Our Work
Our goal is to create socially and economically vibrant and sustainable neighborhoods, with living wage jobs, local businesses, good schools, quality housing, reliable transportation and needed amenities. This requires not only the use of investments to create connections to economic and ownership opportunities, but also trust, collaboration and a community process for residents to have a say in decisions that shape their neighborhoods and lives.
Our focus is on equitable development: ensuring that every neighborhood and everyone has the opportunity to benefit from economic transformation, especially low-income residents, communities of color, immigrants and others at risk of being left behind, even as parts of the city thrive.
Our Priorities
We support neighborhood planning that builds local capacity for strong relationships and collaborative decision-making and action among community stakeholders to drive equitable change.
Our economic development strategy is to generate sustainable, living wage jobs by attracting businesses to targeted neighborhoods and preparing residents to be hired into these jobs.
We target our loans for mission-driven developers who are working to improve their communities throughout the metropolitan Chicago area. We target our grants based on recommendations from our neighborhood Quality-of-Life Plans.
The Neighborhood Network in collaboration with LISC has joined forces to advocate for equity. Together we represent 26 diverse neighborhoods with a combined population of over 1 million residents.