About Us
Vision
At the Center for Community Investment (CCI), we see a future where communities have the resources they need and the capacity to collectively shape their futures.
Mission
CCI supports places—especially low-income, rural, and immigrant communities—to transform their community investment ecosystems so they can achieve their visions for the future. Our national practitioner network is critical to this support, ensuring that communities are working not in isolation but as members of a broader collective effort to advance equity and self-determination. As our country faces profound uncertainty and strain, strong local ecosystems and a vibrant national network will be essential to achieving our vision for community investment and expanding the power of communities to shape their futures.
What We Do
Since CCI’s founding in 2017, we have partnered with communities across the country to strengthen local community investment ecosystems. Today, practitioners and communities can engage with CCI through:
Our Programs
We design and deliver leadership development and multisector programs that help practitioners collaborate across sectors—including climate, economic development, housing, and sustainability—to address complex, place-based challenges. These programs support leaders to clarify shared goals, reimagine their community investment ecosystems, center equity, navigate power and risk, and move toward purposeful, coordinated, successful community transformation.
Learn more about our programs and initiatives.
Our Network
We facilitate a national community investment network that connects leaders to support and learn from one another, share strategies, and collectively strengthen the field.
For more information about our Network, please email info@ccilincoln1stg.wpengine.com.
Our Influence
We develop and share content that supports practitioners at every stage of ecosystem transformation. Through case studies, think pieces, curricula, workshops, and speaking engagements, we show what ecosystem transformation looks like in practice, offer tools and frameworks for action, and explore new ways to align capital with community visions.
Explore our Resources page and sign up for our monthly newsletter for the latest news, events, and more!
How will we do this?
CCI’s approach reflects the reality that today’s community investment challenges are at once technical, adaptive, and shaped by history, power, and systems that require collective action to change. The core principles of our work are capital absorption, racial equity, adaptive leadership, and shared ownership.
Capital Absorption Framework
Our Capital Absorption Framework helps communities define a shared priority, develop and execute pipelines of investable deals to achieve that priority, and create a supportive enabling environment of policies and practices to advance their visions.
Racial Equity
We center racial equity as a fundamental aspect of effective community investment work. We do this by addressing historic disinvestment, elevating community voice, and changing decision-making structures so that those most affected by investment outcomes have the power to shape them.
Adaptive Leadership
We use adaptive leadership strategies–approaches that mobilize people to address complex challenges where solutions are not known in advance–to build the skills and relationships needed to work across differences, adapt strategies over time, and lead collectively.
Shared Ownership
Recognizing that who owns, governs, and benefits from investment is as important as how much capital flows into communities, we promote shared ownership, long-term stewardship, and community control of assets.
Values
CCI’s values ground our work and shape our collaboration with our partners and program participants, in the community investment field and in low-income communities and communities of color across the U.S.
Racial equity is the compass that guides everything we do.
We embrace and amplify diverse perspectives, expertise, and voices.
We invest in people and keep sight of our shared humanity.
We recognize the urgency of our task and the need for deep, specific results to accomplish it.
We rely on learning and reflection to live our values and achieve our goals.
Our Team
Who We Are
CCI’s staff includes investment and banking experts; community development leaders, educators, and coaches; strategic communicators and housing, health, and community development policy experts; event organizers and fundraisers; and urban planners and technology whizzes.
Although we bring differing perspectives, we are committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion at every level, from how we recruit and hire our employees and consultants to the communities we work in.
Fiscal Partners and Funders
CCI understands the important role of philanthropic growth and innovation in shaping the flow of investment in communities. CCI is a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which accelerates philanthropy in pursuit of a just world by continuing the Rockefeller family’s legacy of thoughtful, effective philanthropy.
The Center for Community Investment is supported by The Kresge Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Target Foundation, Wells Fargo & Company, and The California Endowment.
