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Above: |
The Commodore Duchess Apartments
in
Seattle, Washington |
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NDC is the oldest national non-profit
community and economic development organization in the country.
Founded in 1969, its mission was and continues to be a simple
but powerful one: increasing the flow of capital for investment,
jobs and community development to under served urban and rural
areas across the United States. Since that time, NDC has pursued
this unchanging mission through a unique combination of invention
and innovation with actual real-world practice.
Our earliest programs focused on getting more private-sector capital into the country’s minority-owned banks (an increase of 62 percent, or over $255 million in 18 months) and insurance companies (doubled the amount of insurance-in-force in two years). Soon we began providing community development
Technical Assistance to localities throughout the country, and through those relationships we recognized the critical need to build local capacity in community development finance. NDC’s training program was born, and with it, the economic development professional. NDC has now provided Technical Assistance to thousands of communities in every one of the 50 states and Puerto Rico, and every year we train more than 3,000 practitioners in all aspects of financing for economic, community, and housing development. See, NDC Training for more information.
Our earliest innovations and program development were at the federal level, where NDC worked with successive Presidents and with Congress to design and then implement, in the field, new or modified community development tools. These are all still in use today in thousands of communities -- rural and urban, large and small -- across the country. See, Historical Highlights for more information.
Later, as the needs of our client communities changed, and with ongoing shifts in national and local policy as well as in the economic environment, NDC responded with its own new services and products, for affordable housing, small business finance and project finance and development.
From the beginning, one of NDC’s most important contributions was to bring the use of leverage to public and non-profit development finance, using public funds to leverage private investment. In the early days of local economic development, almost all public programs were based upon limited direct Federal grants or loans. Our staff, with the perspective of the private sector but the goal of public benefit, recognized that to achieve the large-scale impact needed, leverage was essential. It is a hallmark of all of our products and services, as well as those we designed for the federal government.
By the last years of the Twentieth Century, NDC had become something far different from the small organization that set out in 1969 to bring capital to low-income communities. Technical Assistance and training remained the heart of our work, but in pursuit of that original mission we had become a full-service financial institution for community and economic development.
The NDC of today would be unrecognizable to those who began in 1969, but we have followed our mission where it has led us, motivated by the needs of the people and communities we serve and anchored by our roots in our founding principles.
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