Ep 67 Building Community and Empowering Lives - Dr. Michael Swack
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Dr. Michael Swack - UNH Provided image
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Building Community and Empowering Lives - Dr. Michael Swack
Welcome to this joint production of The New Hampshire Secrets, Legends & Lore and The Radical Centrist Podcast. I'm your host Wayne King.
It's not often that we feel compelled to do a joint podcast but there is something quite special about our guest Michael Swack - Senior Fellow at the Carsey Center for Impact Finance, having recently stepped aside from his previous role as its director - In hopes of being able to direct more of his energy to practical and positive projects. Michael has been New Hampshire's secret weapon for Community Development for forty years. Those of us who have known him over the course of those years are very proud of him and the contributions he has made toward building community here. But he isalso a man of the world and he has worked his magic in countries from North America to Asia, Latin America and Africa. He is, by every standard we have established on the Radical Centrist Podcast, a radical centrist - more interested in getting things done than towing the line of any dogma or ideology.
Michael Swack is probably not a name that sets off a lot of bells and whistles with most folks, but for more than forty years he has been the brains behind some of the most innovative and empowering ideas for Community Economic Development and finance - not only in New Hampshire but nationally. In other words, he is a superstar, but a superstar without a super-ego. His joy - what gets him out of bed every day raring to go - is his work and the powerful understanding that his actions are making a difference in the lives of those too-often overlooked when it comes to building community and equity in our future.
All of us have a shortlist of people in our lives whom we have met and immediately realized that we were in the presence of someone very unique and talented. For me Michael Swack is one of those people.
I've known Michael now for more than 40 years. We were founding members of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, one of the very first nonprofit loan funds in America helping low-income families purchase and manage their cooperative housing. I was the prime sponsor of two key pieces of legislation that Michael - along with two other giants in my eyes: Elliot Berry and Julie Eades - were the brains behind. To this day Those two bills, that both became law, along with New Hampshire's first homeless shelter legislation, are among the laws of which I am most proud.
But the thing about Michael is that he's never satisfied and his brain is always looking beyond today for the next series of ideas to achieve even more.
All this is not to say that Michael is simply a "tinkerer" because among professionals in his field he - in fact - sets off all those bells and whistles I spoke of before, because Michael Swack is a pioneer in the field of Community Development, who never rests on his laurels. To dispense with the tinkerer analogy - and to make it even more silly but meaningful: He's the ever-ready bunny of Community Economic Development. His gears always seem to be turning, ferreting out ideas that use public and charitable dollars to leverage private sector investment,all in the name of benefitting the hub of our lives . . . our communities and more specifically the people of those communities.
That's why In 2019, the National Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) awarded Michael the industry’s highest individual honor, the 2019 Ned Gramlich Lifetime Achievement Award for Responsible Finance. Then, In 2021, Michael was appointed by President Biden to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Advisory Board - a position he has recently been reappointed to by the President. It's also why his position as a professor at UNH and as the founder of the Center for Impact Finance at the Carsey School is the ideal spot for him, teaching others is the next best thing to cloning Michael himself.
Michael received his doctorate degree from Columbia University, his master’s degree from Harvard University, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Back in the 1990s as a result of a piece I had written in the Christian Science Monitor I had been asked by the Ford Foundation to put together a team of people to introduce the Civil Society Community in West Africa to the Internet and to train them in management skills to help enhance their effectiveness. In those days everywhere I went in West Africa I kept hearing about the Community Development program at Souhern NH University. I finally asked someone to tell me who was the head of that program and it was not a surprise to learn that it was none other than Michael Swack. He was the founder and former dean of the School of Community Economic Development (CED) at Southern New Hampshire University.
He has been involved in the design, implementation, and management of a number community development lending and investment institutions both inside and outside the United States. He was the first chairman and served for seventeen years as a board member of the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority (CDFA), the state-chartered equity fund for community economic development ventures and projects that we had first worked on together. He is the founding president and a current board member of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund. He was a founding board member of the National Association of Community Development Loan Funds (now the Opportunity Finance Network), a trade association of Community Development Finance Institutions. Internationally, he has been involved in development finance and microfinance work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Today Dr. Michael Swack is a professor at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire where he directs the Center for Impact Finance. He also serves on the faculty of the Paul College of Business and Economics. Dr. Swack has published in the areas of economic development, development finance, community investment and mission-related investment.
I could read you off a list of his publications and other honors but that might mask the one thing that I most want you to know about Michael Swack. That he is a man who cares deeply about making the world - or his piece of it at least - work for everyone, irrespective of their station in life. He is a man whose own humility compels him to name others who deserve recognition and credit in the story and masks his burning desire to use his talents to serve his fellow men and women.
I am honored and pleased to speak with Michael about his life's work.
Here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Swack.
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