MESSAGE FROM LEADERSHIP
///////// WHAT A YEAR 2022 TURNED OUT TO BE. There were some incredible achievements, some frustrations, and a very personal reminder of how important it is to have a strong team and trusted relationships in the community. I’m always saying that “It’s not one of us, it’s all of us” to make things happen – 2022 was the year that showed us how true that statement is. Community development doesn’t happen without everyone pulling in the same direction, and when we needed to, LISC Rhode Island stepped up and got extraordinary things accomplished.
First, just by looking at the numbers, 2022 was an exceptional year. For the past several years, LISC has consistently invested $25M in our communities to address poverty and create communities where people can thrive. But this past year, and thanks in large part to a grant from Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, we nearly doubled that impact and invested an incredible $42.5M in Rhode Island. These investments – usually first-in capital — leveraged an astonishing $168M of development funding. That increased level of funding is gratifying when you see the projects that it supports, but it’s frustrating when you understand the total need in the community. We’ve tripled the number of units in the pipeline on some incredibly transformative projects, but we also see that this just scratches the surface.
We’ve also had a fantastic year in our Early Learning and Child Care Facilities practice area. The team — in partnership with the State — launched The Early Childhood Care and Education Capital Fund to deploy more than $13M in grant funding for physical improvements to childcare spaces, and the development of new licensed facilities. The team delivered hundreds of hours of trainings, technical assistance for applicants, conducted site visits, worked with architects, licensing boards and providers. The team launched the program in the spring, and by September, they had awarded nearly $11M to fund key expansions and improvements for child care facilities – an incredible accomplishment.
The power of teamwork really took on extra meaning this year. As many of you know, I was in an accident and had to take time off to heal. Having the strong foundation that comes with being part of the country’s largest Community Development Financial Institution gave me the comfort that our local team could tap the resources they needed. As it turned out, the office was in steady hands. Every single person on our staff stepped up to take on more, to communicate with each other, to reach out to funders and program providers and keep doing the work to build communities, to respond to COVID in the Pawtucket Central Falls Health Equity Zone, to initiate expanded funding programs, and to form a coalition of BIPOC Business Development Organizations. We are lucky to have such a team of capable, mission-driven professionals doing this work, and I’m very grateful for their contributions to the community.
In the pages that follow, you’ll read about ways our work impacts our neighbors and improves our communities. We’re proud of this work. I hope you will take a moment to look through some of the highlights.
Sincerely,
Jeanne Cola Senior Executive Director
OUR IMPACT STORIES
The experience reinforced a sense of community empowerment. In the words of one delegate “Con el inicio de esta nueva revolución estoy convencida del cambio en mi comunidad y estoy maravillada de lo que juntos podemos hacer, aprendiendo. Voces con Poder.””
Health Equity
Even as the Omicron wave was starting to ebb, the work in the LISC Pawtucket Central Falls Health Equity Zone expanded even further to launch several new programs designed to improve the Social Determinants of Health in those communities. Working with residents and the HEZ coalition of local program providers and community members, LISC completed a comprehensive Accelerator Plan with funding from the Centers for Disease Control to address healthy food access. A new Pawtucket Central Falls Food and Nutrition Task Force was formed to implement the action plan to increase the availability of fruits and vegetables, and to establish a Food Ambassador for the two cities.
The HEZ team also developed initiatives to engage the youth – a key priority raised by the community. A Youth Equity Leaders program, in partnership with the YMCA in Pawtucket, worked together to identify priorities, create programs, and worked to address food security and homelessness.
The Youth Equity Leaders group also participated in another key initiative in the HEZ. This year, the RI Department of Health engaged the LISC PCF HEZ in a Participatory Budgeting pilot program to have residents assess the social determinants of health, provide ideas for improving health outcomes, develop programs to support those ideas, and then vote on which program should be funded from a budget of $385,000. The community put forth more than 600 ideas that were distilled and developed the ideas into programs. The community vote is coming up in June and we’re excited to see which of the 11 programs will be chosen to receive funding.
Wealth Equity
Broad opportunity for upward mobility is a basic tenet of the American Dream and the key to closing the racial wealth gap. Surprisingly, the U.S. actually has lower rates of economic mobility than other developed countries, and people of color face additional barriers to getting ahead.
In an effort to help build ladders of opportunity, we’ve created a layered network of programs that support personal economic growth through a range of touch points including: one-on-one financial and career coaching through our Financial Opportunity Centers®, workforce training and wrap-around supports through Bridges to Career Opportunities, entrepreneurial support through our coalition of Business Development Organizations, and a crowd-sourced financing vehicle for microbusinesses called KIVA.
This year, we began the work to launch a third Financial Opportunity Center in Rhode Island. The Jane Addams Resource Corporation, or JARC, is partnering with Polaris MEP and will begin training in the spring of 2023. JARC is a successful FOC partner with LISC in Chicago and Baltimore, and its program will provide skills development in manufacturing. They will join Amos House and Genesis Center, which are longstanding FOC partners.
Amos House and Genesis Center continue their transformative work through culinary arts, building trades, and health care training programs – including dental tech. Their dedication to clients leaves a lasting impression on participants, the success of whom continue to provide inspiration. For example, clients like Tommy Ngo, who escaped the gangs in south Providence and found success and a relationship, or Merissa Piccoli, who dreamt of starting her own company during her incarceration, or Shique Briggs who continues to make strong personal gains — including being reunited with family —wholly due to the support and training received through these partners.
Funding is critical to our local FOC programs, including ongoing support from Citizens to provide Digital Literacy training, and support from Citi for Healthcare job training and Lowe’s for the Building Trades programs. New funders have provided opportunities to develop entrepreneurship among priority populations. During the pandemic, LISC began working to build a coalition of BIPOC Business Development Organizations which would provide opportunities to build capacity, share best practices and participate in national programming. LISC embedded an AmeriCorps member in several BDO partner organizations who was able to provide financial counseling to clients who were struggling to disentangle their personal finances from their entrepreneurial projects. This helped remove a critical bottleneck for many new entrepreneurs and set them on their way to financial stability.
Additional funding from Verizon and Next Street meant that we could offer the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready online training platform through our local BDO partners. In 2022, both the Multicultural Innovation Center and Hope & Main held events and trainings. In 2023, we will broaden that program to include Social Enterprise Greenhouse and the RI-Black Business Association.
Early Learning and Child Care Facilities
Our Child Care team was incredibly busy working to expand child care for Rhode Islanders. They launched the Early Childhood Care and Education Capital Fund, a bond-funded grant program approved by voters in 2021 which provided more than $13M for the development of new licensed early childhood care and education facilities, and funded facility improvements for existing spaces. The team developed the materials, scheduled trainings, issued the RFP in the spring and met with providers and architects to provide technical assistance on proposed plans. Sixty-four proposals came in for more than $30M — far more than what was available — but by September, the team was able to make $11M in awards to 15 programs including Meeting Street, the I-195 Parcel 9 mixed-use project that incorporates child care, and the Boys Club and Girls Club of Newport County. The team continues to work to deploy the remaining funds for this program.
The team continued to provide Preschool Development Grants for planning in order to build out a robust pipeline for future child care expansion projects. In 2022, they awarded more than $300,000 to providers to secure professional services for predevelopment and feasibility planning of both indoor and outdoor facility projects.
The team also built upon its successful work for the City of Providence during the past two years and expanded their work for 2022 and 2023. The team is now administering the Early Learning Infrastructure Program for the City of Providence that will provide specialized one-on-one technical assistance to both home- and center-based child care facilities, as well as provide planning and capital improvement grants to early learning programs. This work will prioritize improvements that support compliance with regulations and remediate areas that pose risks to children’s health and safety, and support facilities to improve their overall quality. While this is available to all child care providers in the City, this represents an increase in support for home-based providers. The team will deliver more than $1.5M in grants to providers between now and December 2024.
Housing
During COVID, the intersection of health and housing security came into sharp focus. While housing advocates have been raising the alarm for many years, the decades of underinvestment in housing took its toll on Rhode Islanders — and people began to notice.
To call attention to the fact that housing is the foundational social determinant of health, LISC created the Health and Housing program, in large part due to a transformative grant from Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and supported with additional funding from the Rhode Island Foundation and Rhode Island Housing. Because of these additional resources, we leveraged additional LISC National resources and provided pre-development financing for a record-breaking 26 projects – nearly 3x our usual volume — that will create or preserve more than 1,000 additional units of affordable housing.
The addition of unrestricted, flexible funding from the Health and Housing program has had a dramatic impact on the pipeline. Not only has it resulted in our ability to award significantly more pre-development funds for projects, but it has enabled those projects to become “shovel ready” much faster. LISC has been able to make oversized grants to critical projects for priority populations including the new permanent supportive housing facility at Crossroads, the LGBTQ-focused Aldersbridge, West House II senior housing which will create permanent supportive housing units in Middletown, and a critical project by Foster Forward, One Neighborhood Builders, and Family Service of Rhode Island and Crossroads that will build 134 total units for children aging out of foster care. Providing this funding has allowed LISC to accelerate the timeline for projects — especially critical in this crisis environment.
This funding also has allowed the Rhode Island office to tap key funding sources that bring additional dollars to Rhode Island. For example, this year LISC invested $6M in New Markets Tax Credits for the Meeting Street Early Learning Center Expansion project, invested $3M in the Mayoral Academy expansion — and more than $18M for the Joe Caffey Apartments and Townhomes currently being built in Upper South Providence. In total, LISC invested more than $46M in Rhode Island in 2022 – nearly twice our usual investment.
And we continue to provide Technical Assistance and deliver Capacity Building programs for our CDC partners. We funded a 3-part, 80-hour professional certification program through the National Development Council and made it available to all CDC partners statewide.
LISCs investment of pre-development financing has leveraged an additional $192M in development. We often say that an investment in LISC means 1+1 equals 3, 4, or 5. But because of the funding from Blue Cross & Blue Shield of RI, and others, we’re able to say that an investment in LISC means 1+1 equals so much more for Rhode Island.
SNAP Employment & Training
LISC RI works in partnership with the State to bring a full range of training opportunities to SNAP recipients through the SNAP E&T program. LISC provides Technical Assistance, manages program providers, and conducts compliance oversight that tracks verification of SNAP participants going through the trainings. In 2020, that meant working with providers to pivot programs during the pandemic. And then in 2022, it meant working with providers to reframe new programs as people began to go back to work. It has been a dynamic few years, but last year broke all previous records.
By the end of 2022, we added three new providers including CCRI, the Newport Community School and the Jane Addams Resource Centre, and have more in the pipeline for 2023. These additional providers will expand both the geographic coverage and the variety of programs that will give Rhode Islanders more choice for ways to build a career.
Strikingly, the number of people who are taking advantage of this key training opportunity has skyrocketed. Last year, more than 2,000 people accessed training, supports and career guidance to help them find good paying jobs. An increase of 57%. The results are so staggering that LISC offices across the footprint are looking at ways to support the SNAP E&T programs in their states.
Check out the SNAP E&T website – traffic here increased by 50% last year, too.
BY THE NUMBERS
IN 2022
$42.5M
invested
hours of technical assistance
$168M
leveraged
SINCE 1991
$529M
invested
affordable homes & apartments
$1.8B
leveraged
2.2M
square feet of commercial space
OUR FUNDERS
2022 Private Sector Support
Anonymous
Bank of America
Bank of America Charitable Foundation
Bank of Newport/OceanPoint Charitable Fund
BankRI
Robert & Susan Baxter
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island
Adrian Boney
Bristol County Savings Charitable Foundation
Care New England Health Systems
Phillip Chan
Citizens Charitable Foundation
Brenda Clement
Coastal1
Robyn Hall
Khadija Lewis Khan
Elizabeth Klinkenberg
Bradford Latimer
Lowe’s Companies, Inc.
Becki Marcus
McGunagle Hentz, PC
Charles & Linda Newton
Jeremiah O'Grady
Charlotte Orlowski-Eicher Memorial Fund
Papitto Opportunity Connection
The Rhode Island Foundation
Rhode Island Housing
Santander Bank, N.A.
Cheryl Senerchia
Joseph Silva
Julia Anne Slom
Claudia Staniszewski
Natividad Taveras
TD Charitable Foundation
Textron Charitable Trust
Mary Thompson
United Way of Rhode Island
Webster Bank Charitable Foundation
2022 Public Sector Support
Care Transformation Collaborative of Rhode Island
City of Providence
Rhode Island Department of Education
Rhode Island Department of Health
Rhode Island Department of Human Services
U.S. Department of Agriculture
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Thank you to all of our partners who make this work possible.”
OUR LOCAL ADVISORY COUNCIL
THE LISC LOCAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE (LAC) is the leadership body that guides local programming and is comprised of local leaders and community members who offer insight into the current needs and dynamics of their area of expertise. LAC members review investments, provide guidance on programs, policies and plans and support resource development efforts.
Joseph L. Silva Chief Lending Officer Fidelity Bank Angela B. Ankoma Community Leader Vice President and Executive Director The Rhode Island Foundation Adrian Bonéy Grant Programs Officer for Housing and Special Programs The Rhode Island Foundation Keb H. Brackenbury Senior Vice President, Commercial Real Estate BankRI Colonel Hugh T. Clements, Jr. Chief of Police Providence Police Department Nancy Smith Greer Rhode Island Field Office Director US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Bradford Latimer Director of Consumer Risk, Senior Vice President Commercial Real Estate Santander Bank Khadija Lewis Khan Executive Director Beautiful Beginnings Child Care Center Mary Leach Executive Vice President Chief Retail Banking & Lending Officer BankNewport Kenneth F. McGunagle, Jr, Partner McGunagle Hentz, PC
Charles Newton Community Leader
Ana P. Novias, MA Acting Secretary Executive Office of Health and Human Services State of Rhode Island
Robert Sabel, Esquire Managing Attorney Rhode Island Legal Services, Inc.
Julia Anne Slom Senior Vice President Commercial Real Estate Group Washington Trust Company
Michael E. Smith Senior Vice President Webster Bank
Mary Thompson Senior Vice President Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Vanessa Toledo-Vickers Vice President, Community Development Market Manager Citizens
Charles Van Vleet Assistant Treasurer & CIO Textron, Inc.
Carol Ventura Executive Director Rhode Island Housing