Anna Blanding ’09

Anna Blanding ’09 grew up immersed in her family’s history. As a child, she lived at and later regularly visited the Oklahoma farm that her formerly enslaved great-great-grandparents bought in the 1920s.

But only recently has she considered how the lessons imparted by her upbringing have shaped her work in impact investing and economic development.

“My understanding, my thoughts about entrepreneurship and capital, that’s all been expanded” by her background and lived experiences, Blanding says. “I hadn’t really connected some of that with my career.”

As the chief investment officer of the Connecticut Community Outreach Revitalization Program (ConnCORP), Blanding focuses on using real estate and business development in New Haven to create wealth and opportunity for marginalized communities, including through the First Haven in Dixwell project, a mixed-use space that aims to revitalize the historically Black neighborhood.

Blanding is proof of the impact a solid economic foundation can have. Her great-great-grandmother, Frances Parthenia Johnson, could not read or write but managed to secure property in Arkansas and Oklahoma that would change her family’s trajectory. Accepting a recent award for her work from the Unlocked Foundation, which aims to address wealth disparities, Blanding called Frances her “north star.”

Blanding studied history at Yale College, and after graduating in 2003 took a job as a tax and budget policy fellow at Connecticut Voices for Children. There, she managed a $2 million fund to improve outcomes for young people transitioning out of foster care.

The job taught her to pay attention to the way capital markets affected the communities she most cared about.

“That’s where I began to see how money flows,” she says. “In thinking about how to save the world, I hadn’t thought about how money helps facilitate that.”

Around that time, she met Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at SOM, through New Haven’s Community Leadership Program, and Brooks recommended she consider business school. Blanding sat in on a behavioral economics class at SOM and “completely fell in love” with finance, she recalls.

“Money, human behavior, policy, income distribution—oh my goodness, it was everything I cared about and expanded my mind beyond classical economics,” she says. “I was sold.”

Blanding only applied to SOM, drawn by its dual focus on business and society. Once there, she served as co-president of the Black Business Alliance and co-chair of the Economic Development Club. Through one class, she worked with the Congressional Black Caucus, researching how to ensure government funds deployed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were available to smaller banks and financial institutions.

She particularly enjoyed studying with the late Sharon Oster, then SOM’s dean, whose classes in economics and nonprofit finance were challenging—as a history major in college, Blanding hadn’t taken a math class since high school—but rewarding.

“She taught me the importance of being prepared, of digging through information and data and arriving at a point of view and defending that,” she says. “I admired her leadership.”

Classes in real estate with William N. Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies, have also come in handy throughout her career, including during her work at ConnCORP: the Dixwell project required several property acquisitions before it could begin.

“I went to SOM wanting to be able to impact communities,” Blanding says. “I took away the idea that you have to have really strong public-private partnerships to do that.”

Blanding pursued that interest after graduating, benefitting from SOM’s ties to the economic development community. One of her first jobs, as an investment analyst at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, came through Christa Velasquez ’96, then the foundation’s director of social investments. Blanding spent three years at the Casey Foundation, spending much of her time on an economic revitalization project in Atlanta. She next worked as a senior investment advisor at Choate Rosemary Hall. In 2015, she struck out as an independent consultant to foundations and endowments, in part to be more available for her two children, including a daughter who has serious health challenges.

As her children grew older, Blanding decided to reenter the full-time workforce, joining ConnCORP in 2019. As CIO, she manages the financing of the $200 million First Haven in Dixwell project, which will include retail, residential, health care, childcare, and cultural spaces. The first construction phase will be completed in May.

Blanding describes the project, which includes other economic development initiatives throughout New Haven, as a “holistic economic revival” aimed to restore the Dixwell community—known as “New Haven’s Black Main Street” in the 1930s and 1940s, when Dixwell Avenue was lined with jazz clubs and restaurants—to its former vibrancy.

“It’s about, how do you restore this community to be one of hope and not deficit? How does deep place-based impact investing in a variety of systems impact children and families,” she says. “In a sense, it’s entrepreneurial, it’s co-creating with the community and with public and private partners, this magical world that doesn’t yet exist.”

Blanding is also heading up ConnCORP Capital, which will invest in local entrepreneurs. The work builds off a grant-making initiative she led during the COVID-19 pandemic that distributed $10,000 grants to about 25 New Haven businesses, all of which are still open and expanding in revenue.

“A lot of entrepreneurs aren’t getting access to growth capital, or they are getting it at rates that don’t help,” she says. ConnCORP “meets a need for that.”

Outside ConnCORP, Blanding expands access to capital through her board work. She serves as a trustee and on the investment and social investment committees of the Kresge Foundation, an urban philanthropic organization; as a trustee and on the investment and finance and audit committees of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, which works to achieve education equity; and as a trustee and investment committee member of Yale University’s Dwight Hall. In February, she was honored by The Unlocked Foundation and Tiffany’s with the Catalyst for Inclusive Capital Award, alongside Kelly Rowland and Ali Webb. In April, she joined the Casey Family Programs board as trustee and investment committee chair; and in May, she was honored by Blueprint Capital Advisors as part of its Power100, which recognizes “influential and impactful” people working in investment management.

Blanding loves helping organizations become “more mission-aligned”—not just in where they deploy their funds, but in who manages them, and how. She says she is motivated by her knowledge that just as wealth gaps persist at lower levels of the economic ladder, they are also pronounced among investors who own funds and hold equity in companies.

“A lot of my work is in seeding and giving money to managers that might not otherwise get institutional capital,” she says.

When she first became an independent consultant, Blanding says, she worried she hadn’t made the right choice. She says she could never have imagined the path her career has taken, and the ways her decisions have paid off.

“Life is not linear,” she says. “But I felt like I took the next best step every time. I’ve been able to make decisions that are value-aligned, to be with my children, and to have this amazing impact.”

Her time at SOM, she says, empowered her to make choices that worked for her throughout her career.

“The lesson I learned at SOM is that there are many different paths to creating change,” she says.