Kevin McQueen has been a part-time lecturer for the Community Development Finance Lab at the Milano school since 2011. Kevin has an extensive background in corporate and community development finance and is a partner at a national consulting firm (BWB Solutions) that specializes in impact investing strategies and nonprofit planning and governance.

The Community Develop Finance Lab course engages students in a project-based curriculum with the following components: classroom instruction, student teams, interdisciplinary engagement across the university, guest lectures, networking.

Students come in with varying levels of finance knowledge - many with absolutely no background in finance or economics - so the first part of the course is dedicated to the basics of understanding finance and how capital can be used to create positive social outcomes. With that knowledge, groups of students go on to work with a community partner on a finance project. Interestingly, Kevin emphasizes the importance of referring to these community organizations as partners rather than clients, as this is, first and foremost, a learning environment for students. One of the biggest challenges of the class is learning to ask the partner organization the right questions and getting to the root of what they expect the student team to deliver.

Since the creation of the course in 2003, students have worked with a variety of community organizations in New York, New Jersey, California, and Ohio. During the early stages of the class the projects focused on commercial real estate and more traditional place-based solutions, but since Kevin began teaching, the class became more focused on cultural community development and creative place-making.

In his Affiliated Faculty seminar at the Tishman Center, Kevin discussed some of the projects students have worked on over the past years and the organizations they have partnered with, such as developing a business plan for UPROSE’s community-owned solar generation project in Sunset Park or creating a sustainability framework for the Jersey City government.

Our Assistant Director and Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Alumnus, Mike Harrington, was a part of the team that worked with UPROSE and explored models for alternative energy infrastructure ownership. (You can read more about Mike’s experience as a part of the Community Development Finance Lab on the Milano web page.)

McQueen and other affiliated faculty members also discussed the challenges of doing partner/client-based work in the school environment in a way that ensures that both opportunity to learn for the student but also actually benefits the community. The faculty stressed that in order to develop trusting and meaningful relationships with the partner organizations, it is important to focus on projects that are long-term, rather than episodic, and make sure that each project is direct and specific, delivering on one part of the larger puzzle that the partner community organization is focused on.

Watch Kevin McQueen’s full presentation on the Community Finance Development Lab below:

February 2020 Affiliated Faculty Presentation from Kevin McQueen