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LISC to Deploy $3.4M from CDFI Fund to Expand Access to Healthy Food, Schools and Housing

Last month, the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI Fund) awarded 265 organizations more than $180 million in 2021 Financial Assistance (FA) awards. LISC received $3.4 million through several FA-related funding streams to expand efforts that fuel healthy food, charter school financing, and affordable housing in underserved communities.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI Fund) awarded 265 organizations more than $180 million in 2021 Financial Assistance (FA) awards. LISC received $3.4 million through several FA-related funding streams to expand efforts that fuel healthy food, charter school financing, and affordable housing in underserved communities.

Since 1996, the CDFI Fund has made $57.3 million in grants to LISC in support of critical programs that bridge gaps in health, wealth and opportunity throughout the country, in addition to nearly $1.2 billion in New Markets Tax Credit investment authority.

LISC plans to use part of the new funding—awarded via the program’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative program (HFFI-FA)—to pursue an array of proven financing approaches that increase food access in food deserts. These prioritize healthy food retail outlets, including grocery stores and farmer’s markets, as well as community kitchens, mobile food vendors and urban agriculture and food business incubators.

With the 2021 CDFI Fund award, LISC can help break down historical barriers that limit opportunities in BIPOC communities

The CDFI Fund award will support more projects like Astoria Co-Op, a worker-owned food cooperative in rural Oregon seeking to expand in a food desert, and Farm 360, a hydroponic urban farm that grows organic crops year-round, while providing a local source of jobs and fresh produce to local grocery stores in disinvested neighborhoods in Indianapolis.

LISC will also use $590,000 of the new funding to establish a Charter School Predevelopment Loan Fund, which will increase access to financing for emerging, primarily BIPOC-led charter schools.

LISC saw a threefold increase in predevelopment loan requests from charter operators last year, highlighting a significant gap in the financing stack. Often, school leaders need a small loan to get their facility project underway, and this financing may be a higher hurdle for school leaders who have fewer financing connections. 

With the 2021 CDFI Fund award, LISC can offer a new, early-stage product to charter schools serving students from economically disadvantaged communities and, in the process, help break down historical barriers that limit opportunities in BIPOC communities.

Finally, LISC received funding to support affordable housing projects in counties where the poverty rate has been 20 percent or greater for the past 30 years. Investing in these counties is central to LISC’s overarching community investment strategies that upend geographically concentrated poverty. LISC’s last such award, which the CDFI Fund designates as Persistent Poverty Counties-FA, helped finance 52 affordable rental units and six for-sale homes in Philadelphia and Tunica County, Miss., in communities with high rates of poverty. 

For more on the CDFI Fund and its investments in CDFIs and underserved communities, visit https://www.cdfifund.gov/.