LISC president and CEO Michael T. Pugh reflects on what he's learned in his first months helming the organization, and shares top priorities for the year, both internally and for supporting the communities we work with. Green housing, second-chance employment and AI as a tool for more efficient credit-building and lending are at the top of the list, along with strengthening and streamlining LISC's operations to achieve maximum impact in people's lives.
“One hundred days” is a benchmark with a lot of historical weight, and probably for good reason. I’ve found that the first 100 days in a new role are a critical time to take the measure of an organization, and to take the measure of myself in it.
Since arriving at LISC last fall, I’ve been able to meet hundreds of people and learn about our complex operations and many program areas. My visits with our local offices—seeing our executive directors in action and their passionate leadership in forging public-private partnerships that create real impact—has been an inspiration.
And I’ve seen, over and over again, our communities’ need for greater investment, capacity building and collaboration. We have entered a new phase following the pandemic and the justice issues that have plagued our nation, all of which created opportunities for LISC to respond intensively. Now, we are collectively asking, “What's next? What should we be doing to continue the charge and increase scale?”
With those guiding questions and all the information and input from staff and partners, we’ve identified priorities for the coming year and beyond and are developing and implementing a roadmap to achieve these goals.
Some of those priorities relate to our operations—like streamlining and strengthening our internal organization and infrastructure to be even more fiscally responsible and nimble. And investing in technology to help us deliver solutions to our communities more quickly and efficiently. These efforts, combined with a push to centralize our communications work, refine the ways we track and assess our impact and publish LISC’s next three-year strategic plan, will all help uplift the work of our local offices and national programs.
One form of technology I am committed to leveraging is AI, which can be an especially powerful tool in our work supporting small businesses. There are more than 40 million people in this country, many of them in the communities we serve, who don’t have a traditional credit score. We know that without that score, entrepreneurs can’t get loans and grow their enterprises. But AI is a potential source of credit solutions and alternative scoring that could open doors and tap the incredible economic engine of small businesses. We’ll be looking for partners to help us leverage existing technology or build new tools to do this. And I hope we’ll become a leader in the CDFI space for using this technology to move fast, efficiently, and soundly with small business lending.
Another area of economic opportunity we’ll be honing is job training and other support for people re-entering their communities after incarceration. Investing in those pathways is imperative if we are going to break the cycles of mass incarceration and over-policing that undermine the health and wellbeing of our entire society. This will build on our long-standing programs in community safety and justice and employment readiness.
Green initiatives—and approaching all of our work through the lens of climate resiliency—will be enormously important this year and beyond. Especially if we are awarded the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money we have applied for, together with Enterprise Community Partners, United Way, Habitat for Humanity and Rewiring America, in a partnership called Power Forward Communities. The climate crisis is shaping how we promote economic development, like supporting entrepreneurs to be energy smart and investing further in green jobs training; and it’s guiding our housing investments, which are increasingly green—to create and retrofit healthy, energy-efficient homes for everyday Americans.
Of course, affordable housing development will continue to be our mainstay, and we will intensify our work in that area to meet the mounting housing deficit in our communities.
None of this can happen without our supporters, both public and private. We rely on their capital to create impact, of course. But we also need their expertise and technical assistance. Our board, our local advisory councils, and our many funders have deep subject area knowledge and experience that can help ramp up our innovations and speed our ability to get capital and other support out the door to community partners and residents. They are a trove of time, talent and treasure for realizing our shared mission.
As I mentioned, I’ve used these early months on the job to gauge my own place in this work, too, as a leader and practitioner. My goals for myself this year are: one, to help us develop even stronger relationships with our affiliates, National Equity Fund, Broadstreet and LISC Strategic Investments, and to signal that we are an organization united in the effort to improve the quality of people’s lives; two, to connect more deeply with colleagues across the country to understand their thoughts, opinions and recommendations for the organization. It's important to me that they feel included and have a voice. And my third goal is to demonstrate continued growth—by engaging more partners and reaching more communities that have been sidelined from American prosperity.
There’s no question that community development is a long game—and we’re in it for the long haul. But at the same time, the people and communities we work with should not have to wait to be part of the mainstream economy and have equitable access to opportunities. We have the ingenuity, the resources, the relationships and the sense of urgency required to deploy investments and create impact. 2024 will be our year to make that impact deeper, wider and more meaningful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael T. Pugh, President & CEO
Michael T. Pugh became CEO of LISC in October 2023. He has more than 30 years of experience in banking, with a particular focus on expanding access to capital for underserved families, businesses, and communities. Michael spent more than a decade at the Harlem-based Carver, leading the nation’s largest publicly traded African American-operated bank, with more than $720 million in assets.