LIFT Regional Center is a Community Economic Legacy company dedicated to creating and sustaining wealth in high-potential, culturally-relevant urban and rural communities in Southern California.
Based on community-based, ethno-cultural principals, LIFT embodies the core values of: Unity, Purpose, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics and Legacy.
LIFT - literally - Legacy Investing For Today - emphasizes these core values that will lift the community to higher success in housing, economics, jobs, supportive services, small business, community enhancement and legacy.
The community economic legacy strategy is our main focus and takes a 4-pronged approach:

Our community needs investment (capital).


It’s a fact. Community businesses are the backbone of America. They employ over half of all private-sector workers. And have created over 64% of our new jobs in the past 15 years. It they are strong and growing, so are we, and so is our community. The problem is, today more than one in three community business say they cannot get adequate financing to fuel their enterprises. That number skyrockets for MBEs and WMBEs. That financing squeeze is stifling their potential for growth.
In the Black community in particular, the latest Census numbers show that the number of black-owned businesses but only about 100,000 of these companies have employees. Far fewer, 14,000, gross $1 million or more in a year.
One vital necessity for any burgeoning business is resources. “Limited access to financing… restricts the ability of minority business enterprises (MBEs) to achieve viability, generate new jobs and, in general, fulfill their potential to contribute to the development of communities in which they operate,” write Timothy Bates, a professor at Wayne State University and Alicia Robb, a senior research fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in a guest article for Forbes. The two conducted research that found that MBEs rely on financial institutions more than other capital resources, but are more likely to run into issues like higher interest rates or outright rejection when trying to secure a loan or other funding.

Challenge: Our community needs work and community economic development opportunities.
Enter unemployment rates, US, California, Los Angeles, Black Los Angeles>
More than 8% of the U.S. labor force is unemployed. But that number doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s a number that represents friends, family, and colleagues. It is a number that rises to double digits within communities of color. It is a number that doesn’t take into consideration the people that have stopped looking for work, in desperation have given up hope.
Worse yet, economists predict that this number won’t drop below 8% for a long time. This is the longest stretch of unemployment at this level in more than 70 years.
Community economic development focuses on four pivot points, turning them into economic engines for family and community impact. These economic pivot points are:
- The commercial district
- Micro-businesses
- Workforce
- Job opportunities

Challenge: Our community lacks legacy.
How do we sustain the wealth that we’ve created? How do we ensure the next generation builds upon the successes and lessons of the past and starts anew from a “raised foundation”?

YOU are the LIFT Solution
• 1. Wealth Partner Attraction - EB5 Regional Center Development
• 2. Wealth Creation - Loan and Leverage Fund Creation
• 3. Wealth Development - Business , Real Estate and Infrastructure  Development
• 4. Wealth Sustainability - Community Legacy Leadership Program
 

​What is the solution? YOU are the LIFT solution.

We need you as community investment ambassadors, giving of your collaboration, expertise and resources.  By becoming a community legacy investor, your membership will entitle you to:
- “First-Look” at current and future investment opportunities
- Preferred and common stock opportunities in the investment fund
- Eligibility for various executive advisory committee membership
- Access to monthly investment progress roundtable
- Group legacy benefits
- Interest ownership succession ability
- LIFT Legacy Leadership Program for Young Entrepreneurs
- Opportunity to participate in foreign capital-raising delegations
- Financial services and education
- Access to the Legacy Grant Fund for the furtherance of legacy education

​

LIFT Programs
1. Wealth Partner Attraction – Development of EB5 Regional Center.
In today’s global economy, stronger international economic partnerships are increasingly important to ensure the health and vitality of regional and local economies. The international links afforded through foreign direct investment vehicles such as the EB5 Investor Visa program enable American businesses and other actors in regional industry clusters, to develop new ideas, identify new markets for goods and services, and take advantage of new resources to grow and expand their economies. As such, the development of international resources is an important part of the innovation ecosystem necessary to foster strong economic growth.

Created in 1992, Congress envisioned the EB-5 Regional Center Program as an important tool for private enterprise to attract large amounts of foreign investment capital in order to fund interrelated businesses and infrastructure projects in geographically defined “Regional Centers”.

A Regional Center is defined as an economic unit, public or private, engaged in the promotion of economic growth, improved regional productivity, job creation and increased domestic capital investment through the utilization of the U.S. Immigration foreign investment visa program.  In exchange for investment, and creation of a minimum number of full-time jobs, foreign investors would be eligible to receive a visa for themselves and their families.

At  a minimum investment of $500,000 per investor, a Regional Center would allow the inclusion of direct and indirect job creation; create the opportunity to create small, medium and large investment pools; and allow foreign investors to have passive involvement in the day-to-day operations of the business, allowing them to live anywhere in the U.S. or even abroad as would a U.S. citizen.

2. Wealth Creation - Loan and Leverage Fund Creation
3. Wealth Development - Business , Real Estate and Infrastructure  Development
4. Wealth Sustainability - Community Legacy Leadership Program. 



About LIFT

LIFT is a transformative, neighborhood strategy, representing a collaborative of multi-cultural, community, public, private and nonprofit partners.  LIFT brings amenities, sustainable living, services, employment opportunities, retail business and economic stability to an attractive and healthy, community setting into Los Angeles’ predominantly African-American and economically diverse neighborhoods.




 



L.I.F.T. REGIONAL CENTER



6510 Crenshaw Blvd., Suite A, Los Angeles, CA 90043