The Impact of Strategic Partnerships

Let me start by saying the work of revitalizing distressed communities is HARD. The navigation of issues associated with social detriments that ultimately impact social outcomes is inextricably tied. However, in distressed communities, the consequences of failure can be the difference between life and death. Ask anyone who does this work, and they will have countless stories about the challenges associated with the de-coupling of inter-related social issues that impact distressed communities. However, they will also say that strategic partnerships are essential to producing success.

Further, the challenge with revitalizing the aforementioned communities is poverty begets every other social detriment and one must be prepared to navigate the impact it has before change can begin. Therein lies the work of LISC. By coalescing around people and organizations that are closest to the problem, you afford yourself the greatest chance for success, as suggested by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in his seminal work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This same belief system is what led to the creation of LISC back May of 1980. 

LISC’s approach to revitalizing distressed communities centers around a fundamental systems-change model commonly referred to as collective impact. This approach to revitalization allows LISC, its partner organizations, and the people who are indigenous to the community to develop a common set of metrics, a common dialog relative to said metrics, a common agenda, and a set of mutually reinforced activities that will drive revitalization. In most cases, LISC serves as the entity bringing parties together — a convener of sorts. In action, this looks like the following:

• Working alongside local and state government leaders
• Listening to resident leaders and developing their internal capacity
• Bringing innovative solutions based upon our national scope and reach
• Working to remove barriers that institutional policies have created

Locally, evidence of this process can be seen throughout neighborhoods such as Springfield, Historic Eastside, the Rail Yard District, and Metro North, just to name a few. LISC Jacksonville’s catalytic investments in projects that have served as transformational opportunities for both neighborhoods and the larger city are north of $100 million dollars and $365 million dollars in terms of dollars leveraged.  

North Point Town Center

While the dollars are laudable and speak to the charitable nature of our donors and our capacity to make philanthropic dollars work, the transformation relative to place is just as impressive. Fostering real change and revitalization within our most vulnerable communities takes a collective effort. It is not a singular venture that can be undertaken by one entity successfully. Our quality of life and even our projection of who we are as a city is tied to our ability to develop strategic partnerships for the greater good. The work LISC does in the communities we work in, along with our broad list of partners, simply reflects the success of partnership at its highest and broadest level, achieving the greatest good for our most vulnerable neighbors and communities.

Housing Resiliency is a LISC Priority

Resilience as a scholastic theory has been evolving over the past 70-80 years and has enjoyed a renaissance in the past two or three decades. However, I would argue that resilience as a practical form of survival for under-resourced communities and BIPOC people has always been simply a way of life. Under-resourced communities as a whole have never had the luxury of sitting back and waiting for market corrections to change their outcome. They have always had to have a spirit of resiliency if they wanted to survive.

I would offer it is that spirit of resiliency that has helped LISC as a national organization grow to over 35 markets across the country. However, unlike any other time in our country’s history, resiliency has been tested in every form within the last five years. To that end, LISC Jacksonville, like many of our partners, has taken up resiliency as one of the core tenements that guide our work. On the ground, that translates into three fundamental strategies for us in the area of Affordable Housing:

• Production – We view the work associated with Project Boots addresses this. Project Boots is our bold, audacious plan to work with our local CDC’s and for-profit builders to build homes that meet the demands of essential workers (teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, etc.). It is my belief that we have to make neighborhoods, particularly those north of downtown, destinations to live for the class of workers previously referenced. 
• Preservation – This includes our work associated with home repair. Indigenous people to a community must be supported because they are the fiber and the back story to all that has happened there. Therefore, as a resiliency strategy, we have made home repair a part of our Affordable Housing work.
• Protection – Our work in this area is probably the work I am most excited about because it addresses the issue of heirs’ property and the residential property appraisals and taxation system within some of our most vulnerable communities. It also affords us an opportunity to partner with the University of Florida’s Shimberg Center for Housing Studies and other key partners. 

Over the next nine months, LISC will invest $25,000 in legal services to preserve title ownership and sustain $1 million of assessed home values, which furthers LISC’s Project 10X goal of generating lasting equity and wealth through homeownership.

While the work of LISC Jacksonville is no panacea relative to affordable housing, it represents one aspect of the work that has to be done in the resiliency space. It represents more than the occasional lip service and scholastic treatment that is often levied upon those who live in under-resourced communities.

LISC is Larger Than Jacksonville

There was a quote that I heard recently on a commercial and it suggested that “size was everything.” As I reflect on that and look at the scope of work conducted by LISC Jacksonville, I have to smile and say I tend to agree. I agree in as much as our size has allowed us to partner with the City of Jacksonville to address some of the most pressing issues that face our under-resourced communities. It has allowed us to partner with Fortune 500 companies to deploy capital during the COVID-19 pandemic in an unprecedented manner. Finally, our size nationally has allowed us to leverage and develop a technical resource base that serves over 38 major metropolitan areas and rural communities.

While to a great degree our size does matter, LISC Jacksonville has not lost sight of the humanity our work requires or the directional dexterity that is often required when you are working with some of the most under-resourced communities. I would offer that it’s all those elements combined – size, humanization of the issue, and dexterity – that puts us at the front lines of our work and makes us the go-to partner for resource and programmatic deployment.

To that end, much of the aforementioned is maximized when we as a local office partner with our national team to bring resources and programmatic offerings to Jacksonville, such as the Uber Vaccination Program, which provides rides to vaccination locations at no cost. We have also partnered with Chipotle’s Juneteenth “Round Up For Change” initiative and the Macquarie Group Foundation to garner support for our work around criminal justice reform. These are just a few examples, with much more to come, of how partnering with those outside our county’s borders can have a direct impact in our own back yard. 

In this newsletter, we also address how to leverage the power of our national office in the areas of disaster recovery and resiliency. And yet, all of this is still just a taste of everything that is possible. While size can be relative, I would argue that LISC nationally and locally have maximized our size and abilities to generate an unprecedented level of impact in our under-resourced communities and beyond. And as our community increasingly recognizes the positive, city-wide economic and other impacts of uplifting our most challenged neighborhoods, LISC – both locally and nationally – will continue to play a leading role in bringing the necessary resources to the table to improve the quality of life for our most vulnerable neighbors and our city overall.

Getting to the Root of It

I was recently challenged with the question of how LISC Jacksonville in particular gets to the “root cause” of what constitutes our work. After reflecting a bit, I came away with the belief that we, meaning LISC, would have to have a solution to detangling poverty. While I do believe that there are many smart people within our organization, I also fully understand the issue is far too complex for one organization to have all the solutions. Furthermore, I am a practitioner of systems thinking, which suggest that problems such as poverty are part of a wider social issue.

To that end, LISC nationally has decided to address those “root cause” issues through an aggressive plan called Project 10X. Locally, that translates into three distinct programmatic offerings that reflect our local capacity to alter those issues that lead to generational poverty: Project Boots, Family Wealth Creation, and Financial Opportunity Centers® (FOCs).

First and foremost, Project Boots is our way of creating generational wealth through the mechanism of home ownership. Research is clear that homeownership is perhaps the most common form of generational wealth creation, and we are targeting our LISC-supported communities as the place to start. However, what makes our work so unique is that we are targeting essential workers as program participants.

Secondly, in terms of our work to address other underlying issues that impact generational wealth is our work in the area of Family Wealth Creation. Our goal here is to help transfer generational wealth by assisting with financial and estate planning, probate, clearing titles, and consolidating property ownership. 

Lastly, in our efforts to address “root cause,” we continue to deepen our work within our FOCs, which are career and financial coaching service centers that help low- and moderate-income people build effective money habits and focus on the financial bottom line. Currently, we have three centers in Jacksonville with a goal of adding one a year for the next three years. 

I will be the first to admit that in isolation our work alone will have very little success. The “root causes” are entirely too intertwined with large-scale systemic issues to change. However, when we partner with other agencies and engage in a systematic approach to change, we can get at the source of what holds back our most under-resourced communities.

We will have more to share about these initiatives in the coming months that we look forward to sharing with you.

The “Why” Behind Investments in Historic Eastside

 One of my favorite “live” albums of all time is Frankie Beverly and Maze Live in New Orleans. During one of the intros to his song “Southern Girls,” he states that people asked him why he did a live album in New Orleans, to which he replied, “Why not ya dig.” That response is what comes to mind when I’m asked why LISC Jacksonville continues to invest in Historic Eastside with the Eastside Home Repair Program, discussed in this newsletter, and is launching a program in September called “Project Boots.” 

While the aforementioned quip may be more satire than anything, the reasons for “why” Historic Eastside are both personal and strategic. First and foremost, I spent the majority of my youth being shaped and molded by the community called Historic Eastside, but during my time as a kid we simply identified it as “Out East.” The myriad of families that called “Out East” home reflected a pathway to success for myself and many of my friends. The postal worker lived next to the social worker who lived next to the teacher who lived next to the longshoreman who lived next to the lawyer was a visible possibility of what any of us could and eventually would become.

However, as access become more available to me and many of my peers and disinvestment became more common, what we knew and appreciated became a distant memory, leaving in its wake an aggregation of poverty and all the accompanying consequences. You may ask again why the investment in Historic Eastside and I will simply say again, “Why not?”

LISC’s investments in Historic Eastside do not represent a singular investment in a social program with the hopes that the people will somehow be better. Our investments in Historic Eastside represent a belief in the enterprises that have been tried and true in terms of disrupting the entanglements that poverty and lack of solid investments bring. During the last 10 years, LISC Jacksonville has invested in people, homes, and technical assistance to empower the people who are closest to the issue with the tools to be a part of the change they want to see. We have partnered with organizations ranging from the United Way to LIFT JAX to Operation New Hope to get the work done.

Our latest work, including the Eastside Home Repair Program and soon-to-be-announced Project Boots, represents our latest iteration in terms of getting that done. It represents our deepest dive to date in terms of transforming a neighborhood by making Historic Eastside a destination where people want to live without displacing those who currently reside there. It is LISC Jacksonville’s belief that through a mix of corporate philanthropy, social responsibility on the part market enterprise, municipal policy, and investment we can collectively work together to deliver a product to market that gets east siders back home and becomes a destination for others.

Therefore, I say, when people ask me why LISC Jacksonville makes investments like these in Historic Eastside, I simply say, “Why not ya dig?”