Day 3: KEYNOTE: Funding Disaster Recovery Through a CDFI with Emily Nilsen

 

“As the recovery process continues, you have to continue to adapt.” —Emily Nilsen

 

2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT

 

Disaster recovery is a complex challenge, but innovative lenders are stepping up to the plate. Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) like Impact Development Fund are providing flexible financing, coordinating resources, and creating tailored programs to support communities in rebuilding and becoming more resilient.

In this talk, we hear from Emily Nilsen, the Chief Program Officer of Impact Development Fund. Listen in as Emily shares IDF’s three-pronged approach as well as the key partnerships, evolving programs, and adaptations required to effectively fund disaster recovery efforts. 

 

Highlights:

• 00:50 What is CDFI? 
• 04:53 Rebuilding, Recovery, and Resiliency
• 12:13 Professional Burnout 
• 16:55 The Issue About Fraud 
• 19:02 The Close Out

 

Twitter:

Mission lenders are making a difference in disaster recovery. Tune in as Impact Development Fund’s Chief Program Officer, Emily Nilsen, discusses how CDFI’s are providing flexible financing to survivors. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #CommunityDevelopment #CDFI #AffordableHousing #ResilientCommunities #GrantFunding #PublicPrivatePartnerships #KnowledgeSharing #ProfessionalBurnou

 

Quotes:

07:53 “As the recovery process continues, you have to continue to adapt.” —Emily Nilsen

13:13 “The things that keep all of us from burnout is to be able to see all other people who are working hard to do the good work in their communities as well.” —Emily Nilsen

16:55 “We do not have eyes on every single program out there, but we have eyes on 80% of the programs right now. So there is not this level of fraud, of duplication of benefits that has happened.” —Emily Nilsen

18:02 “Disaster recovery tends to be a boom and bust industry, and that is something that we want to mitigate from.” —Emily Nilsen

20:10 “We can innovate together.”  —Emily Nilsen

 

Meet Emily Nilsen, Chief Program Officer, Impact Development Fund

Emily Nilsen is dedicated to providing excellent leadership for the nonprofit sector, where she has 15 years of experience. Emily gets very passionate about causes she believes in, often in the realm of community development and housing, economic development, and philanthropy. Emily also has a love for policy and advocacy work, consistently researching best practices to expand an organization’s public reach and creating collaborative, community-based solutions. When Emily is not busy with her work or volunteerism, Emily enjoys hanging out with her husband, Matthew, and her dog, Frodo. Emily is a voracious reader, a supporter of the Arts, and an appreciator of Colorado’s beautiful outdoors.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilynilsen/ 

Connect with Impact Development Fund: 

• Website:  https://impactdf.org/  
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/impactdevelopmentfund/ 

 

Transcription:

Emily Nilsen Thank you, Jennifer. As a fellow MPA, I’m just going to give a plug to everyone that if you’re looking for a master’s and MPA is the way to go. I also want to give a shout out to someone who is not in the room but who has been super involved with After the Fire in the past, and that’s Tatiana Hernandez, who’s a dear friend, and so I will be bringing up some of this partnerships that we’ve done with her. But I want to first just kind of level set with what a CDFI is, who is Impact Development Fund. But to kind of benchmark my presentation, there was someone who was speaking on the first day who said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a consolidated application during the recovery process that took in all sorts of coordinated resources, and you could apply for a bunch of different programs.” That’s currently what we’re doing. So if you’re interested in that, dial in and buckle up. I have a lot of lessons we’ve learned along the way. 

So this session is funding disaster recovery through a CDFI. So what is a CDFI? A CDFI is a Community Development Financial Institution, impact development fund where I work as a CDFI. CDFI is basically a designation by the federal government where you can apply to the CDFI Fund. But it basically says that we are a missional lender, so we can do flexible lending, unlike the big banks and everybody else, and we are a nonprofit. So at our core, we are offering sort of risky loans. We are trying to get people who otherwise are underserved, and that’s what our mission is. 

So we have always been in the space of affordable housing. A lot of times with CDFIs, you will end up seeing that they are doing affordable housing or small dollar lending or SBA lenders are often CDFIs. So far to my knowledge, there has not been a ton of CDFIs doing work in disaster recovery. That is something that we want to see change. We are not trying to be the only one in this space. My goodness, I would love for other CDFIs to join us. CDFIs are often very locally based as well. There are national CDFIs, but no matter what state you’re from, there are going to be CDFIs near you who you might want to talk to about some of what I’m talking about here. So mission minded lender. We have a team of expert underwriters across the board. We have backup of a loan servicing and management team who is very financially capable, and we have established history with client facing populations. Specifically, we have to lend majority of our corpus into things that are for LMI populations, Low to Moderate Income, which is 80% of area median income or below. We can do stuff above that, but it just needs to be charitably minded and mission minded. So we, as Impact Development Fund, have a long history of working with all sorts of state and local agencies. We also work with a lot of various nonprofits around Colorado and in some other states as well. And we had the opportunity to talk to them individually about some of the things that they wanted to do in disaster recovery. And I kind of created this little funnel here, because this is what we’re going to talk about today Where you’ll see up there, there’s the Department of local affairs, there’s Community Foundation of Boulder County. That’s Miss Tatiana, who I mentioned Colorado Energy Office and Boulder County as well. And that funnels into what I’m calling a three pronged approach of recovery, rebuilding and resiliency. It comes through Impact Development Fund and ultimately out to the survivor. 

So I’m going to very briefly touch on these programs, because the programs themselves are what I find kind of sexy as chief program officer, but I know that that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. I am happy to talk to you about the various programs, if you would like. But for recovery, that’s where we’re hitting up a lot of our renter population in some of these programs. So unmet needs is really just small grants that go out to individuals for various needs. Housing Support Program is a $2,500 rental stipend that goes straight to their landlord. Rebuilding that’s where we have some of our traditional loans and our forgivable loans through the state. We’ve also got rebuilding grants. We’ve also got the tax rebate for the county resiliency. We have mitigation traditional loans and forgivable loans, a mitigation grant. So all of those things are going to be for home hardening, so they have to meet certain metrics in order to get some of those funds. And then the Colorado Energy Office rebates, which are like heat pumps and some of that stuff. It’s been a while since Marshall fire. It’s been two years and eight months. Marshall fire happened at the end of December 2021 there was state legislation. Pretty much immediately after that. 

We started talking to the foundation on the philanthropic side with strategic discussions about how they were going to get dollars out. And that’s important because the foundation, most foundations are used to dealing with other nonprofits. They’re not typically doing direct grants to individuals. That’s a whole other animal, and that’s why it really complements what we do with lending and mortgages and all of that, because we’re pretty used to seeing individual finance. So the first rebuild grant went out in August 22, first unmet needs grant, the state program went under contract. As you can see here, some of the purples are the partnerships, and the greens are key funding dates and timelines. This has been a very generative process. It continues to be a generative process. We may still launch yet another program, because we know that as the recovery process continues, you have to continue to adapt. The blue are some big infrastructure moments in our own company. 

So one thing that’s really important is there are other organizations that were doing case management and their grant funds from FEMA from HUD, were starting to run out. They were the ones who were the front lines, and they were doing some of that document collection and then passing it along to us. We knew that we still have a long road ahead, and we have to start moving and facilitating all of that intake work in house. I will also say it came at a massive benefit to the survivors, because we have control, internally, of understanding that our team understands what the proper documents should look like. So there’s a lot of benefits to that, which I’ll mention in a moment. But as you can see, there was a moment where we started beginning more in person intake. We also had a consolidated website for everyone to go earlier on, before this big first blue one here, but it was not a single application. At that point, we were able to take all seven programs and move them into a single application, which was huge from the survivor’s perspective. 

I also just wanted to call out that our state funds application closed recently. That was intentional, because we knew these funds are going to run out. We’re still going to be underwriting these things for months, but we did need to make sure that at a certain point, people understood that they needed to kind of get in line for the process if they were rebuilding, so that we had a sense of how to manage the current application flow and not over promise and under deliver to the best of our ability. So as of today, across all all those programs that you saw, we have put out $31.8 million across recovery, rebuilding and resiliency. 

We will eventually we have, I’m anticipating, through July of next year, we will likely get to about $45 million and this has not been an easy feat. I was just telling someone when we started this process with the original strategic discussions. Impact Development Fund was a 15 person organization. We are now 52 so the team that’s doing full time disaster recovery work right now is 10 full time people. All that growth was not just for disaster recovery. We have some other initiatives that are in the works, but it is a huge infrastructure left to get something like this off the ground and to get it off the ground really, really fast. So we are talking two years, eight months since Marshall fire, getting that much out the door. And I want to say too that right now, across the superior Lewisville and unincorporated Boulder County, we have 55% of people back in their homes, and 82% permitted or in process of permitting, which is huge, and I’m trying not to get emotional.

So we still have a long road ahead. We’re still learning a lot, and I will say, you know, one of the things I’ve loved about this conference has been addressing that professional burnout piece. Because it is a real thing, and we desperately, I don’t know that we can just go disaster to disaster to disaster. So one of the things that we’re really focused on right now is knowledge sharing so that other CDFIs can do this in their communities. This is something that I want to see other people take up the torch on. I think they have the infrastructure and skills to make this work. There’s just not a lot of people or playbook or molds. I know that’s the stuff we’ve been talking about at that’s conference, but there’s not a lot that has been done prior to this, and so people just don’t know that that’s happening. So I’m really grateful to be able to share today, because these are the things that also, I think, keep all of us from burnout, is to be able to see all these other people in the room who are working really hard to do the good work in their communities as well. 

So the other couple things I’m going to share, there’s a lot of text on these slides, but I figured they would get shared to you all later. I also want to call out that my colleague in the room, Jamila over there, has some of my business cards as well as you can grab me after the conference as well. We are happy to talk to you through lessons learned. But these are just a few that I wanted to point out. So I cannot understate the incredible benefit that has come from sharing documentation across programs under one roof, to be able to coordinate and to be able to have our entire team meeting weekly. They might have their program goggles on most of the day, but they can go across the hall and say, “Hey, have you worked with blah, blah, blah, I think they’re eligible for your program.” Can not understate the importance of that. Can not understate the fact that when the rebuild grant requires a permit, we know that they’re eligible for the Boulder County tax rebate, and we can say, hey, we’re also going to pipe you through this system can not explain how incredible it is to be able to connect those dots for folks. But yes, it has been a very high infrastructure list, staffing list, to be able to get, you know, these websites and everything live. It’s a lot, and we’ve all said it before the finance expenses are not necessarily there, but I do want to see this model moving forward. 

And I also want to mention that we do have the balance sheet ability to float funds. So as a CDFI, because of our size and because of our ability to have a risk profile where we’re comfortable for this stuff, we were able to float $7 million for the state last year. That’s not something every nonprofit can do, and so it is an important thing if you are talking dollars out to survivors as fast as you can, that is something that should be a part of that calculus is understanding that there might be an agency who can kind of bridge the fact that dollars from other partners can be slow to get there. So adaptability in general is key. There are constant guideline revisions and changes like I mentioned, and a lot of that comes from really great partnership, such as with the Community Foundation, where we can say, hey, here’s what we’re seeing and here’s how we think we need to change or tweak these little aspects moving forward. 

So every few months, there will be a new guideline change on our website saying, Oh, actually, now we can do reimbursements because people have certificate of occupancy. That’s a new thing we have to do now. Oh, actually, we can do this program with smoke and ash damaged facilities, which is huge. It’s monumental. It is a heavy compliance list, but it is a better coordination strategy for duplication of benefits. We do not have eyes on every single program out there, but we have eyes on 80% of the programs right now, and so there is not this level of fraud, of duplication of benefits that has happened, amongst other disasters. That being said, when programs are under one roof, there can be internal frustration. Why am I qualifying for this, but not this? I see you laughing. 100% know you understand what I’m saying, because they underwrite income differently and all of that, but moving intake and case management in house really, really, truly was a game changer because of that control over, is the documentation being submitted correct? And I can make sure that our people are not over promising what people are eligible for, because I know that my team knows what people are eligible for. 

It is important for us to retain staff talent with this skill set. We all know that disaster recovery tends to be a boom and bust industry, and that is something that we want to mitigate from. So as this disaster recovery winds down, we’re placing people on other portions of our team internally who can then be ready for the next mega fire in Colorado. I will say, because we are so far down the line, as I mentioned, with where our CEOs are at and where our permitting is at, we can tell you where we’re at in the process now is that we do have the most vulnerable populations coming through. Now we do have very complex smoke and ash and reimbursements and all of these things that the underwriting time has gotten significantly longer on individual files, but it is great to have that applicant coordination within the team to push them through a little bit faster. And I mentioned the skilled in underwriting. I mentioned the fact that we are working towards close out, which is a strange process, because you also have to make sure that what we’re talking about internally, to make sure that everyone on this team has jobs, does not mean that we are pushing that message out to survivors, because we have to be careful. We don’t want them to feel pushed through this process, but we do want them to feel encouraged and prompted to say, get your applications in. At some point, we’re going to need to start making that decision about whether or not you’re rebuilding in the next few months, if possible. 

And then really the biggest thing is that we are limber enough to continue to invent programs, to change programs. In our work with community foundation. One of the funds that we have has just not been spending that quickly and so we’re anticipating taking some of those funds and putting them towards a different need. Perhaps it’s smoke and ash, perhaps it’s this and that we can innovate together. And so Tatiana and I are sitting together next week, sitting down, looking at the data, having a strategic discussion as thought partners for what that looks like moving forward. So public, private partnership works. It’s incredibly exciting, and I’m so glad that I got to share it with you. That is all that I have. I did want to mention that this is the website for our organization for disaster recovery, because our main website does not link to the disaster recovery website right now. We’re having issues with our main website, so yeah, that’s everything. Thank you so much.