How We Work

It is not always easy to describe what LISC does and how. One way to do so is to think of LISC as a hybrid: part investment bank, part foundation. It raises capital – loans, equity and grants – to invest in specific neighborhood development projects and programs. In this respect, LISC is a "financial intermediary," a term of art in the community development field.

But this really does not do justice to the program. As important as the financial capital is, what LISC tries to do fundamentally is establish networks of relationships that will eventually lead to the transformation of neighborhoods. Financial relationships are one, albeit very important, example of this mission.

But so too, for instance, are the relationships LISC helps establish within local communities through its support for community organizing, or the relationships LISC helps foster between local leadership and government officials in City Hall.

On the one hand, then, LISC is called upon to establish deep associations with the corporate, civic and public sectors from which it can gather the resources it needs to assist its neighborhood clients. On the other hand, LISC must have equally strong relationships with its neighborhood clients, bringing resources to the table – financial, technical, advisory – while supporting community leaders in their efforts to revitalize their local areas.

Breadth of Program

Though LISC, like many other organizations of its kind, focused on the redevelopment of housing in its earlier years, its program support for neighborhoods is now much broader and deeper.

In many urban neighborhoods that suffered through the disinvestment of the 1970s and 80s, housing was the first and most recognizable need. LISC responded with a number of financial initiatives that helped local community organizations begin their rebuilding process, resulting in the production of thousands of affordable units in Chicago and nationwide. But by the mid-1990s, LISC and its neighborhood clients recognized that the rebuilding of community required a much broader approach in which housing would be a core, but not the only element.

LISC Chicago led the way in articulating this new approach through a very public dialogue begun in 1997 in which it engaged community development leaders throughout the city in thinking about the future of Chicago’s neighborhoods. Ultimately, the dialogue, spawned under the rubric of “The Futures Committee”, led to a white paper entitled “Changing the Way We Do Things”. That paper inspired significant changes in LISC Chicago’s thinking and methodology, resulting in the kind of program it has in place today.

In short, while housing redevelopment remains a central element, LISC Chicago recognizes that a healthy neighborhood requires a broad-scale and integrated strategy to support its revitalization and/or stabilization. Other elements include leadership development, retail services, employment, health care, public safety, education, the arts; indeed, all those things that common sense and experience suggest as necessary to a functioning urban community.

Since the time of the Futures Committee, therefore, LISC Chicago has understood its mission as nurturing the “comprehensive” development of neighborhoods in Chicago.

Clients

There are many factors and agents that impact the comprehensive development of a community. They range from regional forces, such as economic trends, to government programs (including taxation), to private investment.

In its experience, LISC believes that one of the most important and potent factors in the revitalization of a community, particularly a lower-income community, is the community’s ability to develop its own leaders and to create and own its own program of development.

LISC has therefore focused its efforts on and through community development organizations that manifest these attributes. That’s why most of the LISC Chicago portfolio of loans and grants is composed of nonprofit organizations.

Many of them are community development corporations (CDCs) specifically devoted to the redevelopment of a neighborhood. Others may have a somewhat different mission but are still engaged in some aspect of the redevelopment process. In either case, LISC/Chicago generally works with a single “lead agency” in the neighborhoods in which it is focused that have these characteristics.

An example of such a “lead agency” is the Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. BRC is a 40-year old community organization dedicated to preserving and enhancing the quality-of-life for the low-income residents of the neighborhood. Over the years it has developed approximately 1,000 units of affordable housing, most of it rental, which it still manages.

But its program goes well beyond housing: it owns a construction company that employs and trains local residents in the construction trades; it developed a grocery-store to provide fresh and nutritious food to a vastly-underserved community; it runs various youth and young-leader programs; and it is a staunch public policy advocate for the poor and underrepresented in their community.

But another example of a “lead agency” is quite different. The Quad Communities Development Corporation in the city’s southside Bronzeville neighborhood does not provide any direct services or do its own development. Rather, it has become a “development coordinator” and voice for the community, inducing everything from a new commercial development in the key 47th and Cottage Grove trade area, to improved schools, to a new employment and financial services center for the community’s residents.

LISC provides services and its full range of financial products to both of these organizations, as well as to approximately 60 other such groups in Chicago and the close-in metro area. Still, LISC recognizes that those involved in neighborhood development encompass the broader range of players noted above.

Thus in addition to the BRC- or QCDC-type of organization, LISC also invests in projects or programs owned or operated by other sorts of organizations, including private developers, the government, social service agencies and so on. LISC does so if, in its judgment, the investment conforms to the development of the community as the community defines it. If so, LISC will provide its support, technically and financially to their organizations as well.