Denise Scott was named president in December 2021. In the interview that follows, she talks about the to-do list for her first months in the new role, her vision for LISC’s future, and the trajectory of a life committed to closing racial wealth and opportunity gaps.
In December 2021, the LISC board of directors named Denise Scott as the organization’s president, establishing a new leadership structure that responds to LISC’s growth and uplifts the importance of its on-the-ground urban and rural network.
Prior to the announcement, Scott served as LISC’s executive vice president over all field activity for eight years, a role she stepped into after 14 years as the executive director of the organization’s flagship New York City office.
Scott, in fact, has a storied, 40-year history in community development and deep expertise in affordable housing finance and advocacy: she was a White House appointee to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Clinton Administration and, before that, directed the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation. Earlier in her career, she led unprecedented public-private revitalization efforts in Harlem during her tenure with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Today, Scott also serves on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve (she was chair for three years running).
We caught up with Scott to hear about her vision for the presidency and the future of LISC’s investments in communities, the trajectory of a life committed to closing racial wealth and opportunity gaps, and how she stays grounded through it all.
Can you start by talking a little about your family background and how you were inspired to go into community development?
Sure. My parents were business people—they owned a restaurant, a luncheonette, in Corona, Queens—but my father was deeply into politics, civic politics, and he really cared about community. He was never a politician, but he showed up for everything, community meetings, anything that had an impact in the neighborhood. Even some of the mayors of New York City knew him. He showed us that you have to think about your neighbors, your community—that you have to be there for each other.
Both my parents would often say that you can never go much higher than the person behind you because it’s your job to pull them up. That was ingrained in me from childhood.
Let’s talk about what the LISC presidency means. What will the role look like and how will it propel LISC on its mission?
The naming of a president is really an opportunity to elevate the voice of the field and emphasize the “local” in LISC. LISC has become so much more complex over time as we’ve grown and taken on a wider range of issues in communities. The fact that the president is someone who has come up through the ranks of the field is a message that communities are at the core of LISC’s mission and work.
In addition to my new role, we have created other new positions that will form part of senior leadership. By augmenting leadership this way, it also means that there will now be more senior managers who engage with the field daily, and will bring that voice to decisions impacting the field at every turn.
What are your top strategic priorities for refining and intensifying LISC’s work in the next year or two?
One of the priorities for my first months in this position is to make sure we’re delivering the right kind of support to each local office based on what each market needs. There’s a lot of variation across the places we serve. From Buffalo to Kansas City to Los Angeles – they need different things, and we need to tailor support for them so that they, in turn, can better serve their communities. That’s the bottom line of our internal restructuring: to better serve the people and places we work with.
That includes rural communities, my plan is for us to get deeper into the rural scene to make sure we have a clear understanding of their needs and direct resources accordingly.
And another area that we’re sorting out is our DEIJ [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice] agenda.
Yes, we want to talk about that. Like so many other organizations, LISC is making its commitment to DEIJ, both within the company and in our work with communities, a much more overt effort, including through launching Project 10X and a dedicated DEIJ team. How do you hope to see LISC walking its talk on this agenda?
I see my role as helping to operationalize DEIJ, which essentially means determining how we implement this agenda throughout our work—through our work plans, our programmatic structures, our strategies, our goals. How do we lift up the voice of DEIJ throughout every aspect of what we do? How does everyone at the organization assume responsibility for our DEIJ agenda? We need to make sure we are fulfilling that commitment.
Can you give an example or two of the kind of restructuring you have in mind? What needs to change or what do we need more of to make sure DEIJ permeates all of LISC’s work and culture?
One example is lending. LISC has done a lot to expand the types of borrowers who receive loans by examining every aspect of our process and making sure we’re removing roadblocks for people of color. We’re also part of a movement to educate ourselves and partners about racism in the financial system, and we’re working to bring flexible capital to the table when we need it. I want us to continue and deepen that work.
We also need to look at things like how to provide even more capacity building support to community organizations led by people of color. Are we recruiting diverse civic and community leaders to guide our work through the Local Advisory Committee (LACs) for our local offices? When we look at the diversity of our staff, we have to ask who is getting hired and how are they supported? How are they elevated?
In discussing LISC’s evolving strategic focus, you’ve said that the organization can’t be all things to all people. What does that mean to you?
It means doing what we do better – creative solutions around housing, around economic opportunity, around health, safety and justice. I think we need to deepen our investment in communities and the way to do that is to go deeper where are. If we have too wide a variety of programs, we end up putting a little money here and a little money there—we can’t go deep that way, either. Right now, we have 38 offices and a large rural footprint. What if we say, for the next several years, we’re going to go deep in those neighborhoods rather than expand into new ones?
Is this where the plan to strengthen our partnerships with local government might come in?
Exactly. There’s a lot of government money out there that doesn’t have a strategy attached to it; there’s no plan for how to leverage or adequately deploy it. If we can move that money into alignment with some of the strategies we have in the communities we already work with, that would be a big deal. That’s where LISC can do its best work – taking our local knowledge and relationships and matching that up with the models and expertise we’ve used elsewhere.
You have an impressive track record in the affordable housing space. As president, what are some ways you plan to step up LISC’s response to the spiraling affordability crisis in our country?
One is through home ownership, and of course that’s connected to DEIJ and closing the racial wealth gap. I want us to go really deep in homeownership, in terms of preserving the integrity of ownership for folks who already own homes, as well as home repair, to reposition homes for the longer term. And we need to find more ways to make home ownership available to more families. We will also continue working intensively on affordable housing development and preservation, vacant home remediation and eviction prevention.
You sit on the board of directors for the NY Federal Reserve. Do you think you’ve been able to influence how the Fed considers its impact?
I’ve tried to create venues between LISC and the other CDFIs and the Fed. For example, when the Payroll Protection Program was rolled out and it was not accessible to the kinds of businesses we support at LISC, we pushed really hard to get the exceptions that were necessary for CDFIs to participate, to get PPP to marginalized small businesses. And we finally got there.
I think my proudest accomplishment there has been advocating for diversity. I’ve been part of the hiring process for senior staff and engaging new board members and we’ve pushed to change antiquated rules that determined who could sit on committees and sub-committees.
You’ve been at LISC a long time. What is it about the organization that has kept you so engaged?
Every day is different. The work is so interesting and it’s ever-changing. And I’ve been able to grow with the ever-changing nature of the company and to innovate and create new programs. I’ve been able to work with staff and our partners in the public and private sector to take programs to scale and test new ideas.
All of that is what makes it so compelling that you look up, and it’s 20 years later! Not everybody’s journey here takes that long. But this has been my journey. As the company has evolved and grown, we have all evolved and grown. Now we want to figure out how to create more opportunities to have a greater impact on the ground, and to provide more opportunities for our staff to play a big role in that.
So how do you decompress from all this? What are your favorite things to do when you’re not working?
Well, right now, I’m at my home in Port St. Lucie, FL, where my backyard is filled with fruit trees—mango, avocado, ackee—and the front yard is filled with plants. So whether I’m in Queens or in Florida, gardening is a big deal. It relaxes me.
And then I have two adult children, and we spend a fair amount of time together, especially on the weekends. I had my daughter when I was 22, and my son when I was 28, so in a lot of ways, we grew up together. I feel very blessed that we enjoy each other’s company so much.