As part of our Impact Notes Social Bond Framework, we are continuing our blog series to illustrate how investments in the Impact Notes advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals, now covering May’s SDG Goal of the Month – Decent Work and Economic Growth.
The second blog in our series highlights how LISC supports UN Sustainable Development Goal #8 – Decent Work and Economic Growth as part of our Impact Notes Social Bond Framework. Goal #8 is to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. Access to quality jobs with room for advancement is essential for individual financial stability and wellbeing, and for the health of families and communities.
The UN estimated that pre-Covid some 783 million women and men were working, but not earning enough to lift themselves or their families out of poverty. Empowering people and supporting enterprises to contribute and take advantage of economic growth through quality jobs is foundational to LISC’s approach to comprehensive community development. LISC defines quality employment as jobs that are accessible for community residents – jobs that are close enough to home and schools that a long, expensive commute is not required. Quality jobs provide a living wage and family-supporting benefits and they offer a sustainable work environment with company stability, growth opportunities and a positive culture that promotes individual satisfaction.
LISC research illustrates how investments revitalizing industrial districts can have an extraordinary impact in creating good jobs, activating neighborhoods and sparking local economies.
You can see that through our financing to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that manages operations in the Navy Yard, an industrial park located in northern Brooklyn, New York. BNYDC provides affordable space for manufacturing businesses and partners with local community organizations to ensure residents of surrounding neighborhoods— historically low-income communities of color—can access job opportunities in the Navy Yard. LISC provided BNYDC a $7.8 million construction loan to rehab Building 127, a vacant former industrial building into a 100,000 square foot state of the art manufacturing space that will create a projected number of 263 direct and 83 indirect jobs. BNYDC operates an in-house employment center that helps businesses in the Yard to hire and retain their workforce, providing local residents access to high-quality job opportunities. The employment center serves nearly 2,000 jobseekers each year, filling more than 300 positions annually across over 150 businesses.
Another example is East End Innovation Makers Hub in Houston, Texas, which LISC provided a $500,000 predevelopment loan. The 300,000 square foot multi-tenant, multi-use manufacturing and fabrication space supports makers, manufacturers, corporate tenants and other small businesses. The Hub was developed through a partnership between Urban Partnerships CDC, a nonprofit real estate development company and TXRX labs, a nonprofit manufacturing business incubator and accelerator, and focuses outreach on minority-owned manufacturers, makers and other small businesses in a three-mile radius of the building. Each year, the hub provides job training for 75 adults and hands-on learning for over 500 teenagers. The hub is projected to have an annual economic impact of $153 million and create over 400 direct and 200 indirect jobs.
In addition to these examples, LISC’s loan portfolio includes investments to women and BIPOC entrepreneurs, social enterprises aimed at providing disconnected youth the tools to engage in the workforce, and much more.
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting quality jobs is imperative to support equitable recovery and resilience. As individuals, we now can invest our dollars through the Impact Notes program to help create quality jobs and support communities where residents can live, work, visit, do business and raise families.
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.
Learn more:
lisc.org/invest