Perhaps you already saw the big news – we are thrilled to share that last week LISC received a transformative unrestricted $65 million award from Yield Giving, the MacKenzie Scott foundation! This represents a deepened commitment to our mission from Mrs. Scott, building on the extraordinary $40 million unrestricted grant her foundation gave LISC in 2020. It is also a testament to the LISC model and our success driving impact in local communities.
LISC is one of the country’s largest community development organizations, with 37 local offices and a large rural development program that supports work in more than 2,000 counties across 49 states. Our LISC colleagues across the country work hand-in-hand with residents and partners to close systemic gaps in housing, wealth, and opportunity, and advance racial equity. With this substantial gift, LISC can scale and innovate the national capacity that advances a range of impactful programming across the country.
This gift also presents a unique opportunity for our local partners to recommit to our work, leveraging increasing national capacity for deeper local impact.
Here in the Bay State, LISC Massachusetts is focused on tackling three of the state’s most pressing community development challenges: creating more affordable housing, growing an equitable economy for all, and preparing communities for our climate and energy future. We use innovative lending tools, grants, technical assistance, and policy advocacy to support and enable solutions to these challenges.
Much of our impact is fueled by amplifying locally raised funding – we creatively match dollars, build coalitions, and close financing gaps. Our ability to be flexible and innovative is made possible by the infrastructure, knowledge base, and resources of our parent organization.
Much of our impact is fueled by amplifying locally raised funding – we creatively match dollars, build coalitions, and close financing gaps. Our ability to be flexible and innovative is made possible by the infrastructure, knowledge base, and resources of our parent organization.
Three examples of our work that illustrate the relationship between LISC and our local Massachusetts office include LISC Massachusetts’ Equitable Transit Oriented Development Accelerator Fund (ETODAF), the Growth Capital Fund, and the new Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).
ETODAF was launched in 2014 as a locally raised housing investment fund, seeded with $1.5 million investments each from The Boston Foundation, the Hyams Foundation and Mass General Brigham (f/k/a Partners Healthcare), along with a $1 million MassWorks grant from MassDevelopment. Our office leveraged that local funder investment to unlock an additional $7 million of internal LISC funding plus additional capital from other CDFIs. The fund enabled LISC Massachusetts to make targeted loans to 27 affordable housing developments, representing nearly 1,690 units of housing either built or preserved. The resulting $18 million of investment has facilitated nearly $624 million in total housing development costs across Greater Boston.
LISC Massachusetts’ Small Business Growth Fund is supporting historically marginalized entrepreneurs grow their small businesses to build a more equitable economy for all and close the racial wealth gap here in our state. LISC Massachusetts partnered with three local funders – Bay Coast Bank, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Dana Farber Cancer Institute – to pilot an innovative entrepreneur-friendly investment fund. Collectively, these local funders contributed $1 million to launch this fund, which makes patient equity-like investments to help small businesses grow and scale, and fills gaps in capital access, especially entrepreneurs of color in Massachusetts. We were able to raise this meaningful capital from locally based funders by leveraging the technical capacity of LISC Strategic Investments (SI), LISC’s national business group charged with managing impact investment funds. Together, the LISC Massachusetts and LISC SI teams have collaborated to invest our donors’ funding in three businesses, totaling $375,000; a pipeline of potential investments is brimming with hope for entrepreneurs who struggle to raise capital that meets their unique needs.
Just this year, LISC partnered with four other leading national nonprofits to apply for an EPA Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund award, focused on utilizing low-cost capital to make critical investments in greening the affordable housing stock. That coalition collective won a $2 billion award from the federal government last spring. LISC now is preparing to deploy its share of the award to local offices, including ours. LISC Massachusetts’ 15-year track record of Green Homes leadership and program focus, however, makes us among the best positioned and prepared office in the LISC network to take maximum advantage of these nationally-raised federal funds – delivering sizable housing decarbonization investments to the affordable housing sector throughout the state. This has been made possible because of committed, forward-thinking funding over the years from local philanthropic, private sector, and state government partners.
All three of these high impact initiatives demonstrate the value of the LISC model here in Massachusetts: building strong partnerships with on-the-ground community leaders; raising critical investments from local corporate, philanthropic, and government funders; and then leveraging the scale and expertise of our colleagues here at one of the nation’s largest CDFIs – all to support local solutions to critical community challenges.
Today, this extraordinary award from MacKenzie Scott foundation is a doubling down in the underlying infrastructure that enables the impact of the LISC local office model. Now is the time for local funders in Massachusetts to leverage Mrs. Scott’s investment by supporting LISC Massachusetts’ goals for even greater impact across the Commonwealth in the year to come.