By Lisa Glover, LISC CEO

LISC’s CEO Lisa Glover reflects on lessons learned while leading the organization through another pandemic year, the imperative of listening to diverse views and strategies that LISC will deploy in 2022 to promote equity and wellbeing in communities we work with.

In this episode, LISC's Interim CEO & President, Lisa L. Glover, interviews LISC board member, Michelle de la Uz who is also the Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, NY. The conversation highlights the work of the Fifth Avenue Committee around COVID, environmental initiatives and climate change, community advocacy, and affordable housing. It’s a great conversation that celebrates the importance of community partnerships in an ever-changing urban landscape.

As part of their worldwide vaccine access campaign, Vax Because, Global Citizen invited LISC CEO Lisa Glover and Uber's global head of social impact Julia Paige to discuss their $11 million Vaccine Access Fund, designed to upend barriers to transportation to vaccination sites—barriers that primarily affect undeserved communities of color. Said Glover in the video interview, together with Uber, “we can deliver the resources to our partners that are trusted on the ground, and they can work with their communities to get the transportation needs met.”

By Lisa L. Glover, Interim LISC President and CEO

In a blog describing the new $11 million Vaccine Access Fund, a partnership of LISC, Uber, Paypal and Walgreens, LISC's Interim President & CEO Lisa L. Glover details how the fund tackles more than the transportation gap that is keeping tens of thousands of Americans from accessing COVID-19 vaccines. "The fund offers a practical solution to an immediate problem," writes Glover. "But this is absolutely part of our larger efforts to address equity as well."

An op-ed in the Mercury News by LISC CEO Maurice A. Jones, along with Facebook CFO Dave Wehner and Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination:Home, describes the twin urgencies created by the pandemic and longstanding housing underinvestment. The intensifying need for more affordable housing in the Bay Area has galvanized the Partnership for the Bay’s Future, funding by Facebook and managed by LISC, to ramp up investment in the COVID era.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic and this year's anti-racist protests, LISC has raised some $2 billion in grants, loans and equity to fund programs that aim to upend structural racism and close yawning health, wealth and opportunity gaps. An article in CNN looks at how corporate donors have stepped up to support LISC in this work and points to what will be an ongoing need. As LISC CEO Maurice A. Jones says in the piece, “This requires faithfulness over a long time to have real transformative impact. It can't just be 2020. This has to be a new chapter.”