MESSAGE FROM LEADERSHIP

Since 1988, LISC has provided the Flint area with over $40 million in financial support to non-profit and community organizations for capacity building, projects and programs. This equates to generating $16.2 million in grants and loan commitments and an additional $9 million in equity in Flint, leveraging $192 million in additional investment. These investments created 398,967 square feet of commercial space and 770 units of housing.

With support from the CS Mott foundation and local partners, the LISC Flint office was established in 2003, as part of the LISC Michigan Statewide umbrella, to formalize LISC’s support for CDCs and neighborhood revitalization activities through technical assistance, capacity building, grants and loans. In late 2021, the LISC Flint office obtained stand-alone designation and in collaboration with local community development groups, local advisory committee members, and the City of Flint, local staff help identify priorities and challenges, delivering the most appropriate support to meet our needs.

2023 was a challenging but exciting year for the LISC Flint office, with our partner and community support we were able to offer our 1st Project 10x Loan to Vehicle City Onsite Fleet Services. Project 10X is a $1 billion national LISC program that addresses systemic barriers to health, wealth, and opportunity for people of color. The VCOFS loan reﬂects the kind of small business support LISC will be providing in the future, this isn’t philanthropy; these are business investments in the long-term health of our workforce, our local economy and our communities.

Partners like the Shelbys, who are active in our community as individuals volunteering their time and as business owners creating an economic impact, are willing to connect their ambitions and their experience to larger goals for our region. When they can access the capital they need, they can be a powerful counterweight to years of disinvestment. Coupled with our HUD Section IV capacity building, LISC AmeriCorps programming and our LISC Financial Opportunity Center. We are looking forward to further positive impact in our community.

Sincerely, Juan Zuniga LISC Flint Executive Director

OUR IMPACT STORIES

LISC Flint—the local program oﬃce of the national nonproﬁt—announced its ﬁrst “Project 10X” loan to Vehicle City Onsite Fleet Services (VCOFS), a truck maintenance and repair operation in Burton, Mich.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a long-time investor in Flint-area communities, is expanding its commitment to economic opportunity in the region with small business ﬁnancing that is speciﬁcally designed to advance racial equity, support good jobs and expand the local economy.

VCOFS is owned by Joseph and Kimberley Shelby, a husband-and-wife team that left successful corporate careers to pursue a long-time goal of business ownership. They launched the company in 2019, moved into a larger space in 2020 and began looking for opportunities to buy their space and grow their core business operations in 2022.

What they found, though, was that conventional ﬁnancing was diﬃcult to access, in part because VCOFS was too new to be able to borrow at reasonable terms. Their experience also reﬂects the national gap in access to capital for Black businessowners, which has long impacted growth and wealth-building. The Federal Reserve Bank’s Small Business Credit Survey reports that loan applicant ﬁrms owned by people of color are half as likely as white-owned applicant ﬁrms to report that they received all the traditional ﬁnancing they sought.

In the case of VCOFS, LISC was able to step in and provide a loan to ﬁnance the property purchase. With access to aﬀordable ﬁnancing, VCOFS was also able to pay oﬀ an existing, more expensive SBA loan and earmark the cost savings for reinvestment in the business.

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LISC HUD Capacity Building for Comprehensive Community Revitalization

With funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, LISC helps community-based nonprofits strengthen their organizations and improve their ability to implement safety initiatives in the context of comprehensive community revitalization.

The Neighborhood Engagement Hub (NEH) provides a catalyst for positive neighborhood change by supporting neighborhoods to become safe, healthy, and whole. The NEH supports several Flint, MI neighborhoods by engaging in activities such as blight elimination, community economic development, placemaking, public policy, public safety, and training & technical assistance. LISC is supporting a full-time Community Safety Project Manager, who will be responsible for organizing strategy-specific trainings such as CPTED, convening project stakeholders, and holding special community events. This role will increase the capacity of the organization to support both the City of Flint and neighborhood-based partners in the execution of a variety of community safety-related projects.

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LISC AmeriCorps

LISC AmeriCorps places passionate, dedicated people with community development groups in the neighborhoods where we work. These placements serve a vital, three-fold purpose: members serve the organizations where they are placed and spearhead valuable projects; they engage local residents in the revitalization of their own neighborhoods; and they develop skills, experience and insight into community development and the profound value of service.

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