It was over 10 years ago that Sumair Sheikh found himself in Duluth after living in a couple of big cities. According to Sheikh, he felt an immediate resonance with the community, one that he could connect with and integrate into quickly.
“I think I ended up staying because of that quickness of connection, community engagement and really a feeling of a pivot that was happening that time, a change I felt the city was going through,” Sheikh said.
Now, Sheikh works as the executive director of the Local Initiative Support Corporation in Duluth, or LISC. He plays a central role in helping shape growing businesses, building housing stock and assisting with its overall economic development in the fifth largest city in Minnesota.
Sheikh sat down with Finance & Commerce to talk about his work at LISC, how the implementation of the Duluth Housing Trust Fund has worked and gave his thoughts on the recovery of Duluth’s downtown.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You've done community-based work before LISC, how did you find yourself there, specifically?
A: I think LISC has kind of become the culmination of a few different threads. I started out as a teacher in Chicago, teaching biology and chemistry at the high school level. I guess in the classroom, seeing what students were showing up with, and the different things that their families were facing, I couldn't necessarily touch those or help in that, in those ways that they needed. And I started thinking about the systems at play.
Then I saw an opportunity to get out of the classroom and be in these program management, instructional leadership and curriculum development roles that put myself one foot in one world and one foot in the other. We're bridging community and schools and thinking about the systems that were either inaccessible or were not attainable to some of our students thinking about career readiness and college readiness and so I became, in those roles, a program lead and designer.
Then always on the side, we're working through thinking about policy, so working with the unions within education systems and seeing how that influences the work.
Then board service being a part of some foundation boards, understanding how philanthropy and public, private, nonprofit resources can be woven together to create some impact. I got kind of a 30,000-foot view of some, some different types of alternative lending and solutions that were at that level.
Really, this LISC opening came about and it put all that into one seat really. So I went for it.
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Q: Could you tell me a little bit about what LISC in Duluth does specifically? How your work is localized towards Duluth? A: Our office has historically been involved with housing, income and wealth, building economic development, and so those are the sort of key program areas that we've been in.
I think, where we can move forward and where I'm trying to build on the work in the past, is making stronger connections between that capacity building, part of our role, and connection to capital in more strategic ways within specific areas of our community.
Q: Duluth, as F&C has previously reported, has some pretty significant need for affordable housing. Could you tell me a little bit about how LISC and you have worked with the city and the HRA to develop the Duluth Housing Trust Fund? A: Just before I got into this role, the Housing Trust Fund was established in partnership with the Duluth Housing Redevelopment Authority and the city of Duluth, the city set aside $4 million of their own general funds. Locally. We raised $3 million locally and maybe another half a million in grants related to this endeavor. And really the idea is to catalyze housing production. We wanted to be able to create a vehicle that was accessible to developers across the spectrum, and also support access to capital for developers that are emerging, and really the idea is to, you know, preserve existing housing stock, potentially increase and make some new production and incentivize affordability.
It's been a great tool in the last two years to be able to point to that, to be able to funnel almost so far, I think, close to $4.5 million out into the community, ending up, I think, making or preserving 119 units.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about some of the economic development initiatives or policies that you at LISC have been pushing for or helping with? A: Some of this overlaps the housing and economic development work, because there are emerging developers that, they're entrepreneurs in a lot of ways. They're not as established, or they're new to the community, potentially, or they don't have as robust of a balance sheet. If we're talking about providing access to potential predevelopment grants and/or low-cost loans that allow them to access the funds needed to get projects off the ground, that's from the housing perspective, a little bit of a tie into that economic development area.
Sort of adjacent to that is thinking about a BIPOC entrepreneurship ecosystem in Duluth and helping like I said, there's the capacity building side of our work so helping organization’s work that involve small business development or entrepreneurship, helping them make sure that their organizations are best suited to serve their mission and the residents that they serve. Thinking about organizational structure, thinking about even financial management of their own organization, they're doing the work, you know, we want to make sure that they can do the best work that they can, and sometimes that capacity building can look like having their organization have access to different types of capital to build out their programs.
Q: What has Duluth’s downtown been looking like? Has it been able to kind of bounce back a little bit from some of the damage the pandemic brought from an economic downturn standpoint? A: As we've had guests come in from either national LISC or other LISC offices they have commented on the activation level in the Duluth downtown, and they've been pleasantly surprised. I think that that's something that I want to tout, that maybe isn't talked about as much.
Does that mean that it's working for everybody? No. But I do want to commend the work that all the different partners and people involved with creating a thriving downtown, and what they're doing. But yes, there is, there's an opportunity to, I think, advance.
There's potential housing that can be and already housing that is being created. There's conversion opportunities of underutilized commercial spaces or office spaces that is starting to happen. People are planning and thinking about the order of operations to do that, along with thinking about the mixed use and opening up the retail spaces and creating accessibility for new entrepreneurs and small business owners to have a brick-and-mortar space, potentially, if that fits within their plan. And we're, you know, soon to be embarking on a new sort of plan for downtown. So that's going to be exciting too.
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