Health & Safety
LISC’s approach to improving health in underserved places is holistic: We promote affordable, green housing, safety, good education, job opportunities and financial stability—all of which lift the health and wellbeing of a community. We work to build three fundamental resources every neighborhood needs to keep residents well: easy access to primary health care, affordable, nutritious food and safe places to exercise.
Fannie Mae Challenge
LISC Charlotte has secured a grant of $500,000 to fund a partnership with Fannie Mae and Atrium Health to develop new financing to address social determinants of health, including employment and access to healthy food. The initiative is part of a broader housing development effort through CHOIF—a joint effort among Foundation For The Carolinas, the City of Charlotte, corporations, and philanthropic organizations to expand the city’s supply of quality housing. The goal is threefold, to improve quality-of-life outcomes for Charlotte residents, to offer a model that other cities and states can replicate, and to encourage health-related companies to invest in affordable housing as part of a broader strategy to catalyze gains for the people and communities they serve.
Affordable Healthy Food Initiatives
Affordable, fresh food is a critical ingredient of a healthy community and one of the keys to upending chronic, nutrition-related diseases like obesity and diabetes that plague impoverished neighborhoods. Still, many low-income people, especially those who live in food deserts, face serious hurdles in getting access to good food. LISC has long invested in grocery stores and other food outlets in the neighborhoods where we work, not only to improve nutrition and health, but as a way to spark commercial revitalization and job creation. We also back healthy food production through community gardens and greenhouses, and food entrepreneurship, initiatives that provide low-income people training for jobs and an opportunity to launch food-related business ideas.
Safety
We’ve worked on building community ties at a grassroots level to establish a common ground around safety, starting with helping communities identify their safety priorities. We provide capacity building to locally-active community development corporations (CDCs) to enable them to focus on systematic issues, root causes, and most importantly better safety and wellbeing for vulnerable and at-risk people in Charlotte’s Historic West End (HWE). We continue to provide technical assistance and capacity building to “For the Struggle” and “Historic West End Partners”, both CDCs that have been providing services to the elderly and the homeless in HWE. Through community partnerships like these, we continue to implement some of LISC’s best practices for safety initiatives. One example is the Neighborhood Blitz, where local partner organizations receive support to supervise targeted neighborhood physical improvements that began a chain of positive after-effects including neighborhood revitalization, community safety upgrades, all while building closer bonds between residents and stakeholders. LISC Charlotte also promotes the City’s Cure Violence Initiative and other violence interruption programs in HWE.