PROJECT 10X
This is LISC's all-out initiative to help upend our country's unconscionable racial inequities.
Generating enduring wealth and equity
PEOPLE OF COLOR HAVE LESS WEALTH to cushion against life’s hardships and springboard its opportunities in part because they’ve never had fair access to wealth-building pathways like higher education, homeownership, and entrepreneurship. Nonwhite race is linked to economic disadvantage through a vast range of inequitable processes, from school segregation to the under-appraisal of Black-owned homes. That’s structural racism in a nutshell.
In 2022 LISC attacked these foundations of racial wealth disparity—by providing patient, flexible growth capital to entrepreneurs of color, boosting BIPOC business owners’ readiness to win lucrative corporate supply contracts, helping families of color to purchase their own homes, and exploring ways to promote community ownership of commercial real estate, to name just a few efforts.
Generating enduring wealth and equity
PEOPLE OF COLOR HAVE LESS WEALTH to cushion against life’s hardships and springboard its opportunities in part because they’ve never had fair access to wealth-building pathways like higher education, homeownership, and entrepreneurship. Nonwhite race is linked to economic disadvantage through a vast range of inequitable processes, from school segregation to the under-appraisal of Black-owned homes. That’s structural racism in a nutshell.
In 2022 LISC attacked these foundations of racial wealth disparity—by providing patient, flexible growth capital to entrepreneurs of color, boosting BIPOC business owners’ readiness to win lucrative corporate supply contracts, helping families of color to purchase their own homes, and exploring ways to promote community ownership of commercial real estate, to name just a few efforts.
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“This Is My Foundation”
Meet Johnnie Akons of Legacy Cutz in Chicago and see how LISC's Entrepreneurs of Color Fund provides crucial growth capital to business owners of color who have been shut out of conventional avenues of funding.
Strengthening opportunities for economic mobility
BROAD OPPORTUNITY FOR UPWARD MOBILITY is a basic tenet of the American Dream and the key to closing the racial wealth gap. But the U.S. actually has lower rates of economic mobility than other developed countries, and people of color face additional barriers to getting ahead.
LISC’s 10X initiative last year helped build ladders of opportunity for households and communities of color, including through one-on-one financial and career coaching in LISC’s nationwide network of Financial Opportunity Centers®, new paid internships for students at HBCUs and national service positions in the community development field, comprehensive capacity building for developers of color, and new infrastructure to support affordable child care and broadband access for working families.
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Strengthening opportunities for economic mobility
BROAD OPPORTUNITY FOR UPWARD MOBILITY is a basic tenet of the American Dream and the key to closing the racial wealth gap. But the U.S. actually has lower rates of economic mobility than other developed countries, and people of color face additional barriers to getting ahead.
LISC’s 10X initiative last year helped build ladders of opportunity for households and communities of color, including through one-on-one financial and career coaching in LISC’s nationwide network of Financial Opportunity Centers, new paid internships for students at HBCUs and national service positions in the community development field, comprehensive capacity building for developers of color, and new infrastructure to support affordable child care and broadband access for working families.
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Diversifying the Real Estate Development Industry
Real estate developers are important people. Even as they grow their own businesses, they contribute lasting assets to the built environment, create jobs. They shape communities. And there’s no shortage of talented, savvy developers of color with inspired visions for what they want to accomplish.
So it’s a critical inequity that people of color are severely underrepresented in the industry. According to one recent study, Black and Hispanic developers together make up less than one percent of the sector, an imbalance that’s especially troubling in the community development world where responsiveness to the priorities of communities—often communities of color—is part of the mission.
That’s why LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund (BEDF) is strategically financing the work of established Black-led development firms, investing $128.3 million since the fund’s launch in the summer of 2020. In 2022 BEDF provided $75.9 million in flexible capital for vital Black-led projects like Salina 1st, which will transform two vacant acres in Syracuse, NY into a community-serving hub of commerce and mixed-income housing. (All data through 12/31/22.)
And the sector’s lack of diversity is why, in cities from Newark to Los Angeles, LISC is tapping its decades of experience training emerging developers to focus that capacity building on Black and Brown developers who demonstrate commitment to affordable housing. The latest example: LISC Puget Sound’s Housing Equity Accelerator (HEA) program.
Launched in 2022 in partnership with Amazon, HEA is a two-year professional development fellowship that enrolled its first cohort of participants last March. At no cost, the Fellows receive extensive classroom training, one-on-one consultation with a variety of business advisors, and capital—including grants and connections to other financing opportunities—to strengthen their organizations and fund predevelopment costs.
There’s no shortage of talented, savvy developers of color with inspired visions for what they want to accomplish.”
Improving community health and resilience
DURING THE COVID PANDEMIC, the life expectancy of Black and Hispanic people fell even more sharply than that of whites—one more indication that the social determinants of health profoundly impact life prospects. Because of these modifiable social determinants, people of color fare worse across a range of health outcomes; Black and Native American people, for instance, experience much higher rates of pregnancy-related and infant death than white people.
To address these tragic disparities, in 2022 Project 10X invested in the health and resiliency of communities of color, creating new open spaces and recreational facilities for stress relief and exercise, fostering climate resiliency with energy-efficient housing and other green infrastructure, and increasing the availability of locally sourced fresh and nutritious foods. LISC also facilitated access to health care via free Uber rides to medical appointments and by building or expanding community health clinics and supportive housing with on-site health services.
Improving community health and resilience
DURING THE COVID PANDEMIC, the life expectancy of Black and Hispanic people fell even more sharply than that of whites—one more indication that the social determinants of health profoundly impact life prospects. Because of these modifiable social determinants, people of color fare worse across a range of health outcomes; Black and Native American people, for instance, experience much higher rates of pregnancy-related and infant death than white people.
To address these tragic disparities, in 2022 Project 10X invested in the health and resiliency of communities of color, creating new open spaces and recreational facilities for stress relief and exercise, fostering climate resiliency with energy-efficient housing and other green infrastructure, and increasing the availability of locally sourced fresh and nutritious foods. LISC also facilitated access to health care via free Uber rides to medical appointments and by building or expanding community health clinics and supportive housing with on-site health services.
Black people are 40 percent more likely than other groups to live in places where extreme temperatures will cause more deaths.
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Uber rides to better health
What does health equity have to do with transportation? Plenty, as it turns out. In deploying an $11 million fund established in 2021 to provide Uber rides to Covid-19 vaccination sites, LISC discovered a deep well of need: many people in the low-income communities of color served by the program face enormous difficulty physically accessing all kinds of health care.
The Vaccine Access Fund, established by donations from Uber, PayPal, and Walgreens, has fed grants to LISC’s community-based partners, whose staff book the door-to-door Uber rides for community members using the HIPAA-secure platform Uber Health. Clients don’t pay; they need not even own a smartphone or have a permanent address.
The fund has helped tens of thousands of vulnerable individuals get protected against Covid. But it was in 2022, after the program opened up eligibility to those needing other kinds of health services in addition to vaccine education, that uptake exploded.
Last year the fund provided 48,000 rides to health care facilities for people who could not get there otherwise—because they don’t own a car, for instance, because the bus stop is too far to walk with a disability or small kids in tow, or because time off work is too limited to make a long cross-town journey for personal wellness.
Racial inequities overlap in complex ways. LISC’s Uber rides partnership is helping to incubate solutions to an access gap at the intersection of transportation and health care. Read more about the program here.
Green Futures + Climate Justice
As part of LISC's investments in resilient, earth-friendly housing and infrastructure in communities of color, a $5M loan from LISC New York is supporting the creation of new and refurbished net-zero homes, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, in southeast Queens. They will serve Black families in an area highly vulnerable to flooding and other impacts of climate change.
Image Credit: Paul A. Castrucci Architects (PCA)
Reimagining community safety
VIOLENT CRIME IS NOT RANDOM. It’s concentrated within high-poverty, often racially segregated neighborhoods, where trauma and deprivation fuel a cycle of harm. Black men and women are far more likely to die by homicide than white Americans, and their victimization rates surged more steeply during the pandemic. At the same time, as anguished protest in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder by police made clearer than ever, communities of color also experience trauma and victimization in the U.S. criminal justice system.
That’s why LISC’s 10X safety initiatives focus on community-led alternatives to stepped-up police enforcement. In 2022, for instance, LISC made major investments to support and disseminate lessons from the field of community violence intervention (CVI), a grassroots approach driven by relatable outreach workers. In Los Angeles we helped set up a social-services infrastructure to assist people diverted from incarceration. And we supported restorative justice processes in schools to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline
Reimagining community safety
VIOLENT CRIME IS NOT RANDOM. It’s concentrated within high-poverty, often racially segregated neighborhoods, where trauma and deprivation fuel a cycle of harm. Black men and women are far more likely to die by homicide than white Americans, and their victimization rates surged more steeply during the pandemic. At the same time, as anguished protest in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder by police made clearer than ever, communities of color also experience trauma and victimization in the U.S. criminal justice system.
That’s why LISC’s 10X safety initiatives focus on community-led alternatives to stepped-up police enforcement. In 2022, for instance, LISC made major investments to support and disseminate lessons from the field of community violence intervention (CVI), a grassroots approach driven by relatable outreach workers. In Los Angeles we helped set up a social-services infrastructure to assist people diverted from incarceration. And we supported restorative justice processes in schools to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline
CVI programs have proved to reduce homicides by as much as 60 percent where they are implemented. (Center for American Progress)
An Approach to Quelling Violence Whose Time Has Come
For many years LISC has championed and supported the small, grassroots groups that both invented and carry out community violence intervention (CVI), a strategy to ease gun violence that relies on relatable neighborhood outreach workers rather than stepped-up law enforcement.
Now, as the Biden administration directs unprecedented resources into CVI, LISC is at work lifting up the field’s practitioners and thought leaders, supporting the work, and publishing groundbreaking research about CVI that others can use.
In 2022 LISC’s Safety & Justice team led widely attended webinars on CVI in partnership with the Executive Office for United States Attorneys and the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), for instance. Also with BJA, the LISC team produced a step-by-step implementation checklist that organizations can use to put CVI into practice.
CVI is a fundamental component of LISC’s 10X initiative—it has everything to do with racial justice. This relationship-building method is rooted in an understanding of trauma. It focuses attention on the places, typically neighborhoods of concentrated, racialized poverty, where gun violence proliferates. Yet it avoids collateral consequences to communities of color in the form of over-policing and mass incarceration.