Impact Investing and the Public Sector
Creating Jobs, Driving Profits
October 7, 2010
Kerwin Tesdell
Kerwin Tesdell is president of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University, teaching Double Bottom Line Finance at the Stern School of Business and Community Development Law at the School of Law. Prior to joining CDVCA, Mr. Tesdell was a program officer at the Ford Foundation, first in its office of program-related investments and then in its economic development unit, where he had primary responsibility for the Foundation’s work in small business finance and job creation for low income people. Before that, he was the director of the Community Development Legal Assistance Center, which provides corporate, tax, and real estate legal assistance to community development organizations in New York. He was also an associate with the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, where he represented a variety of clients in the financial services industry, including venture capital firms and an individual angel capitalist. He also performed the legal work in organizing the Community Capital Bank, one of the first community development banks in the nation. Prior to joining Debevoise, he was a law clerk to a federal judge in Manhattan. Mr. Tesdell is chairman of the board of the CDFI Coalition and vice chair of the CDFI Data Project. He serves on the Board of Directors, Executive Committee and Investment Committee of the New York Community Investment Company, LLC, a CDVC fund. He also serves on the Advisory Boards of the Journal of Tax Credit Investment, the Satter Center for Social Entrepreneurship at NYU, the RISE Project of Columbia Business School, and the Milano Finance Lab of the New School for Social Research. Mr. Tesdell graduated from Harvard College with a degree in economics and holds JD and MBA degrees from New York University, as well as a certificate from the Venture Capital Institute.
