Yale School of Management - Andrea Levere '83

Andrea Levere has led the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) as its president since 2004. CFED is a private nonprofit organization with the mission of building assets and expanding economic opportunity for low-income people and disadvantaged communities through matched savings, entrepreneurship, and affordable housing.

At the helm of CFED, Ms. Levere developed an unprecedented partnership with the Federal Reserve System to address the inability of many Americans to build personal savings and assets. She guides CFED’s national initiative, I’M HOME: Innovations in Manufactured Homes, which addresses the challenges faced by the 17 million homeowners who live in manufactured homes by advancing market change through policy design and financial innovation. She also oversees CFED’s largest program, a 10-year initiative to test and promote children’s savings accounts called SEED (Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment), which has the goal of passing state and federal policies to create savings accounts for every child born in America as a means to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

Ms. Levere has added staff and resources to CFED’s policy and communications efforts. The organization is leveraging its biennial publication, the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard — the nation’s foremost benchmarking tool assessing how well each state builds and protects assets — into a national Assets and Opportunity Campaign that mobilizes thousands of practitioners, legislators, donors, and low-income savers to advocate on behalf of municipal, state, and federal policies that build assets for low- and moderate-income Americans.

Prior to joining CFED in 1992, she was a director with the National Development Council. At NDC, she was a lead trainer for the Economic Development Finance Certification Program and designed and conducted “Taking Care of Business,” a financial management program for entrepreneurs while also working with cities and states to structure financing for small businesses, affordable housing and urban development projects.

Ms. Levere served as chair of the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women from 2002-2005, after being on its board since 1998. Currently, she serves on the endowment committee of the Center for Community Change and as president of ROC USA, a national social venture that aims to convert manufactured housing communities into resident-owned cooperatives to build wealth and financial security for homeowners.

She received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master’s degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Management. She was awarded the Alumni Recognition Award from the Yale School of Management in 2001 for exemplary commitment to the field of economic development and the mission of the Yale School of Management.

Ms. Levere lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with husband Michael Mazerov (SOM ’82), a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and their two children.