Support Our Work
Rural LISC is an intermediary that seeks to build the capacities of local organizations and efforts to lead their own community solutions. The Disaster Solutions program works to address social inequities in rural areas through community and economic development. We work to help community-based organizations and collaborative alliances address these social inequities through their recovery journey so they may be more resilient to future shocks and disasters.
We support various programs that help community organizations:
- access grants
- receive technical guidance from experts in various fields
- obtain lowinterest or forgivable loans to pursue projects in affordable housing, small business recovery, workforce development, broadband, arts culture, public infrastructure, and community recovery planning and coordination.
- Our Focus
- We are looking at new programs that address systemic issues and intervene in the regressive cycle of recurring disasters on vulnerable communities, such as:
Encouraging the use of resilient construction methods in homes in high-risk communities. Many efforts by disaster relief organizations rehabilitate homes to pre-disaster status, and few focus on renters or multi-family affordable housing. However, this approach is not sustainable as communities remain vulnerable to the next disaster and will require aid to rebuild again. We seek to help ensure rebuilding efforts reduce vulnerabilities, not re-invent them.
As many rural areas lack established community-based organizations to advocate, administer, and coordinate community and economic development projects, we are pursuing programs to help local initiatives post-disaster transition into permanent, community development institutions. This would ensure that recovery efforts are supporting communities through long-term recovery and would create a mechanism within the community that sustainably addresses inequities and vulnerabilities to future disasters.
Small business recovery is vital to restore jobs, critical services, and an income that will be needed for community recovery. Minority-owned businesses and those in coastal areas are even more likely to close after a disaster. We want to maintain funds to launch recovery grants rapidly for small businesses, capacity-building dollars to help economic-focused nonprofits surge capacity to support economic recovery, and technical guidance from experts in business recovery and continuity planning. Through their recovery, we want to help these small business be more prepared, mitigate the need for future aid and support broader community resilience to future shocks.