The New York Fed’s Community Development team is leading the Making Missing Markets Initiative. The initiative aims to create market connections and business models that build opportunity-rich neighborhoods and communities.
The initiative is curating conversations with leaders from different sectors to foster early, preventative investments to address community challenges, which participants call “upstream” investments. The initiative seeks to deploy existing sources of public and private capital more effectively, creating stronger incentives for better outcomes.
Among the initiative’s key concepts are that neighborhoods are engines of change; that social and economic vulnerabilities often overlap; and that community-based nonprofits are well positioned to create change.
The “Making Missing Markets Initiative” essay describes these and other key concepts. The essay also explains how the initiative is being put into action by Making Missing Markets Communities and volunteer work groups called Design Teams.
