Who We Are
Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Indianapolis is the local office of a national organization that helps resident-led, community-based development organizations transform distressed communities and neighborhoods into healthy ones.
By mobilizing corporate, government, and philanthropic support, LISC provides financing, technical advice, management and program consulting, training, and policy support to neighborhoods. We help neighborhood-based organizations organize, identify results they aim to achieve, create plans, and then help implement them—a process we call quality-of-life planning.
We work to restore housing, stimulate economic development, champion education, create avenues out of poverty, and support healthy environments and lifestyles. Our efforts are based on the proven principle that sustainable revitalization works best when it is driven by community residents and stakeholders, not imposed from the outside.
LISC is a comprehensive community development intermediary. We work holistically across sectors to address the interconnected factors that drive inequality of opportunity.
LISC drives systems change by working with neighborhoods to align capital, capacity and neighborhood visions.
LISC is committed to advancing racial equity and eliminating racial wealth, health, and opportunity gaps to empower people and transform places.
Poverty and other forms of inequity and injustice that LISC works to help redress are largely rooted in this country’s historic and systemic racism, as well as in other forms of discrimination. Pursuing our mission demands that we conceive and implement every aspect of our work through the lenses of equity and anti-racism. LISC is wholly committed to living this approach.
Learn more about LISC's strategy and the ways we will improve our operations to better serve our communities.
Our History
In 1979, when the Ford Foundation first conceived of LISC, it envisioned an “intermediary”—a nimble non-profit with strong community partnerships that would connect hard-to-tap public and private resources with underinvested places and people working to access opportunities everyone of us deserves.
The premise is still as it was then: government, foundations and for-profit companies have the capital; residents and local institutions understand the need; and LISC helps bridge the gap by offering the relationships and expertise to assist community organizations in attracting the kinds of resources that allow them do their best work.
The components of our programming and our role continue to evolve and expand, in particular, our commitment to systems change, equity and an overt anti-racist approach to the work. But for 40 years, our mission has remained the same.
Formed in 1992 to address substandard housing conditions in the city, LISC Indianapolis has since become known for our holistic approach to community development – an approach that recognizes the importance of a set of interdependent neighborhood characteristics to the well-being of neighborhood residents and an approach that coordinates investments in commercial and industrial corridors, community facilities, businesses, and job creation in Indianapolis’ core urban neighborhoods.