2020 Annual Event Wrap-up

Thank you to all those who make our virtual annual event a success! We had an engaging chat during the livestream and many more have watched the replay. 

If you missed it, you can catch the video or read about the key take-aways from the racial equity keynote conversation in our wrap-up below.

Thank you to our sponsors 

Dignity Health | Dunlap & Magee | FirstBank | Northern Trust | United Healthcare | U.S. Bank | Vitalyst Health Foundation

Arizona Department of Housing | Bank of America | Bell Bank | Community Development Partners | Dudley Ventures | Enterprise Bank | Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco | Friends of Transit | Gorman & Company | National Bank of Arizona | New York Community Bank, Amtrust Bank | Sunbelt Holdings

Community Awards 

• Exemplary Collaborative:The Arizona Managed Care Organizations for developing the Home Matters Arizona Fund.
• Exemplary Project:Urban Living on Fillmore, Native American Connections' newest Downtown Phoenix community.
• Exemplary Partner:U.S. Bank for their Covid-19 relief efforts that provided technical assistance and grants to small businesses.

Say its name! Racial equity!

Multiple crises – the disproportional impact of COVID-19 on people of color; the pandemic-related economic burden on low-income communities; the widespread and sustained protests against police brutality – have put systemic racism front and center in the national consciousness.  We heard loud, stark, urgent messages about the need for systemic change across multiple sectors of society.

Racial injustice. Specifically naming the root cause of socioeconomic disparities is part of what’s being called a national reckoning on the historic legacy of racism. But community economic development experts speaking at the recent LISC Phoenix annual breakfast said the central factor in response to the issues and challenges stemming from racial injustice also should be clearly named and become a clarion call as work is done in the interest of helping individuals and neighborhoods.

Say its name! Racial equity!

And then, featured breakfast guests said, advocates for social justice and change must be intentional about finding long-term partners in racial equity work and in centering community voices in comprehensive strategies to close disparity gaps.

More than 400 joined the LISC Phoenix annual breakfast and community awards program on Oct. 28 or have watched a replay. LISC Phoenix honored the Arizona Managed Care Organizations for developing the Home Matters Arizona Fund; Urban Living on Fillmore, Native American Connections' newest downtown Phoenix community; and U.S. Bank for its Covid-19 relief efforts that provided technical assistance and grants to small businesses.

Raquel Gutierrez, principal of Blue Agave Partners, facilitated a timely discussion on racial equity with featured guests Maurice Jones, president and CEO of LISC, and Laura Choi, vice president, community development, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Both organizations, Gutierrez said, have made achieving and applying a racial equity lens a strategic imperative in their work.

The data on leading indicators of health and well-being clearly reveal racial disparities. In the context of community development, racial equity is just and fair inclusion in an economy in which all can participate, prosper and reach their full potential.

The conversation with Jones and Choi made clear that comprehensive systems change and racial equity go hand in hand. Righting wrongs of the past doesn’t happen without introspection and intentionality, and it doesn’t happen without partnerships.

“The issue of racial equity, it touches every aspect of our lives,” Choi said. “It touches health, the economy, education, employment. It’s pervasive across every aspect of our society, and so we have to think about partnering very intentionally across all of these different domains to make a difference in this space.”

And partnerships, Choi said, comes down to relationships.

“To do this work, to be in community, to be fully engaged, it requires that relationship building, which takes time,” Choi said. “It takes trust and patience and empathy. … That’s the difference that will get us from transactional to transformational work – the really deep relationships that can be built with community organizations, with community members themselves. That’s the transformation that will be needed across community development and across all sectors to really create an inclusive economy in which everyone can fully participate and in which no one is left behind.”

Jones said the commitment from partners should be long-term.

“My humble ask is that we need partners who want to be doing this work for generations,” Jones said. “Because the truth of the matter is when you look at disparities in our country, this is not work that we will complete with a transaction or multiple transactions. This is work that we need to be at and commit to for generations.”

In the zip codes where LISC works, there are 10, 20, 30 years difference in life expectancy between those zip codes and more affluent zip codes, Jones said. LISC is looking for partners who understand the overlap between race and class in that life expectancy gap, he said.

“We’re looking for partners that understand that in the U.S. there is a 10-times difference in net worth between white families and black families, and we’ve got to be intentionally pursuing closing that gap,” Jones said.

“I am looking for partners,” he said, “who understand and are unambiguously, unabashedly pursuing justice and opportunity with intention when it comes to communities of color and low-wealth communities. … If partners or prospective partners don’t share that kind of intentionality, then they’re not partners that make sense for us to do work with.”

Choi agreed that intentionality is key to successful partnerships. Intentionality also is important to ensure strategies address root causes that create modern disparities and to challenge narratives about poverty.

“There’s a tendency to think that (poverty) is related to individual choices, personal responsibility and behaviors,” Choi said. “Push back hard against those narratives to really illuminate and show the structural roots of the disparities we see today.”

“Centering” the community is a key component of creating and implementing effective strategies in equitable community economic development. Gutierrez described centering as the “practice of seeking out and understanding the needs, demands, perspectives and voices of those closest to the issues of injustice and then amplifying, uplifting, prioritizing them and their ideas for effective community development.”

Choi and Jones endorsed the “power of proximity” in advancing centering practices. That’s a reference to the work of Bryan Stevenson, author of the best-selling book, “Just Mercy,” and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

“When we think about setting macroeconomic policy, there’s a whole host of indicators and really robust data that goes into that, and what we know is that data at the aggregate, at the median, is just not telling the full story of what’s happening to communities on the ground.” Choi said, adding that voices of people who are facing the most barriers to economic opportunity filters up to decision making at the highest levels of organizations.

Proximity is at the heart of the LISC business model with work done through community and organizations and strategies and tools that are about community ownership, Jones said. Local advisory committees are the most important assets everywhere LISC’s works, he said.

Terry Benelli, executive director of LISC Phoenix, was clear in remarks at the virtual breakfast that pursuing community development goals through partnership and collaboration is not work for LISC. But looking at issues through a racial equity lens adds depth and dimension.

“LISC was born out of a reckoning with redlining, racist lending policies that entrenched segregation and inequities in our community,” Benelli said. “Our mission to finance affordable housing and build capacity of community organizations may not have always spoken of racial justice but it’s at our core. Over the last 40 years we’ve moved from simple affordable housing to comprehensive community development, weaving in economic development support for small businesses, access to health care, education and more.

“In recent years, we’ve seen this approach in discussions of social determinants of health, factors that impact who gets to reach a ripe old age and just as importantly the quality of life of those years. We know that these elements of a healthy community most affect black, indigenous, Latinx and people of color, as well as those making less than the living wage. Racial equity is a factor, whether we name it or not.”