Race, Gender and Equity in Community Development

This paper summarizes how 15 leaders of community development finance organizations are intensifying their focus on race, gender, and equity, and it provides a prescription for change. That prescription calls for a fieldwide reformulation of the community development vision that embraces equity and justice explicitly; it calls for an expanded policy agenda to update the tools used (the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the New Markets Tax Credit, and others) to include segregation-busting features; and it calls upon leaders to broaden their work toward “both-and” and inclusive strategies—that is, not only investing in the most distressed places, but enabling low-income families access to high-opportunity places.