This week, Christina Travers, LISC’s former SVP of finance, returns to the organization as chief financial officer. In the two and a half years since she left, she has served as VP for Finance and Capital Strategies at the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), and more recently as CFO at Working Solutions CDFI, a nonprofit microlender based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We sat down with Christina to hear about her vision for her new role, the innovations in raising impact capital that inspire her, and how a would-be marine biologist ended up in the world of community development finance.
Can you tell us a little about what you’ve been doing since you left LISC?
Sure. As you know, I’ve stayed in the CDFI industry. I had a lot of opportunity for learning and upward mobility at LISC, but when I left, I was able to nail down some of the hard skills that I had wanted to learn. That includes financial planning and analysis, accounting, budgets. I had been doing those things at LISC but I was able to perfect my craft and get very comfortable with those skills in my recent jobs, with the ultimate goal of being the chief financial officer of a larger institution.
Did working in other organizations arm you with new insights?
One thing is just seeing how you can be in the same industry but have such different ways of doing everything—from the back office, to product delivery, to the markets that we serve. LISC is very comparable to other CDFIs in theory but is very differently structured and has a very different approach in how we put money out into the world. Until last week I was at a micro-lending institution, where I learned a lot about a different type of lending, and a different type of financial structure. I think that perspective brings me back to LISC as a stronger industry professional.
What is most exciting to you about returning?
LISC is the organization that I grew up in as a professional, and it will always be my first love. I think one of the really great things about the organization is how many places we work in, how different they are, and how the people in those offices have to approach their work very differently. I love engaging both at a local level and with all the national teams at headquarters. There are so many opportunities for collaboration and teamwork and problem-solving to keep pushing LISC forward.
 | Christina Travers |
It’s like I’ve been watching what’s happening at LISC on television for the past couple years, in terms of seeing how our industry is now really on the map—particularly LISC. I’m excited to dig back in and, with full acknowledgement that I’m not coming back to the same place I left, to learn and be part of the new chapter.
Can you describe some of those changes and how they will affect you work?
Before I left, I was part of the team that went to the capital markets for our first bond offering. That was LISC’s first large foray into new investor types. Since then, there’ve been a lot more corporate partnerships, both on the philanthropic side and on the lending side. Up until that bond offering, we were really dealing with our traditional community reinvestment act-motivated partners. That bond was a significant step in the diversification of our sources of capital and LISC has been continuing to build out corporate partnerships and other sources of investment, which is really exciting.
What other kinds of innovations do you foresee driving LISC's capital-raising efforts?
For starters, our impact notes offering is an important innovation, as is continuing to fine tune our impact statement to the world of impact investing. That means really engaging in a new market of investors who are driven by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. I think there's a ton of opportunity there. Success rests on building new relationships, but also on crafting our message to show that we’re really doing the work.
I also think of the work we're doing on the loan fund management side, where we're able to raise very specific capital that meets the needs of a particular programmatic purpose, like with the Developers of Color Fund. That type of work really helps us raise and drive capital to our target, but it’s also a great way to engage with investors. If you're trying to build a relationship, having a focused approach is really appealing and a nice way for everyone get what they need. Continuing to build out that work is important.
As you mentioned, LISC is not the same place you left two and a half years ago. And the world is a different place, too. We’ve undergone a pandemic and a racial reckoning, both of which have sharpened LISC’s commitment to investing to upend systemic racism and inequities. How will that shape your work as CFO?
I think that a focus on racial equity is an imperative. We have to bring it forward because we have the resources to do so, and it’s our mission.
And that demands a change on LISC’s part. There’s a reason that we’re able to attract as much capital as we do. There’s a reason we can go to the bond market and get $100 million and have a capital note shelf offering investors can buy on a monthly basis. It’s because they’re looking at the performance and the quality of the financial institution that we are.
We’ll always have to do loans that are more traditional and that are going to get us the return we need to make our margin to cover our cost of doing business,. But we also need to balance that with pushing deeper into the market, where it may not look the same, and it may take more trust-building with partners on our part, or a proxy of credit risk, or whatever it may be. We could do that without changing anything on our capital side. And we need to do that balancing because it’s our mission. Our job is to reach people and institutions in need of capital. We’ve already gotten investors willing to go there with us. But there’s a whole world of financial resources out there, and the more support we can get for our mission, the more it’s a shared mission, and the more impact we can have.
What are the biggest sticking points to achieving that balance?
If we are truly trying to drive capital that has systemically and purposefully not gone to people of color, we’re going to have to break down our relationship to that system. What that means is we’ve gotten money a certain way for 40 years. But if that system worked, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in now as a country and as an industry. We need to bring in new partners, ones who are willing to understand that we need to reach deeper into the market.
If we’re going to reach deeper, we’re going to need capital that will come with us on our journey. That may look riskier to an investor, but it’s not necessarily true. It's just how it reads when you’re using the tools of measure that have been used and have perpetuated structural racism forever. And this demands a different message, a different ask than the one we’ve made of the traditional capital base we’ve depended on for so long.
So how did someone who once studied biology get into these very different weeds?
I thought I was going to be a marine biologist. I thought I was going to be scuba diving and doing research and all of that. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Zambia, where I was working on an aquaculture project in a village. I began to see there were just so many people living without the basic necessities to live a long and healthy life. At that time, HIV/AIDS was a major epidemic in Zambia, and I was also watching people die from things that are relatively preventable, like malaria and tuberculosis.
Living with people who are living through that made me realize that I love problem solving and communicating with humans. And I couldn't imagine a life where I was just working for a paycheck for something that wasn’t connected to a greater good, beyond myself. It also helped me understand that this work is an exchange—the people around me are helping me as much as I’m helping them.
When I came back, I went straight to New York—I had been very isolated, and I wanted to be around as many people as possible all the time. In graduate school for urban planning, I got a scholarship that required me to research community development finance—I was reading about LISC in my textbooks. Ultimately, I realized that the nonprofit world was where I could be as creative and flexible as I wanted to be with problem solving and finding solutions to things.
And now you’re back.
Yes, and I’m really looking forward to the opportunities that we have now compared to where we’ve grown from. The past couple of years have really propelled LISC, and the CDFI industry in general, into a whole new sphere. There’s a lot of momentum around that and I’m really looking forward to being part of that momentum. I want to help make sure we’re around in another 40 years.