contributed photo
As I described in Part 1, land ownership has been integral to my family’s history, and a core value that has been passed down over the generations. In the 1800’s, land ownership meant having a level of autonomy that served as a buttress, somewhat, against the vicissitude of life in the south. Of course, tragically, this was not a common experience for Black families in this country.
I’ve always loved learning about my family’s history, and history in general — as it related to government and law in the U.S. and comparative societies. In high school in Tulsa, I was selected to be part of a peer court, held at Tulsa University.
When it was time to apply to college, I picked five: Oklahoma University, Stanford, Yale, Emory and Rice. To this day, I don’t remember how I picked these schools, except I was aware several Supreme Court justices went to Yale Law School and Yale had a phenomenal history program. I was clear I wanted to major in history and become a supreme court justice.
Funny enough, the Yale admit weekend was the same weekend as Rice University’s in Houston; I visited Rice and loved it. I visited Emory and Stanford admit events, but felt Stanford was too far away from home. It’s ironic now as I sit here freezing in CT, still far from home. On the very last day to decide, out of the blue — I now think it was God — I decided to go to Yale.
I majored in history, and planned on law school after that.
In my senior year, I was a freshman counselor. One of my counselees was driving back from New York with several other students, and they got into a horrible, traumatic accident. Four Yale students died, and my counselee was in critical condition and a coma for several months.
It really affected me. I visited him as often as I could. I felt sad, distraught — while we’re sitting in classes, his life was hanging in the balance. It was the first time in my life I felt demotivated. Looking back, we all should have gone for counseling. But at the time, I didn’t see it that way — I was used to producing, producing, producing. Everything I felt was solid, now felt very un-solid.
I decided to not go immediately to law school. I graduated and started working at CT Voices for Children. I was a tax and budget policy fellow. The job included reading 500-page tomes about Connecticut tax and policy. On the surface, it was tedious, but I began to understand the importance of money — how it flows, and how policymakers allocate amongst varying priorities. (I also remember thinking policy takes a long time.)
This was when I started CLP — the month after Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. During CLP, Bill, Susan Fowler, and Heidi Brooks were our facilitators. Heidi suggested I think about business school.
I had never thought of business school. I thought of law school obviously, PhD in psychology, PhD in history, but business school had never crossed my mind. In some ways it made sense, as I was starting to think deeply about the capital markets. Further, I was in leadership at a young age, but I had not critically thought about organizational development.
I also realized the ways corporations influence policy. I wanted to figure out Wall Street and the financial capital markets. I remember thinking, oh that’s who runs the world; the people who own the institutions with trillions of dollars. It resonated with some of the lessons from my family — wealth and ownership are power. Watching shows about the markets, I began to see that I could work in that world too.
I took Heidi’s advice and visited Yale School of Management, and sat in on a behavioral economics class. I was completely in love. Macro-economics, motivations and why people do what they do, power, case studies. I thought it was amazing — it’s about capital allocation, but also behavior, and patterns. It was such a breath of fresh air.
The world of finance felt fast; it felt clear, it could solve problems, and it determined community outcomes.
Hurricane Katrina shone a light on the impact of poverty in communities, and how that intersected with race. If you’re poor, you can’t even leave New Orleans? I was so angry about the inequity in the United States. I wanted to think about entrepreneurship, business and investment. SOM hit on all these things, and how to do it in a responsible way.
I only applied to Yale and was accepted to attend SOM starting in the fall of ’07. With a year to go before I would be starting, a CLP cohort mate Laura Berry — then at a local foundation — approached me to work with her. I learned of this new world of endowed institutions and how one can use their grant making arm, as well as their corpus, to impact communities.
SOM was a two-year program, and it was difficult — remember I had been a history major. I had not taken a math class since high school! More so, business school is an extroverted culture. That innately was not who I was. For me, very shy, I realized you need to raise your hand even though you don’t want to or share your opinion even if it wasn’t fully baked. Like a cannon, it pushed me into different parts of myself — including the awkward ones!
It was also opening up the world in a new and powerful way. One of the professors was also a lawyer, and connected our class to the former mayor of DC, Sharon Pratt Kelly — the first Black woman mayor of a major U.S. city. Mayor Pratt, at the time, was doing some really cool work with the Congressional Black Caucus, including U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters. A few of us had the opportunity to staff a summit in Bermuda that Mayor Pratt organized that included the World Bank and other financial institutions to discuss investment throughout the Diaspora. It felt like all my worlds were aligning.
I was chair of the Black Business Alliance and the Economic Development Club my second year of business school. This is the time of the great recession and housing crisis of ’08, TARP and layoffs in the financial industry; a lot of my classmates were getting offers rescinded. For about a year, I continued to work with Mayor Pratt.
I was still very interested in impact investing and philanthropy, and moved to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Initially, I split my time between social impact investing and the private capital team, venture capital, private equity, real estate, natural resources, etc.
I loved private capital and allocating to funds that would then invest to solve the most complex issues in our global society — technology, biotech, energy, health. Institutions invest their capital into funds that then seed or grow these companies. I saw the impact investing can make, trillions of dollars put into different funds. It was an amazing combination of a lot of macro issues I really cared about.
On the social investment side, I was the point person for an investment project to revitalize a neighborhood in Atlanta, and was in charge of an initiative called Ways to Work — a national program where families could get used cars at a lower interest rate. In America, access to reliable transportation is a pre-requisite for getting and maintaining quality employment. I just loved the work — investments, impact investing, program-related investment — using their endowment for social good.
My husband and I had our first child, our son Daniel, and we were living in Connecticut. At that time, I would go to Baltimore for a few days or a week or two each month. Given we were anxious first-time parents, my mom left Oklahoma and came to CT to help us for two years so we could balance new parenthood, work, and graduate school.
I then moved to Choate’s endowment, and was an Investment Officer. I became pregnant with our daughter Gabby, and it was a very hard pregnancy, including bed rest and hospital stays. When Gabby was born, I didn’t want to return to the same level of travel. We could tell she was disabled in some serious way, though we didn’t know yet what it was. We later learned it was Angleman’s Syndrome, a rare disease. I made the courageous (scary) decision to take a step back from that work pace and started my own consulting company which allowed me more time to focus on Gabby.
At this point, Erik Clemons and I had known each other for 15 years — another CLP connection — and we checked in with each other at least once a year. He knew about Gabby and her medical challenges; he told me about ConnCORP and the work they were advancing around wealth-building, business creation, and restorative community development — all these things that I love. When the time came, he and Paul McCraven invited me to join their incredible mission.
Today, six years after that conversation, I am still loving my work at ConnCORP. Being here has been so healing for me. Growing up, I always felt like I had different lives. My academic life, my Black life, my spiritual life, my family life, my finance life, this life, that life. I’m so much more in tune and aligned with my purpose here — I was able to be my whole, full self and it has been the most incredible gift.
And, going through it all with Gabby, including her full year in the hospital — being here at ConnCORP saved me. People would pray for me, would do deep prayers for her.
Such an amazing, healing space. It is a real life Wakanda.
I’ve grown so much deeper in my understanding of the work I’m supposed to do. Combining my faith and my talents. It’s an amazing reconciliation. Most days, like everyone, I juggle it all in the middle of a breathtaking schedule. I also sit on two foundation boards and investment committees where I can still think through structuring a portfolio and investing in incredible fund managers, especially women and diverse owned funds.
My friends tease me — I came to New Haven and never left. I love this community, it really is the greatest small city in America. When I’m in town, my car goes from home, to my children’s school, to work, to the pharmacy or some other local place. It’s like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, this beautifully knit small-town community, in a place you wouldn’t think it would exist, the bustling East coast, and I am so blessed to have it.
Learn more about Anna at LinkedIn or ConnCORP
Get in touch with Anna directly: ajblanding@gmail.com