Building Community Power Through Investment: MCIC Community Engagement Initiative

The Challenge

Across Maryland, communities are ready to go beyond building housing and facilities to create systems of belonging, opportunity, and shared prosperity.

The ideas, energy, and commitment already exist. What’s missing is aligned capital, capacity, and time.

Participants described projects that could transform neighborhoods — child-care centers in renovated schools, main-street buildings converted into job hubs, community land trusts preserving affordability — but they face structural barriers.

Financing cycles move too slowly, permitting takes too long, and smaller organizations are left without the staff, legal, or financial expertise to compete.

The Goal

Build a statewide network and identify partner and project pipelines.

NDC and CDN (Community Development Network) partnered with Maryland Community Investment Corporation (MCIC) to engage communities in NMTC (new market tax credits)-eligible census tracts, surface local investment priorities.

The goal was to deliver survey findings and regional roundtables as direct inputs into MCIC’s strategic plan, while supporting long-term infrastructure and predevelopment funding readiness for community development projects across the state.

From June through November 2025, NDC co-led a statewide engagement campaign across four regional roundtables — Western Maryland, Prince George’s County, Baltimore City, and the Eastern Shore.

Each session centered on visioning exercises, project storytelling, financial barriers, and technical assistance needs. Residents, small developers, nonprofits, and local leaders to speak plainly about what their communities need and what’s getting in the way.

Alongside the roundtables, NDC co-designed the launch of a public-facing survey, a paid digital campaign, and a partner communications toolkit that meets communities where they are and opens multiple on-ramps to MCIC’s mission.

What We Heard

Communities know what they need, but lack the systems and capital to make it happen.

From Baltimore rowhouses to Western Maryland valleys, from Cambridge’s waterfront to the growing corridors of Prince George’s County, the message was strikingly consistent.

Across every region, participants described the same three gaps:

Projects don’t stall because communities lack vision, but because financing timelines, permitting processes, and organizational capacity rarely move in sync.

People weren’t dreaming of skyscrapers; they were talking about grocery stores, family resource centers, fabrication labs, and theaters where young people can see themselves reflected.

They envisioned places that bring people together: childcare centers that double as workforce training sites; libraries that host small business incubators; churches turned into food hubs; schools transformed into community anchors.

Ownership was a recurring theme:

“We don’t want to rent the new Maryland, we want to build it.”

That means tools for community land trusts, cooperatives, and local entrepreneurs to hold space before it’s lost to speculative development.

Another respondent wrote:

“We’ve been making do for a long time. Imagine what we could do if someone helped us move from survival to sustainability.”

The Solution

NDC worked in partnership to synthesize regional findings into a full suite of deliverables.

These deliverables included:

Together, these outputs give MCIC a clear picture of where community readiness exists and what it will take to meet communities where they are.

The recommendations call on MCIC to become more than a funder.

MCIC should also act as a...

Communities don’t want another layer of bureaucracy; they want a partner who can make capital and capacity work together, combining flexible financing with practical technical assistance and advocacy for system change.

What’s Next

The goal is to turn these relationships into the infrastructure of equity to make Maryland’s community-led development powerful.

MCIC is now positioned to align its financing programs with its community-building mission, creating a pipeline in which financing readiness and organizational growth occur hand in hand. That means developing products and programs that deploy capital while helping communities become long-term stewards of it.