Human Services News

Local Initiatives Support Corporation:

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is dedicated to helping nonprofit communitybased development organizations transform distressed neighborhoods into healthy communities of choice and opportunity -- good places to work, do business, and raise children.

LISC is a national organization with a community focus.

In over 300 urban and rural communities nationwide, LISC has helped to finance the construction or rehabilitation of more than 207,500 affordable homes and almost 27 million square feet of retail, community, and educational space -- totaling $21.3 billion in development.

A REVITALIZED NEIGHBORHOOD is almost always a safer neighborhood.

In 2006, in an opinion column jointly authored by one of the country's leading police reformers, Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, and LISC's former CEO, Paul Grogan, summed up the emerging consensus this way: "One of the greatest threats to community revitalization is crime.

Police and grassroots community builders can and must become greater stakeholders in and defenders of the investments made by one another.

It has become instead a regular means of exchanging observations and concerns, thinking through problems, and treating a community's quality of life --- including its attractiveness, economic growth, convenience, health, and security --- as an organic, unfragmented whole.

For LISC, as much as for police and community developers, this emphasis on safety is not a departure from traditional priorities, but a natural expression of them.

To make that a reality, people must feel safe in their homes and on the streets, must trust that their children can play and use neighborhood amenities, and must believe that public agencies --- including law enforcement --- are among their allies in creating and preserving a desirable place to live.

The requisite starting points are, first, a well-organized community with effective leadership and, second, at least some portion of the local Police Department open to a closer working relationship with residents and their organizations.

A 2001 report of the Surgeon General confirmed what is by now a firm tenet of police reformers and juvenile justice officials nationwide: "socially disorganized neighborhoods" and "low levels of community participation" are prime risk factors in breeding youth violence. Build cohesion in the community and reverse its physical blight, and you go a long way to curbing delinquency, petty crime, and eventually more serious adult crime as well.

The mutual understanding becomes even more likely if the collaboration is supported and kept on track by an experienced negotiator or "broker" such as LISC.

The fundamental lesson of LISC's experience in community safety is the one with which this discussion began: Community development is intimately bound up with community security, and vice-versa.