Executive Director’s Column: The Work of a Social Intermediary

As a kid, one of the things my Pop Warner football team would do when we got close to the opponents’ field would be to break out into this wild chant, asking ourselves, “Who are we?” We evidently knew, but the goal was to be so loud and boisterous that it intimidated the other team. I tell this story because just the other day someone asked me who and what is LISC Jacksonville.

The lazy answer would be, “We are a financial intermediary,” but the true answer is much more complex. We are not only a financial intermediary, but along with fiscal capacity to lean into our community’s most complex social issues with capital, we are the technical and social orchestrators of much of the change we want to see in our community.

To allow ourselves to be put into a financial intermediary box misses the mark in a BIG way. Furthermore, the financial intermediary box does not recognize some of the truly transformational and complex work the LISC Jacksonville office has been doing. Our work in the space of creative placekeeping has allowed us to shed light on the beauty of waterways like the Ribault River and has established deep and meaningful partnerships with organizations like the St. Johns Riverkeeper and Thrive Outside Jacksonville. It has introduced local youth to the beauty of the environment that exists right in their very own neighborhood. As an organization, we are INTENTIONAL around our work of making LISC Jacksonville-supported communities destinations where people want to live.

I would venture to say the work LISC Jacksonville has invested in relative to creative placekeeping laid the foundation for our work around heirs’ property and tax abatement. It is through this powerful work of helping people to stay in their homes that LISC Jacksonville continues to establish itself as a trusted community advisor. The same can be said about the work we are doing around home repair. Both important areas of work have been sentinel in helping the communities in which we work ward off the impending wave of gentrification.

While the aforementioned collectively focuses on “placekeeping,” it has been our work through Project Boots that has focused on redefining the narrative in such a way that attracts those who left back to the neighborhoods and making the associated communities a valid option. As an office, we have tried to answer the tough question of how we attract professionals, particularly those of color, back to traditional African American neighborhoods without involuntarily displacing anyone. You do it by redefining who and what the gentrifier looks like. This has been the guiding thought around the work of Project Boots. To date, we have finished our first cohort of five participants, and we are currently five months into our second cohort, which increased to 15 participants. We also have a waiting list of over 100 eager participants.

So, to say we are simply a financial intermediary is to only read the headline-worthy stories around our capital investments in projects like the Phoenix Arts and Innovation District and the Union Terminal Warehouse. However, if you truly looked at our work comprehensively, you would see that NOT ONLY is LISC Jacksonville a financial intermediary, it is a social intermediary who has found a compelling way to incorporate data, scholarship, and true social consciousness into its work.