announcement

From Initiative to Institute
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After six years of building, learning, and working alongside communities and public leaders across the country, the Public Finance Initiative (an organization I founded as a fiscally sponsored project at Third Sector New England) has become the Public Finance Institute, a non-profit. This is more than a change in name. It marks the evolution of a body of practice and our commitment to building an enduring institution around what we have learned.

Over these five years, we tested several hypotheses about how public finance can become a catalyst for place-based social and environmental outcomes and create prosperity through programs supported by some of the nation’s leading philanthropies, including the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ City Budgeting for Equity and Recovery program, the Bond Markets and Racial Equity program launched in partnership with the National League of Cities, the Rural & Small Cities Program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among many others. Through this work, we had the privilege of working with over 450 cities and towns across 49 states. We saw repeatedly that communities need more than individual sources of funding or isolated solutions. They need strategies that intentionally align public, private, philanthropic, and community investment capital around the outcomes they seek to achieve. And they need the capacity to absorb and deploy new resources, often requiring foundational practices such as capital planning, as well as new competencies to participate in emerging forms of finance such as philanthropic program-related investments.

The lessons learned together with our staff and collaborators, and what I personally via the Rockefeller Foundation Big Bets Fellow, have shaped a new theory of change anchored in what we call Integrated Public Finance: an approach we believe can transform public finance from a transactional system into a place-based investment system. Our work is organized around three interconnected areas via which we are changing the systems in which public finance operates: technical assistance; capacity building; and strategy and research.

Becoming an Institute allows us to take what we have learned across our national portfolio with cities, states, counties, philanthropies, and other leaders across the public finance ecosystem and make it durable. We will continue our direct work through technical assistance and capacity building while developing the tools, knowledge, and learning programs. Through our strategy and research practice, we will also explore the structural innovations needed across fiscal systems, capital markets, and fixed income markets to create lasting place-based impact that can extend that work far beyond any individual engagement. Our ambition is not simply to support governments with learning or project-based assistance. It is to serve as a catalyst for transforming how the public finance ecosystem conceives of, mobilizes, and deploys capital to achieve enduring place-based outcomes.

The Initiative was where we built and learned. An institute creates permanence. The knowledge, relationships, and practices developed over these years should not belong only to a moment. They should become part of an enduring institution that can continue to learn, adapt, and put this work to use for communities for generations to come. The Institute is our commitment to making that learning permanent, and to creating pathways that preserve and extend knowledge and practice

Lourdes German
Chief Executive Officer
The Public Finance Institute