As part of our Impact Notes Social Bond Framework, we are beginning a short series to illustrate how investments in the Impact Notes advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals, starting with April’s SDG Goal of the Month – Good Health and Well-Being.
Good health is essential to sustainable development, and is a cornerstone of LISC’s comprehensive approach to investing. LISC has long recognized that conditions where people live, work, visit, do business and raise families impact a wide range of health and quality of life risks and outcomes. These factors, known as the social determinants of health, constitute 80 to 90 percent of factors affecting health outcomes for a population, with medical care contributing just 10 to 20 percent, and can contribute to a wide range of racial health disparities and inequities.
A key pillar in the social determinants is access to health care, and individuals from racial or ethnic minority groups in the US are disproportionately affected by lack of access to quality health care, health insurance, and / or linguistically responsive healthcare. Through investment in community health centers and other service facilities, LISC expands access to affordable healthcare to historically underserved populations. Community Health Centers provide primary medical services to close to 30 million people at over 14,000 sites in urban and rural communities across the country. CHCs deliver a broad array of primary and preventive care services to patients, including dental, vision, mental health, and drug treatment services. CHCs primarily serve low-income residents—many of whom lack access to health insurance—and they provide these services regardless of the patient’s ability to pay.
You can see that through our project supporting the expansion of HealthCore Clinic, a federally qualified health center serving residents of Wichita, Kansas. HealthCore Clinic was created in 1998 by a grassroots community movement in northeast Wichita to address the rising health disparities and unmet need for health care for its low-income residents. The core founders raised $1 million to purchase the original building through a combination of a door-to-door fundraising campaign along with larger donations from business, foundations, churches and other vested organizations. In 2016, the clinic sought financing from LISC and other partners to expand and renovate its main clinic site into a 41,000 square foot facility serving upwards of 20,000 patients per year.
Another example is Community Health and Social Services (CHASS), a federally qualified health center, which celebrated their 50th anniversary serving the southwest Detroit community in 2020. LISC provided $3 million in financing for their 48,000 square foot center enabling them to triple the number of patients receiving comprehensive care.
In addition to financing health centers, LISC’s loan portfolio includes social service providers and community facilities addressing mental health, HIV/AIDS, drug/alcohol and domestic violence counselling, as well as services to youth, the disabled and elderly.
Through sustained investment and partnership in our communities, LISC works to address the root cause of health disparities. As individuals, we now can invest our dollars through the Impact Notes program to help catalyze opportunity and make health equity a reality for all.
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