Through Inclusive Growth Fellowship, Students and City Leaders Envision New Haven’s Future

Before coming to SOM, Malcolm Cardona-Spence ’24 worked at a Miami-based nonprofit developing a technical assistance program for “underserved minorities in business.” As a native Floridian from a low-income background himself, he found it rewarding to help local business owners access capital funding and other vital resources.

So when he learned about the Inclusive Growth Fellowship, a program that pairs students with local leaders to work on economic development projects benefitting all local residents, the decision to apply was an easy one.

“It was almost like it was built for me to join this program, to be able to leverage my skills to help local businesses,” Cardona-Spence said.

Launched earlier this year, the Inclusive Growth Fellowship is Yale SOM’s first major contribution to the Center for Inclusive Growth, a historic partnership between Yale University and the City of New Haven that will implement strategies for equitable economic development across the city. The fellowship has generated wide interest in the SOM community, with 65 students applying for eight slots in the inaugural cohort.

In fall 2023, the city selected four areas for students to investigate: mid-size business growth, affordable housing, mass timber construction, and local procurement by anchor institutions. Throughout the spring semester, students partnered with local agencies and spoke to a variety of public and private stakeholders to create a long-term plan for growth. In April, each team presented their findings at a stakeholder meeting held in Evans Hall.

“It’s such a great combination of different stakeholders coming together towards this one interesting and complex goal,” said fellow Hannah Adams ’25.

The research and analysis process differed for each team. Cardona-Spence and Adams, who worked together on the mid-size business initiative, knew early on that they wanted to investigate the potential of an independent marketplace that could provide local businesses a brick-and-mortar space in which to operate, while reducing overhead costs and mitigating risks. The teammates analyzed the challenges that small businesses face, such as high rents, and conducted a survey to help determine the optimal business profiles for inclusion in a potential marketplace.

“We've gotten the chance to speak to a number of different small businesses in New Haven and really understand what their daily lives are like, the challenges they face,” Adams said. “And how not only the city but also the School of Management can help them succeed.”

Fellows Rachel Harmon ’25 and Thomas Merizalde Martinez ’25 tackled affordable housing, an especially pressing problem in New Haven: more than half of the city’s residents have trouble affording rent, and the city needs to create 8,000 new units by 2030 to alleviate the current housing crisis. Their research process included analyzing strategies employed by peer cities as well as New Haven’s own policies. They found that reducing minimum parking requirements has helped cities such as Buffalo and Seattle lower both development costs and rent. In their recommendations, the fellows highlighted the value of working within the city’s existing policies to promote the construction of new housing stock.

Michael Yanagisawa ’25 and Clara Usandizaga ’25 explored a different side of city policy in a project on mass timber construction strategies. Comprised of wood panels stacked and glued together, mass timber is a building material more sustainable and energy efficient than load-bearing materials such as concrete or steel. New Haven is already a trailblazer in the field: the city is currently building one of the nation’s first affordable housing mass timber projects. But challenges to the widespread use of this relatively new building material include supply chain problems and moderately higher building costs.

Like their cohort-mates investigating affordable housing, they recommended strategies that utilize city policies, such as adding mass timber construction incentives to the zoning code.

Yanagisawa, who grew up near New Haven, said the fellowship helped him rekindle a childhood connection with the city. “It was just a nice way to get outside of the Yale bubble a little bit and see what the community itself is like,” he said.

Usandizaga noted that the Inclusive Growth Fellowship offers students a unique level of access to real-world economic development programs. “It's super cool and it's not something we could easily do without the program,” she said of the mass timber project. “It's not like you can knock on someone's door and be like, ‘Can I visit the building you're constructing?’”

Laurence Spekterman ’24 and Renee Osagiede MPH-HCM ’25 were tasked with exploring how local anchor institutions, like Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) and Yale University itself, can invest in New Haven through local procurement and hiring policies. The fellows uncovered significant logistical impediments to local procurement: for example, many small or local laundry services that might benefit from contracts with YNHH are not accredited to process medical-grade laundry. Spekterman and Osagiede proposed a potential framework to train local vendors and create a pipeline of businesses qualified to work with anchor institutions.

Carlos Eyzaguirre, New Haven’s deputy economic development administrator, helped select the four projects, and worked directly with fellows. He said the inaugural cohort brought their diverse experiences to some of the biggest problems facing the city. “Income inequality is a really persistent issue that affects a lot of our community, especially our communities of color,” he said. “We get a lot of professional-quality work out of these students.”

Eyzaguirre hopes that the Center for Inclusive Growth will help the city leverage the power of local institutions to build on its existing strengths. “This is a real moment for the city and the university,” he said.

Yanagisawa said that in combining business acumen and social impact, the Inclusive Growth Fellowship embodies SOM’s mission to educate leaders for business and society.

“Mass timber construction isn’t just about the business; it’s about making sure this local community has access to quality, beautiful, affordable housing,” he said, reflecting on his project. “It's not just ‘Does this make good business sense?’ but, ‘Does it make good sense for the community as a whole?’”

The Yale SOM Inclusive Growth Fellowship is made possible thanks to generous support provided by the Amman Community Impact Fund.

Read more about this year’s cohort of Inclusive Growth Fellows:
Yale SOM Launches Inclusive Growth Fellowship Program
Making a Difference: Creating Opportunities for Local Vendors