We don’t know everything. That’s just a fact, not an indictment.
But in our world of equitable community and economic development, knowing that we don’t know everything and then intentionally adjusting to that reality also could be a superpower — the kind that breaks down communication barriers, reveals truths, yields trust, builds relationships and informs our work. Real progress, in other words.
What we do to know more and to do better to truly understand the traditionally marginalized individuals and communities we serve — their histories, their challenges, their goals for their future — advances our strategic plans to improve community and economic development policies and practices.
Posting a flyer about a meeting on something that is about to be done to a community does not real community engagement make. It never has. But now, in a moment of unprecedented investment in communities, including LISC’s Project 10X initiative, is the time to be more diligent and to do the best we can to maintain clear lines of communication and cooperation between policy and decision makers and the people impacted by that work.
In LISC’s work, strong community engagement always has been a vital part of our mission to create healthy, resilient places of opportunity. But we’re also in an exciting moment of hyper-focused attention on community engagement because of federal requirements in initiatives important to LISC, including the Justice40 environmental justice program and the Resilient and Efficient Codes Initiative (RECI).
LISC Phoenix is a core team member in a Southwest RECI project that focuses on building energy codes to meet climate change challenges. By design, our conversation about reducing greenhouse emissions, producing savings and creating resilient and sustainable households and businesses starts with and stays with a grassroots-informed understanding of community power-sharing, displacement and gentrification. We’re excited to learn from indigenous cultures who have ancestral knowledge about surviving and thriving in the desert.
Figuring out what we don’t know and finding the right people in the community to inform us and our partners, animates the work we do at LISC Phoenix to create places of opportunity for everyone regardless of social and economic status. We know by experience that authentic, edifying community engagement lines the path for reciprocal learning opportunities that create and improve policies and initiatives that address challenges to safe, healthy living — including displacement, gentrification, systemic racism, access to capital, health outcome disparities, climate change.
Boosting capacity and power-sharing in marginalized neighborhoods requires building habits of authentic community engagement. Putting in the time and effort to find out what we don’t know is an imperative embedded within our operations, mission and longstanding values on diversity, racial equity, inclusion and justice.
In 2024, LISC Phoenix completes the final year of a three-year strategic plan and starts planning for the next strategic cycle. Our trust-building approach to real community engagement is the basis for our performance confidence in the current and future cycles.
We’ll create a 2025-27 strategy that continues to build upon a strong foundation of knowledge from individuals and communities who have lived experience with underinvestment and disinvestment.
LISC Phoenix is dedicated to a comprehensive, collaborative approach to
improving the health and wellbeing of our communities and residents —
addressing all the elements, broadly known as the social determinants of health, that people need to become and stay healthy and that promote neighborhood growth, equity and economic opportunity.
We will continue to create safe spaces where community members can share their truths about the impact of policies and practices at the root of challenges they face today, and we will facilitate the flow of information to those creating policies.
We will be strategic in learning more about what we don’t know as a matter of building capacity and power in the communities we serve.