ImpactAlpha
In an Inflationary Environment, Are Bond Buyers Still Interested in CDFIs?
In a new ImpactAlpha blog, Christina Travers and Kathleen Keefe discuss LISC’s recent experience in the capital markets and what it might signal about investor engagement with CDFIs. “Is this environment forcing investors to step back from community development finance? Or, are they willing to respond with “catalytic capital” that specifically meets this moment?”
Social Bonds and Racial Equity: The “S” Gains Prominence in ESG
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.
CDFIs: No More Business as Usual
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.
LISC Launches Asset Transition Fund to Help the Twin Cities Build Back Stronger
LISC Twin Cities has launched the Community Asset Transition Fund to ensure that local residents and cooperatives can take ownership of properties and land along the cities’ cultural corridors. It's part of the push for “more inclusion, engagement and ownership by people of color, not only to repair what was damaged, but also to help generate new prosperity and wealth for members of the community,” says Peter McLaughlin, LISC Twin Cities ED, in an article on the fund in Impact Alpha.
LISC CEO is an ImpactAlpha “Agent of Impact”
ImpactAlpha has named Maurice A. Jones, president and CEO of LISC, one of their "agents of change," citing the organization's extraordinary success attracting capital in the wake of the pandemic to fund minority- and women-owned small businesses and underinvested communities hit hardest by Covid's fallout. “If this is a real commitment for long-term patient capital to invest in these communities," says Jones in the article, "there is no question in my mind that we can collectively achieve much greater economic mobility."