Los Angeles Recovery and Resilience
Community Infrastructure Center,
an Initiative of the
Community Infrastructure Center,
an Initiative of the
In response to the January 2025 wildfires that devastated Southern California, the Milken Institute is working with a variety of stakeholders to advance long-term recovery and resilience projects and collaborations. Access to technical assistance resources and tools will be provided for affected and interested communities to navigate the challenging maze of public, philanthropic, and private sector funding through our Community Infrastructure Center and the addition of a dedicated program manager to provide on-the-ground support. When affected communities and neighborhoods are ready to build, our team is ready to provide time-saving tools to accelerate project pre-development. We are also beginning work on a Financial Innovations Lab® to better align insurance markets and construction practices to reward resilient-strong housing and building projects with better insurance rates.
The Community Infrastructure Center offers virtual “channels” as platforms for organizations providing support to portfolios of community-based infrastructure projects. Channels are highly customizable digital hubs for sharing resources, data, and solutions; tracking the step-by-step advancement of projects; broadcasting and holding virtual events; and facilitating peer-to-peer exchange.
A new Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) Economic Resilience Channel will serve as a digital resource-sharing and peer-to-peer exchange hub for economic development project stakeholders advancing work in Los Angeles County.
The Community Infrastructure Center has facilitated virtual and in person “deal rooms” that bring project owners, who are seeking project-specific or portfolio-level funding, into contact with mission-driven investors to create transparency about project finance requirements and create new investment opportunities. Since November 2024, the CIC has convened 5 deal rooms, 8 developers, tens of capital providers, and featured over $600 million in project value.
The Milken Institute will adapt the CIC’s successful “Deal Room” model into “Recovery Accelerators” that bring together private and non-profit capital providers to accelerate deployment of affordable capital to bundled, investible recovery and resilient rebuilding projects in Los Angeles.
Financial Innovations Labs® (FIL) are the Milken Institute’s signature, applied research projects, designed to devise new business models, policy recommendations, capital structures, and financial technologies that can achieve concrete goals. FIL encourages collaboration among parties who may not normally interact to address global challenges by examination through a financial lens, leading to outcomes that influence the flow of capital to promote progress and change.
A Financial Innovation Lab with focus on the Los Angeles region will bring together diverse experts to strategize ways to better align insurance markets and construction practices to reward resilient housing and building projects with better insurance rates.
The Milken Institute’s Initiative for Inclusive Entrepreneurship (IIE) is a national effort to expand access to capital for small businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged business owners. Through the Community Infrastructure Center and the Institute for Inclusive Entrepreneurship (IIE), the Milken Institute has the ability to work with incumbent lenders, public-sector institutions, and non-profit leaders on the ground and tap them into networks of mission-driven lenders across the country to accelerate deployment of small business support and infrastructure funding.