LISC’s vision is to build communities of opportunity for all, grounded in the core belief that fostering a sense of belonging is vital to achieving shared prosperity. Our work as a community development organization has taught us that when communities are supplied with a set of interconnected physical, social, and economic assets, residents prosper.
Our approach is comprehensive, embracing affordable housing development and workforce training, initiatives for better health, safer public spaces, and much more. Since 1979, LISC has invested $32 billion in communities across the United States, with a focus on communities and populations that are the most disconnected from mainstream financial resources. These investments have resulted in 506,300 affordable homes and apartments, and 82.5 million square feet of commercial, retail, and community space.
A key driver of these efforts are federal commitments—both in the form of policies that help set the agenda for revitalizing communities, as well as funding that puts these legislative and regulatory actions into motion. Federal programs that support local economic development are the linchpin of LISC’s public-private partnership investment model, helping us attract billions of dollars of private capital each year to places it would not otherwise go. Federal policies are the driver to these programs and are critical to building communities that are vibrant places to live, work, do business, and raise families.
Just as LISC recognizes the important role that the federal government plays in supporting local economies and enabling individuals and families to thrive, we also acknowledge the need to ensure that these critical resources are sustained in the coming years. Through LISC’s policy priorities for federal action, we reaffirm our commitment to advocacy with our nonprofit partners and working with Congress and federal agencies to establish and safeguard funding sources, policies, and programs that spur revitalization in urban and rural communities throughout the country.
We invite you to review our policy agenda, which covers seven areas of community development across 16 separate federal agencies, along with a summary document highlighting our policy priorities that support rural America. LISC remains committed not only to pursuing action on the items below, but also to identifying additional opportunities for policy development and advocacy in the coming months and years across the following areas:
Capacity Building and Leadership
Community development relies on the knowledge and hard work of change agents at the local level. We must support local nonprofits and municipalities in order to build their capacity to deliver critical services and help them develop innovative approaches that can be replicated in other communities.
We support federal policies that:
- Support capacity building and technical assistance, in particular through increased funding of programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that build the capacity of community development corporations in urban and rural communities, and through technical assistance to local governments under HUD’s Community Compass and Distressed Cities and Persistent Poverty initiatives.
- Promote national service by funding AmeriCorps and the Economic Mobility Corps, which places AmeriCorps members at certified community development financial institutions (CDFIs).
Community Safety
Decreasing crime and mitigating the perception of crime leads to increased prosperity, allowing people to come together in public spaces, patronize local businesses, and engage with civic institutions. For more than 25 years, LISC has supported investments that strengthen the ability of local cross-sector partnerships to collectively address crime and violence.
We support federal policies that promote community safety around the nation, including those that:
- Fund community violence intervention and prevention programs at the U.S. Department of Justice.
- Help rural communities effectively address violent crime.
- Prevent violence in schools.
- Provide resources for community safety coordinators.
- Support training for law enforcement.
- Enable federal support for pre-entry and re-entry programming.
Economic Development
Local economic development is at the heart of LISC’s approach to helping residents build communities of opportunity. When the tools of economic development focus on building the capacity of residents and community-based organizations, they have tremendous power to revitalize under-resourced communities and expand the ability of people, places, and businesses to build prosperity.
We support federal policies that:
- Enhance critical community development programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
- Boost investments in CDFIs via, for instance, a new tax credit for investors in CDFIs, access to the secondary market for CDFI loans, and robustly funding the U.S. Treasury Department’s CDFI Fund.
- Strengthen public-private partnerships by making New Markets Tax Credits permanent, adding accountability measures and provisions supporting affordable housing development in Opportunity Zones, and protecting the Community Reinvestment Act.
- Enable small businesses to thrive, through programs that provide training, technical assistance, and capital to support their operations.
- Invest in broadband infrastructure, including skills training as well as connecting households to affordable internet services and devices.
Education
Education is a sound predictor of well-being and economic mobility. Communities can flourish when families have access to excellent early childhood education, high-performing schools, and enrichment activities for their children, and when adults can get the skills training, continuing education, and higher education they need to land and advance in living-wage jobs.
We support federal policies that:
- Promote early childhood facilities through, for example, legislative measures that would create dedicated federal funding to support the acquisition, construction, and renovation of child care and early learning program facilities; establish technical-assistance and capacity-building resources tailored to the needs of child care and early learning providers; and incentivize and facilitate co-location of housing and child care.
- Assist with charter school financing by increasing funding for and improving the U.S. Department of Education’s Credit Enhancement for Charter Schools Facilities Program.
- Fund public education, such as the Title I program and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), to ensure that all students have excellent education options.
Health
Community development plays a powerful role in preventing chronic disease and bolstering health and wellness to improve outcomes for people in our local communities.
We support federal policies that:
- Leverage federal funding streams to address health-related social needs, such as adopting changes to Medicaid to better promote housing, nutrition, and other services; establishing a capacity-building program for community-based health organizations; and supporting public-private partnerships that implement networks linking health and social services.
- Improve the provision of health care to under-resourced populations, including substantial long-term funding commitments for Federally Qualified Health Centers and investing in community health workers to help local residents access good health care in low-income communities.
- Ensure healthy food is available and accessible to all communities by funding food-access projects through the USDA and the CDFI Fund.
Housing
Access to safe, decent, and low-cost housing is essential for the health and economic well-being of every family—and to the vitality of our economy.
We support federal policies that:
- Develop, preserve, and widen access to low-cost rental housing, for example, by: expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program; increasing the availability of Private Activity Bonds to support affordable housing preservation; improving key affordable housing production programs at HUD, Treasury, and USDA; and reestablishing the Federal Housing Administration’s Risk-Sharing programs.
- Fight homelessness by increasing HUD resources for assisting unhoused people and expanding veterans’ eligibility for supportive housing and clinical services, and by supporting the Interagency Council on Homelessness.
- Promote homeownership opportunities by enacting the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, sufficiently funding HUD’s down-payment assistance programs, passing legislative measures to scale the land-bank sector, increasing home repair resources, and providing assistance to heirs’ property owners, among other proposals.
Income and Wealth Building
Healthy, vibrant communities are made up of residents who have living-wage jobs and feel confident about their economic futures. LISC’s income- and wealth-building programs help residents tackle all the facets of financial life—earning a steady paycheck, budgeting, building good credit, and saving for life goals like homeownership or retirement. LISC champions policies that support this critical work and enable economic opportunities for people in rural and urban communities across the U.S., including those that:
- Build a strong and resilient workforce by reauthorizing and fully funding the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, enhancing the provision of integrated services, and equipping individuals and families with digital skills.
- Improve opportunities to build credit and savings by, for instance, enhancing protections against predatory lending and providing funding for federal programs that help working-class families build wealth.
- Promote funding and policy initiatives that incentivize the provision of financial coaching alongside federal workforce and benefits streams.
- Help families to build financial independence by improving the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit and bolstering vital social safety net programs.