As part of an ongoing blog series, LISC’s Anna Smukowski looks at the way LISC is advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a range of activities supported by LISC Impact Notes, including investments that support climate solutions.
The third blog in our series highlights how LISC supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 13 – Climate Action. Goal 13 speaks to the need for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The UN presents climate change as the single biggest threat to equitable development, with the communities most directly affected by climate change being disproportionately lower-wealth and communities of color.
A 2020 article by the New York Times illustrates this impact on Black and Brown communities by examining how historical redlining—the discriminatory practice of withholding financial services from residents of communities due to race or ethnicity—has left these same communities on average five degrees hotter in summer. They have fewer trees and parks and more paved surfaces such as asphalt or highways that trap heat.
As such, by grounding a response to climate change in equity and inclusion, impact investors and community developers can create economic opportunity and revitalize communities, while also helping limit global temperature rise.
LISC believes there is a greater role for community development financial institutions (CDFIs), including ourselves, to play in financing the transition to a green economy, and ensuring that the transition is equitable and just. While global investments in the green economy saw a 17 percent rise from 2013 to 2016, largely due to private investment in renewable energy, investment in the fossil fuel industry continues to exceed capital for climate activities. To achieve global goals around a low-carbon, climate-resilient future, that needs to change.
"There is a greater role for community development financial institutions (CDFIs), including ourselves, to play in financing the transition to a green economy, and ensuring that the transition is equitable and just."
For LISC, two pillars in our emerging Green Futures strategy include financing equitable transit-oriented development and community-based renewable energy.
Those opportunities are evident in our partnership with the Enterprise Community Development (formerly Community Preservation and Development Corporation) and the National Housing Trust to bring solar energy to 12 affordable housing communities in Washington, D.C. LISC DC provided a $1.2 million loan to support solar panels at apartment complexes with 2,200 units. In addition to LISC’s investment, 10 percent of funding came from DC’s Department of Energy and Environment’s Solar for All initiative aims to expand solar capacity in the District by 10 percent and to reduce the electric bills of at least 100,000 low-to-moderate-income households. Solar for All projects, such as this one, not only increase access to affordable solar energy for people living in affordable housing and reduce carbon emissions, but they also create green jobs.
Another example is Boston LISC’s Equitable Transit-Oriented Development Accelerator Fund (ETODAF), created in partnership with The Boston Foundation, the Hyams Foundation and Partners Healthcare to provide access to acquisition and predevelopment financing along transit corridors. In many places, transit-oriented development represents a transition from urban sprawl, offering a solution to reduce carbon emissions, congestion and air pollution, while also sparking economic opportunity. Since ETODAF was established in 2014, LISC leveraged an additional $7 million of our own capital with the ETODAF to finance more than 1,500 apartments within walking distance of transit – with 1,100 of the units affordable to low-income individuals.
In addition to these examples, LISC’s loan portfolio includes investments in green job training programs, parks and open spaces, sustainable and healthy food access, and much more.
Supporting the UN’s work on climate action can lead to more jobs, greater economic opportunity and healthier, happier lives all while building communities that are more resilient to the effects of climate change. As individuals, we now can invest our dollars through the Impact Notes program to help finance the green economy and support strong communities.
For more information on LISC’s Impact Notes, visit lisc.org/invest.
Anna Smukowski, Senior Director of Capital Programs, Enterprise Community Loan Fund
Anna Smukowski serves as ECLF’s senior director of capital programs, assisting ECLF’s capital and lending teams with capital raising and fund structuring. Prior to this position, she led LISC’s $200 million retail note offering, coordinated LISC investor relations and positioned LISC’s capital raising within ESG, impact and social bond frameworks. Anna also managed $50 million in LISC’s Paycheck Protection Program deployment and has structured and managed affordable-housing and economic-development funds as well as pay-for-success work through a Social Innovation Fund grant award. Anna is passionate about values-aligned investing from the individual to the institutional level and has worked on updating and implementing missionaligned investment policy statements at LISC and ECLF. Anna started her career as a strategy and operations consultant at Deloitte. Anna holds a bachelor of science degree from New York University Stern School of Business and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Disclaimer: This is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Such an offer is made only by means of a current Prospectus (including any applicable Pricing Supplement) for each of the respective notes. Such offers may be directed only to investors in jurisdictions in which the notes are eligible for sale. Investors are urged to review the current Prospectus before making any investment decision. No state or federal securities regulators have passed on or endorsed the merits of the offering of notes. Any representation to the contrary is unlawful. The notes will not be insured or guaranteed by the FDIC, SIPC or other governmental agency.
Impact Notes currently are not offered to residents of Washington.
For more information, visit lisc.org/invest