By Annie Donovan, LISC COO

LISC COO Annie Donovan knows her way around Community Development Financial Institutions. In the blog that follows, she offers an indispensable primer on how CDFIs work, the diverse ways and places they operate, and why they are imperative to building equitable and inclusive communities and helping close our country's racial wealth and opportunity gaps.

By Annie Donovan & Anna Smukowski

The growth of the social bond market has offered a unique opportunity for nonprofit issuers, like Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), to connect with retail and institutional investors and expand the flow of capital to justice-focused work. In ImpactAlpha this week, LISC’s Annie Donovan and Anna Smukowski take a closer look at this lasting shift in how investors view the “S”  in ESG and what it means for CDFI efforts to invest in equity and inclusion throughout the U.S.

An article in Shelterforce by former LISCer Nisha Mistry looks at the ways CDFIs are working to dismantle longstanding discriminatory roadblocks that have kept BIPOC developers from capital and other opportunity. The piece, which quotes LISC COO Annie Donovan and LISC Strategic Investments director George Ashton, is part of a must-read Shelterforce series on systemic solutions to the racial wealth gap.

Getting Out the Good Word on Investing for Impact

LISC’s COO Annie Donovan was the most recent guest on the “What’s Working in Washington” podcast with Mark Walsh, where she discussed how CDFIs invest in small business for social impact, and offered recommendations for how government can support—and market—those those critical initiatives so they’re more broadly accessibly.

By Annie Donovan

In 2020, CDFIs got a glimpse of what can be accomplished with accelerated, larger-scale investment, thanks to an unprecedented corporate and philanthropic response to the pandemic and racial reckoning. In a blog for Impact Alpha, LISC COO Annie Donovan makes an appeal for continued robust investment: CDFIs were able to get those dollars where they needed to be, and will continue to leverage those resources 12:1, as long as private-sector partners stay at the table.

Non-Profit Quarterly delves into LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund and the ways it aims to “reinforce vital economic infrastructure in Black communities” as part of the organization's work to help close racial wealth and opportunity gaps. LISC's Annie Donovan and George Ashton explain the impetus for and structure of the Fund and the impact it is designed to have over the short and long term.

Shelterforce takes a deep dive into how LISC's Project 10X and the initiatives under that umbrella, like our Black Economic Development Fund, are directing capital and other support to help catalyze wealth creation for people of color. This demands new levels of focus and intention, as with our work to ramp up assistance for BIPOC housing developers, says LISC COO Annie Donovan in the article.

For our latest Community Wise podcast, LISC COO Annie Donovan caught up with Gregory B. Fairchild, the Isidore Horween Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and a member of LISC's national board of directors. Fairchild also recently published “Emerging Domestic Markets: How Financial Entrepreneurs Reach Underserved Communities in the United States.”

In the first episode of 2020, Maurice speaks with LISC COO Annie Donovan about her journey before coming to LISC, lessons learned from community development finance and the continuous success of the CDFI model.