The Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund, part of the U.S. Treasury Department, announced the recipients of $3.5 billion in New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocations for 2019. The awards include $60 million for LISC, which will be deployed through its subsidiary, the New Markets Support Company (NMSC). Since its inception, NMSC has harnessed $1 billion in tax credits to offer flexible capital for projects that benefit low-income communities across the country--projects ranging from Cincinnati’s CityLink Center, home to 15 social service agencies, to a health clinic-plus-grocery store in Brockton, Mass. to a public library in Petersburg, Va.

By Kevin Boes

The Healthy Futures Fund, a collaboration of LISC, the Kresge Foundation and Morgan Stanley, connects health services and affordable housing projects in imaginative new ways. Kevin Boes of the New Market Support Company, a LISC affiliate, lays out the architecture of financing these projects and describes the fruitful connections being forged between organizations that once ran along parallel tracks.

LISC Indy director Bill Taft talks financing community development and his vision for Great Places 2020—an initiative to revive six historic neighborhoods by the city’s bicentennial—in an interview with Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Taft also shares his key strategies for people who want to help improve quality of life in their own communities.

A visionary collaboration between a grocery store and a clinic in Brockton, MA, aiming to tackle chronic health problems in a low-income community, marks its grand opening this week. The technical backstory—how complex private and public funding came together to make it all happen—might not take center stage at the celebration. But an article in the Novogradac Journal of Tax Credits details, in plain English, the financial architecture involved in bringing Vincente’s Tropical Grocery to the project and to a neighborhood that has long been a food desert.