Our Work

CCI helps communities create equitable, effective investment systems that respond to community priorities. Using the Capital Absorption Framework, community partners can collaborate to achieve their aspirations so that all residents can flourish.

Impacting the Field

CCI’s program participants foster innovative collaborations to improve investment opportunities in urban, midsized, and rural communities.

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Leadership Development Participants

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Multisector Cohort and Sprint Participants

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Multisector Teams

Turning Investment Around

About the Framework

The Capital Absorption Framework turns investment inside out. Community partners and residents—rather than outside developers and investors—drive the process and work together to build effective investment systems that work for their communities. The framework focuses on three areas: a shared priority, an investable pipeline of deals and projects, and the local enabling environment. By working on all three areas, local leaders can strengthen their community’s ability to achieve needed systemic change—and improve the community investment system so that future deals will be easier.

A shared priority has two parts: an aspiration for how investment can bring racial equity to a community and a result that names the specific change and outcome that will achieve that aspiration.

A pipeline is a set of deals and projects related to a community’s shared priority. Working on a pipeline instead of single deals helps a community achieve a shared priority more quickly and efficiently.

The enabling environment is the setting in which community investment takes place. It includes everything that makes it easier or harder to develop and fund projects to realize a shared priority.

Our Programs

Through our programs and initiatives, we advance racial equity and support disinvested communities to achieve their environmental, social, and economic priorities. 

Accelerate the Field

Leadership Development

CCI’s leadership development opportunities use our capital absorption framework to ignite lasting change in communities. Leaders learn about community investment, racial equity, and adaptive leadership as they work to transform community investment in their own places and encourage the adoption of capital absorption across their networks.

Make Systemic Change

Initiatives

Participants in our initiatives use the capital absorption framework to strengthen local community investment systems. Working collaboratively, community leaders increase access to opportunity and create healthy places that nurture wellbeing.

A Shared Commitment

Partnerships

Partnerships allow CCI to work with and influence mission-aligned organizations to take on system-level strategies with their members or affiliates across the country so they can support communities to advance their priorities and strengthen their local investment systems.

GET STARTED

The Latest from CCI

News, stories about our work, and more. For general press inquiries, please contact [email protected].