Whether the goal is economic development, affordable housing, environmental sustainability, or healthier communities, achieving change at scale is likely to require blending public funding, philanthropic grant dollars, and private investment. Mobilizing private capital that seeks financial as well as social and environmental returns, sometimes called “impact investment,” can help revitalize communities and achieve important public goals, but what does it take to attract and deploy capital for public good?  Robin Hacke, a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation, will introduce the framework of “capital absorption” and describe how it has been applied in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Denver to assess and improve community investment systems in pursuit of social and environmental goals.  The framework looks beyond individual transactions and encourages leaders to collaborate to articulate strategic priorities for investment, build a set of investable opportunities with community benefits, and create an enabling environment that helps to advance the pipeline of deals and projects.  The talk will draw from the paper Community Investment:  Focusing on the System. Hacke will be joined in conversation by Chris Goett of the California Community Foundation, who has co-led the capital absorption work in Los Angeles, and David Wood, Director of the Initiative for Responsible Investment at Harvard University’s Hauser Institute for Nonprofit Organizations, who has been a partner in developing the framework since its inception.

Speakers:
Robin Hacke joined The Kresge Foundation in 2014 as a senior fellow in the Executive Office. She leads a project to improve the ability of cities to attract and leverage capital for investment in public purposes and to explore how philanthropy can develop strategies that advance this goal. The project looks at how cities can define strategic priorities, develop a pipeline of investable opportunities and improve the enabling environment for financing socially and environmentally beneficial efforts. With the Initiative for Responsible Investment at the Hauser Institute for Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, Hacke is researching how places build the capacity to absorb capital; working with cities, foundations and public-sector leaders interested in using the capital-absorption framework to help advance their programmatic objectives; and publishing papers and tools to share what is being learned. The project builds on work begun at Living Cities, a partnership among major foundations and financial institutions, where Robin served as director of capital innovation for nearly seven years. At Living Cities, she co-developed and managed capital deployment for the $80 million Integration Initiative. She spearheaded the creation of the Catalyst Fund for Nonprofits and completed investments in areas such as equitable transit-oriented development, foreclosure mitigation, food access and new approaches such as pay for performance. She is a member of the steering committee for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Working Cities Challenge, has worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on efforts to build healthy places, and has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She spent 20 years guiding the growth of technology companies as a venture capitalist, strategy consultant and director, and was previously a banker in the public finance department at Shearson Lehman Brothers. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of arts in government from Harvard-Radcliffe College.

David Wood is the Director of the Initiative for Responsible Investment (IRI) at the Hauser Institute for Civil Society at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He directs research and field-building work on responsible investment across asset classes, and currently manages projects on RI strategy with pension fund trustees, mission investing by foundations, the changing landscape of community investing in the US, and impact investing and public policy. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University and is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School.

Christopher Goett is the senior program officer in charge of housing, economic development and Smart Growth programs for the California Community Foundation. Goett came to CCF from the Council on Foundations, where he led a team responsible for a national portfolio supporting place-based philanthropy, community foundations, civic engagement, coalition building and community development. Throughout his career, Goett has been actively involved with community development and civic engagement in low-income neighborhoods across the country. Prior to joining the Council, he worked with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the Community Preservation and Development Corporation – a community development corporation in the Washington D.C. area – and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Villanova University and earned a Master of Social work degree with an emphasis on community organizing and economic development from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He was named a 2014 PLACES Fellow with the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities.

This workshop explores the implementation of urban development and value capture policies arising from the transformation of the airport system in Mexico City and fosters interdepartmental cooperation between several Mexican government agencies and the Lincoln Institute of Land and Policy to optimize the social impact of the new airport system. Particularly, the workshop provides a forum to analyze the institutional framework and the instruments needed to guarantee that the new airport system will benefit the city as a whole and the underprivileged sectors east of the conglomeration.

This course brings together different and critical perspectives on urban informality and the approach regarding regularization to this phenomenon. It uses theory and debates from sociology, urban planning and law to help students sharpen their concept of urban informality and to design feasible practices that address it. In conceptual terms, it is a question of breaking with stereotypical and one-dimensional images of informal settlements. Students learn to appreciate the formal and functional multiplicity of informal urban settlements.

This course, offered in Spanish, aims to present a general approach to Large-Scale Urban Projects (LSUP). Based on a definition of what is meant by large scale urban projects and why their analysis is important, the course covers the role of the LSUP’s in the development of cities in Latin America and analyzes the types of projects and the diversity of entities that have been developed for their implementation. A particular emphasis is given to the analysis of local and international cases of LSUP and instruments for planning and financing major projects, such as urban operations (CEPAC y Otorga Onerosa del Derecho de Construir -OODC-), partial plans (distribution of burdens and benefits) and the public-private partnerships.

Prerequisites: It is important that the participant has knowledge on concepts such as price formation of land and its relationship to urban planning. Also, it is recommended that prior to the start of the course selected participants reinforce concepts with audio lectures. 

This course, offered in Spanish, seeks to demonstrate the relationships among urban planning practices, the behavior of land markets and the legal foundations of property and public management. The conceptual, legal and economic framework that acts as a base for finance policy and as well as social management of the surplus value of land will be discussed. The course reviews the development of a variety of alternative instruments designed to finance urban goods and services to recover the cost of public investment (tax on improvements and other special contributions), as well as to manage development rights and public land.

In collaboration with the Congress for New Urbanism and the Public Sector Consortium, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is hosting a two-day capacity-building seminar focusing on strengthening the fiscal health of local governments on May 16th and 17th, 2016. Our objective is to help city officials strengthen their ability to track, manage, and sustain the fiscal health of their communities, guided by Systems Thinking practices.

Schedule:
Monday:  8:00 AM – 4:30 PM
Tuesday: 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM