How we think about the work
About
CID draws on fluency in people and place. We operate at the intersection of political economy and human-centered design, informed by anthropological inquiry, to shape sustainable economic growth.
Our practice is built from two substrates and two acts: the built and civic infrastructure a place is constructed on, and the formation of capital and constituency that sustain it. We work across all four because development that moves only one entrenches inequities we seek to relieve. Our measure is not whether growth occurred, but whether its returns compound for legacy stakeholders rather than around them.
MEET OUR FOUNDER
Sandino L. Thompson is a builder of environments and the systems that hold them.
Over more than two decades that has meant moving between the two — managing multimillion-dollar commercial and residential development and post-disaster rebuilding across the United States, alongside leading public–private partnerships in affordable housing, workforce and vocational training, education reform, and youth development. Along Northeast Oklahoma City’s 23rd Street corridor, that work culminated in commercial development recognized nationally and internationally for inclusive design and placemaking.
That multidisciplinary experience shapes how he approaches capital and develops impact investment strategies including work structuring capital around supply-chain resilience and concentration risk rather than compliance. He has also built from the other side of the table, helping found a renewable energy EPC firm and taking positions in ventures where the return case and the community benefit case are aligned.
As Managing Partner of Community Impact Development, his method is less prediction and more synthesis: reading what is already present in a place or system, and selecting deliberately for the version of change that builds shared value rather than extracting it.