Long-Term Capacity Building
From the very beginning, Living Cities has invested in the long-term capacity building of national and community-based organizations who we believe are critical to bringing opportunity to people and places we care about. For example, Living Cities' consistent investment over our first fifteen years has helped create a mature, vertically integrated housing and community development sector with capable neighborhood organizations and local, state and federal financing for their activities. Strong national intermediaries provide assistance and financing and advocate for policy reforms to sustain long-term success. An analysis by Metis Associates found that in the past six years, two national intermediaries that we supported, LISC and Enterprise, provided significantly more financing to community development corporation (CDC) projects ($805 million) than during the entire first decade of the initiative ($444.6 million).
Today, our capacity building extends to areas well beyond housing and community development—to workforce, asset building and education, both in the nonprofit and the public sector. We are helping local governments, in particular, to re-engineer critical systems that low-income people need to get ahead.