In a wide-ranging conversation with Nonprofit Quarterly, LISC COO Annie Donovan delves into LISC’s 40 years of connecting capital to disinvested places, and people to opportunity. From spearheading a “comprehensive” approach in community development, to elevating health and racial equity in its investments, to forging a $500M affordable housing fund for the Bay Area, LISC continually refines and augments its work.
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And yet, despite production success, affordable housing, absent other forms of community economic development, has failed to keep pace with accelerating demand. . . Donovan observes that you can’t simply rely on “market-based solutions when markets are part of the problem.”
The commitment to truly upend inequalities demands intentional action, says Donovan, which has led LISC to take on “more capacity building, more support for advocacy. That is how you create systems change.”
The excerpt below was originally published:
LISC at 40: Coming to Terms with the Limits of Markets
Steve Dubb, Nonprofit Quarterly
LISC at 40: Coming to Terms with the Limits of Markets
Steve Dubb, Nonprofit Quarterly
Within the field of community development, LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation) is a very large intermediary. With offices in 35 urban centers and a rural operation that spans 45 states and 2,200 communities, “LISC is in more places than any other community development organization,” touts its website.
Founded by the Ford Foundation in 1979, LISC estimates that it has invested $20 billion in four decades, including $1.5 billion in 2018. LISC once focused nearly exclusively on affordable housing; it estimates it helped finance 400,500 units of housing in its first 40 years. Today, its focus is much broader, but it is still a major affordable housing supporter, financing an estimated 20,085 units in 2018.
As Mike Kingsella, who directs the nonprofit Up for Growth, explains, LISC forms part of a network of organizations that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Enterprise Community Partners, the National Housing Trust, NeighborWorks America, and the Housing Partnership Network, that “led the effort to direct capital markets toward community-oriented investments, including affordable housing.”
Kingsella observes that these groups were responsible for “an increased flow of private capital and public funding into disinvested communities, the creation of public-private partnerships to build housing (rather than direct public investment into public housing), and efforts to combat the long-standing impacts of redlining and racial segregation.”
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