Email: bsmith@lisc.org
For more information please visit our site.
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