Yale School of Management - Alumni Leaders

"First and foremost, Yale SOM gave me the skills in finance, accounting, strategic planning, organizational behavior, marketing and economics that I needed to get a job on Wall Street and keep it. I got a first class education in all the basic disciplines. Secondly, it gave me a close knit network of classmates (including many from the class behind us) that has provided me with friendship and support ever since graduation. In its focus on the interplay of the private, public, and non-profit sectors Yale SOM made me understand the perspectives and constraints of people in each area. Without this understanding, I think we are apt to 'demonize' those in other sectors. The businessman becomes a money grubbing capitalist; the public official a stupid bureaucrat; the non-profit worker a lazy idealist. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, but it takes a wide angle lens to see everything in its proper context. Yale SOM reinforced that vision in almost every course."

Henry D. Lanier works for the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) based in Oakland, California, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Marin County. He focuses on developing alternative sources of capital to supply LIIF with funds to lend to developers of low income housing, charter schools, childcare facilities, and other community facilities. He also manages LIIF's regional directors in Oakland, Los Angeles and New York. LIIF, which has approximately $100 million of on-balance sheet assets and the same amount off balance sheet, is one of the country's leading CDFIs and is committed to its mission of finding ways to alleviate poverty in its areas of concentration.

Henry's work involves new markets tax credit transactions to finance charter schools and childcare centers, affordable housing programs with pension funds and banks for whom LIIF serves as loan originator and servicer, financing childcare facilities utilizing California's COIN tax credit, and developing tax exempt bond issues for homeless shelters. Before joining LIIF in 2002, Henry worked at Lehman Brothers Inc., a global investment bank headquartered in New York City. At Lehman he was a managing director and head of the firm's housing finance group as well as president of Lehman Housing Capital Inc., a syndicator of the federal low income housing tax credit. He was an investment banker in the public finance field for twenty-five years and worked with housing finance agencies and developers across the country. Henry is also very involved in micro finance organizations and serves on the boards of Accion New York and Accion US.

Henry got his BA in English literature from Harvard University, and holds a MPPM from the Yale School of Management.