The following is a conversation between Brandee McHale, the Head of Community Investing and Development at Citi and President of the Citi Foundation, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Denver: Brandee McHale, the Head of Community Investing and Development at Citi, and President of the Citi Foundation, has spent over 30 years championing economic opportunity for underserved communities. With a rich history that includes pioneering financial inclusion efforts at the Ford Foundation and leading Citi’s corporate citizenship, Brandee’s work has consistently bridged the world of finance and philanthropy.
As a voice on numerous influential boards such as Living Cities, she’s been at the forefront of initiatives aimed at dismantling racial wealth disparities and building a more inclusive economic future. And she’s with us now.
Brandee McHale Head of Community Investing and Development at Citi, and President of the Citi Foundation
Welcome back to The Business of Giving, Brandee.
Brandee: Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here today.
Denver: As I mentioned, you’re the Head of Community Investing and Development at Citi, as well as the President of the Citi Foundation. How are those roles distinctive, and in what ways do they complement one another?
Brandee: Terrific question. It’s one I’m actually asked quite often because it’s a very long title on a business card. So the Citi Foundation is the philanthropic entity associated with Citi, the global financial services company, and it is set up as its own foundation and as its own separate legal entity. So we are required to call that out.
But I actually think that describing the role as both the foundation as well as community investing at Citi is really important because what it really is communicating is that philanthropy is just one tool in our community investing toolkit.
And the way we like to work is that we see our philanthropy as playing a role and a type of instrument that we use for one type of purpose, but we sit within this global financial services company and frankly have the opportunity to work across the company to harness other forms of financial and human capital, all driving towards the same North Star: How do we drive positive societal impact?
Denver: Yeah. So you’re not looking at the solution you have, you’re looking at the problem, and then determining what solution or what blend of solutions will actually be the thing that will solve that problem.
Brandee: Yeah. I mean, I think in this day and age, one of the things that all of us working in the environmental and social space together begin to see is that the issues that we’re trying to address aren’t impacting people in standalone silos. And so we need a toolkit that’s expanded.
And the way we like to think about the role that we play is, first and foremost, we want to be seen as engaged community problem solvers. We want to be in dialogue. We want to understand what are the root causes that we’re trying to address.
And sometimes philanthropy may not be the best way that we can get at something, and we do need to have a capital solution that may be a market-based solution, or it may be other forms of technical assistance and expertise, or thinking about our role as an influencer.
And so that’s the community investing function that looks at philanthropy, plus the other ways that we can invest in communities.
Denver: A lot of listeners are going to appreciate that clarification. In addition to that, you’ve been at this for 30 years now plus. What are some of the most significant changes you’ve observed over that time? How you think about this work, how you measure it or approach it, maybe how jobs like yours have really dramatically changed over that period.
Brandee: Yeah. First, I can’t believe it’s been 30 years. It’s a privilege to do this work, but what’s really changed, I think, is that you used to have to really specialize and go deep. And we thought about this work as its own standalone vertical, and: How do we build and professionalize the community investing functions in the private sector… build up teams, build up the systems and technology and information management systems we have.
But I think what’s really different is that we now recognize that to be effective, you can’t build a vertical and only look outward. That we also have a role to play as internal change agents and working horizontally across the company. And so while I look at my calendar sometimes and think, “Oh, I’m amazed, look at all these internal meetings and discussions.” Or I’m talking with the board of the company or the executive management team; I’m not necessarily out in the community.
I step back and say: That’s exactly what I should be doing. We’re trying to influence other decision makers. And so we’ve got these dual roles as both now internal change agents and supporters of external change agents.
Denver: Yeah. That’s a great insight because I think most everybody looks at you looking out at the community and governments and NGOs and everybody else, but if you don’t have the infrastructure correct internally, nothing is going to happen with the same impact as it otherwise might.
So that begs the question, how do you do that? That is a question that everybody has been asking themselves because particularly, Brandee, since COVID, we seem to be much more vertically oriented. Zoom is a great tool for vertical teams, and it’s an awful tool for horizontal teams going across the organization and being influenced by an adjacent group.
What have you found to be the keys to effectively engage your counterparts in the organization in other departments?
Brandee: Yeah. Well, I would say COVID definitely was a disruptor and did make things more challenging. But I actually think that we’re going to look back and realize that what it did was it made us… fundamentally sort of all of us… have a moment to step back and question: What is the world that we live in, and what is the world that we want to live in?
And so I am both incredibly optimistic and excited about the interest and the recognition, certainly in our company, business leaders that don’t have as their day job a focus on the community asking: What is the role that we play through our core business capabilities in making a positive difference?
And recognizing that it’s not just about doing something nice or doing something good, but also seeing that the social challenges that we’re seeing have an economic impact as well. And so there’s this integration of making a social case as well as an economic case.
So I think that that is one thing that’s really changed, and we’ve won a lot of hearts over during COVID. We need to keep winning over minds and really making a very, very clear case about why doing good is also good for business, good for the economy, and good for our company.
Denver: Yeah. So you’re speaking to their self-interest as well, in addition to trying to make this a better world; it’s just an economic imperative for their department and their division if they’re going to be successful.
Brandee: Yeah. And that’s not a bad thing.
Denver: No.
Brandee: Because the challenges that we’re facing, some of them… I think one of the things that we’re looking for in philanthropy is to identify and recognize that while philanthropy is necessary, it is insufficient on its own. You can add up all the philanthropy in the world. It is not going to provide enough capital to do the things that we need to get done.
So how do we identify those market-based solutions? And as we come together, it means that we need to help the markets understand, as you say, the economic imperative. And we need to help those of us in the social space really understand how to make that economic case. So we’re all using both new tools and new language.
“Kindergarten to College is a program started by the city of San Francisco to make sure that every kindergarten student has a college savings account when they enroll their very first day in public school. And what we did was to go to our business and to build a platform, a program, a technology offering that can help facilitate those savings programs in schools. Schools aren’t banks; banks aren’t schools. And so what we’ve done is to build a solution that will help to facilitate these savings efforts.”
Denver: Yeah, yeah. You have a suite of innovative initiatives across the organization, which is truly a manifestation of the values and beliefs of Citi; so let me ask you about a couple, starting with Kindergarten to College.
Brandee: Ah, yes. So great segue from what we were just talking about, about thinking about market-based solutions. So, many philanthropies, many foundations, ours included, have been thinking for many years and working at: How do we close the achievement gap? How do we close the educational achievement gap? And traditionally, we’ve thought about: How do we support students academically? How do we provide them with the social supports that they need?
But there’s also increasingly a financial gap, and it’s not just about the high cost of college. There’s also when that financial gap also affects your sense of belief about yourself, that if you’re the first in your family to go to college, you’re coming from a lower income working family. How could you ever imagine that you would be able to bridge that high cost of college?
Denver: And one of those initiatives is Kindergarten to College. Let me just ask you a question. Isn’t the first graduating class this year?
Brandee: Yeah. So we have had the privilege of partnering with the city of San Francisco over the past 12 years as they decided they had a groundbreaking idea that said: Let’s help every kindergarten student when they enroll in the city of San Francisco public school system. We know that in 12 years, we want these young people to not only graduate high school, but we want them to go to college… and what are all the tools that they need to get there.
And one of the things that the city wanted to do was to create a match savings program to incentivize families to start saving early because we know that the power that a college savings account can have, not just in terms of the actual financial benefit that it can provide, but how it creates a college going mindset.
And you would never probably equate a large global services bank as being in the college going mindset business. But what we wanted to do is work with the city of San Francisco and say, How do we make it easy? And we created something called Citi Start Savings, which allows and enables the schools participating in this effort to enable them to organize and to manage school-based savings programs… and make sure that we have an efficient mechanism for doing this.
So it’s a partnership between the schools, the city of San Francisco, and Citi as a financial institution. And again, we want to be sure that every young person has every single tool that they need, and every parent has the tool that they need to put their child on that path to success. And we think a college savings account is a critical part of that success equation.
Denver: Great. What a wonderful and simple way to get a kindergarten child to think differently about their future! And that is really wonderful. I think the meaningfulness of that in getting young people and families to think that early about that, it does even more than the college piece of it. It’s just a mindset in terms of thinking about one’s future that I think has a lot of external manifestations to it.
Another one of your big initiatives is the Citi Impact Fund. Share that with the listeners.
Brandee: Yeah. So this is our impact investing fund. A few years ago, we began to look at the trends, what was occurring, and said: While we see our nonprofit and NGO partners as social entrepreneurs, there actually are a whole class of social innovators coming up that are in the for-profit space. And how can we continue to support those efforts?
And we used our philanthropy strategically to invest in some nonprofit accelerator programs that we’re working with entrepreneurs. But we kept bumping up against the fact that these entrepreneurs and their businesses, the nature of what they were doing are designed to address a social or environmental challenge, that they just didn’t have the same access to the start-up capital that traditional, larger businesses had.
And so the Impact Fund was designed initially to invest in this new class of social entrepreneurs. And when we designed it, we wanted to be very intentional about making sure that we were seeking out diverse founders who in particular really lacked access to traditional forms of venture capital.
Denver: You have a very fascinating job. Do you realize that?
Brandee: Yeah, I do. I do. And it’s definitely a privilege to do this work, and I think there’s a lot to still learn. And I think that was part of what makes it so interesting is that every day is a new experience and a chance to learn something new.
“We selected food security as our first issue. We selected food security because we used to think about malnutrition, a lack of access to food, as purely a developing country issue. And what we’re increasingly finding is that food insecurity is right here in our own backyards.”
Denver: Well, a relatively new experience for you is the Global Innovation Challenge with a focus on food security. I’m excited by that one. Tell me about it.
Brandee: Yeah. I mean, before we talk about the what, I’d like to actually talk about the how.
Denver: Sure.
Brandee: So fundamentally, the Global Challenge is designed with a specific theme, and that theme will rotate every time we put out another challenge. But what really makes it different, I think for us, is that we’re using an open call for ideas. We’re using an open RFP process.
We wanted to transform the way we think about delivering our philanthropic dollars. And as part of our commitment to equity, we wanted to be more transparent and have a more level playing field. And if we continue to only interact with organizations that we already know or somebody we know knows, we could be missing out on a whole class of new innovators. And so the Global Challenge is an open RFP and a call for ideas.
Now we put that out across the company’s 80-country-plus footprint around the world. There are not many foundations that put out a call for ideas and proposals across that big geographic span. And so we were both excited and terrified at what might happen through this process, but we’re willing to take a chance and to innovate because, again, we felt very strongly that we really wanted to have a more equitable and transparent and fair process.
So we put out this call for ideas. We selected food security as our first issue. We selected food security because we used to think about malnutrition, a lack of access to food, as purely a developing country issue. And what we’re increasingly finding is that food insecurity is right here in our own backyards.
So we’re on the eve of announcing those winners. I can’t quite tell you yet, but stay tuned. Next month, we’ll have completed the full process in announcing our first challenge winners.
Denver: Well, when we do the transcript of this interview, we’ll be sure to have an addendum that will include them so people can check them out.
And I love the open-source approach, too, because it really does come from a place of humility. Many RFPs are written by people who are not experts in a particular field saying, “We know what we’re looking for.”
And when you can have that humility to say, “Well, we’re not even sure what’s out there; come in,” you get some ideas that you would’ve never thought of or included in the guidelines of an RFP. So I think it is really wonderful the way you’ve approached that.
One that you’ve done a little bit longer would be the Summer Jobs Connect initiative–10 years now. What’s that about?
Brandee: Yeah. 10 years ago, we launched an initiative, Pathways to Progress, to connect young people to jobs around the world, an area that we’ve recognized that was really powerful.
When you talk to people and you ask them the question, “What was the first job you had?” It’s amazing how people light up, and what a defining moment that first job is for a young person. And the lessons they learn actually carry with them throughout their entire life. I could tell you for myself, those lessons have absolutely carried with me throughout my life.
So Summer Jobs Connect…
Denver: Oh, what was that first job?
Brandee: What was the first job? For my first job, I actually worked in a family business. It was run by my grandparents, and I have never had a more challenging boss that I have worked for with higher expectations than my grandmother, who taught me everything about: you show up on time, all the things that you need to know about and about really being a good colleague, and being someone that people can count on in the workplace.
So I worked in my family’s business in the summers. And again, I think it was a master class in business success. And both my grandmother and grandfather were not people who went to college. So, again, I really learned the fundamentals there.
Denver: I don’t think your mother would’ve been as successful because there would’ve been a pushback. But there’s something about grandma that can get to us, and you kind of stick… and they usually mean business.
Brandee: Oh, she a hundred percent meant business without a doubt, without a doubt. They didn’t cut me any breaks. I didn’t get any special treatment. But as I said, I learned a lot about building a really strong work ethic. And I also… because they ran a retail store, I also really understood what it meant to be in the customer service business, fundamentally.
And what that, you know, people may say, “Well, how does that translate into being a good grant maker?” And what it did is I like to think that we are in service to our grantees. We need to listen to them and help provide them what they need. We’re not here for them to be in service to us. So that’s something I picked up in my first summer job, and I think it’s influenced my role in philanthropy.
Denver: Oh, interesting. Yeah. you learn to be customer-centric.
Brandee: Yeah, very customer-centric. So first job is incredibly important. Summer Jobs Connect for 10 years, we’ve been working with a network of cities around the country, funding summer job slots so they can have their first employment experiences.
But what’s really unique about it is we’ve also integrated financial education. First job, first paycheck, hopefully first bank account, and help young people. …when it’s real to them, they have real money. They can actually take financial literacy concepts and apply them in real life.
Denver: That’s great. I think even sometimes when it comes to purpose, I know some people are trying to get purpose into schools early on. You can’t get a lot of these things in your 20s. You really have to get them in your teens, if not before, and they will be like they were with you– just lifelong lessons that you carry with you.
How does Citi measure its impact of all this? Are there a particular set of metrics you look at? I know how difficult and challenging measuring impact is, but how do you think about it? How do you approach it?
Brandee: Yeah, so I think impact is incredibly important, and for many of us in this space, we get really caught up in the outputs and the outcomes. So I like to think about the ‘I’ in impact a little bit differently and think about it as innovation and influence. Are we actually directing our dollars towards innovators so that they have the flexible support that they need to test new ways of addressing longstanding social challenges?
And are we also using our resources to support influence, raising up what works and why? Bringing stakeholders together to have a dialogue about the issues and the solutions. And then even using our own voice and our own platform to share and help influence and bring others to the table.
So for us, impact is synonymous with innovation and influence. And this may sound like a very rebellious idea, but after spending many, many years on a deep impact measurement system in the foundation, I stepped back and said, I think we are at risk of potentially being accused of torturing our grantees through data.
Denver: Yeah.
Brandee: And so what would happen if we stopped using data to try to make ourselves feel better? Had we made the right choice? And instead said, “Philanthropy should be about funding the marketplace of ideas, and that’s what we really… and how are we doing in that space? Are we taking enough chances, and are we really helping to cultivate that marketplace of ideas?”
Denver: Yeah. It brings to it, I think, a much longer-term horizon. And I think that people in the nonprofit sector are very critical of Wall Street and quarterly profits and how much they’ve done and just working for the next immediate thing for the shareholders. And then that’s pretty much… we sometimes do the same thing.
We want to fix hunger. So how many meals did you serve the last quarter? Well, that’s not going to fix hunger. It’s not going to solve it. So having that sense of really the trends of where this is going and with a much longer horizon is really a much more nuanced and intelligent way to look at impact.
Brandee: Yeah. And I think with the world that we live in today where there is so much divisiveness and the politicization of all of these issues, I think that it’s really important that we are also, when we think about our impact, finding ways to be bridge builders. And that we’re using our resources and our platforms, again, to get also out of our echo chamber.
Not only work with like-minded entities, but begin to find ways to pull stakeholders together to see: Can we find some common ground? And at the end of my career, if what… I did a look back and said, “Boy, I hope to be seen as that bridge builder.” To me, I think that’s an incredibly important form of impact.
“I think the vision I’d love to see us have is that collaboration is about thinking about the sum being greater than the parts. Not only making one part. And that’s where it tends to really fall down. So doesn’t mean we don’t ever co-fund. We’d love to co-invest, co-fund with others. But having worked on large national demonstrations that are really, truly funder collaboratives, I think we’ve spent a lot of time and money on the funder dynamics and not actually on the work.”
Denver: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s the thing that people are going to remember. They’re not going to remember some discrete program and what they did over the next six months, so they got a new grant. I mean, that’s so ephemeral.
Talk a little bit about being a bridge builder and collaboration. Are you seeing more collaboration in the sector, particularly among funders and trying to address some of these vexing, intractable issues and really begin to address them in a much bigger way?
Brandee: Yeah. So I think that nothing breeds more sort of fear and anxiety into the heart of a great grant maker than getting an invitation to be part of a funder’s collaborative. Now, I say this having just come off being the board chair of Living Cities, which is a collaborative of some of the largest private corporate foundations here in the U.S. working on creating economic opportunity and addressing the racial wealth gaps.
So I’ve lived in this space for a long time. Funder collaboratives are really, really challenging because it would almost be like going into the private sector and saying, “Instead of us all having our own individual products and services, let’s just all agree that there’s going to be one brand of cereal, and we’re all just going to do the same thing and produce that one brand of cereal.”
And it’s just not that simple. And so I’ve tended to start to shift and to not think about collaboration as we’re all going to put our money into the same thing. But let’s start to collaborate in a much more transparent and open way and share: What are we doing at the Citi Foundation? But what are others doing? What is Rockefeller doing? What is Ford doing? What are the other banks doing?
And you begin to… I think the vision I’d love to see us have is that collaboration is about thinking about the sum being greater than the parts. Not only making one part. And that’s where it tends to really fall down. So doesn’t mean we don’t ever co-fund. We’d love to co-invest, co-fund with others.
But having worked on large national demonstrations that are really, truly funder collaboratives, I think we’ve spent a lot of time and money on the funder dynamics and not actually on the work.
Denver: Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Also, you’re down to a single bet, so you better be right with that bet. And if that bet’s wrong, you’re nowhere. So this idea of just having a lot of pots boiling and finding which ones are working the best or boiling the best, and then sharing that with others that they can adapt it with their own twist is probably going to lead to a more productive outcome.
Brandee: Yeah, and I also would just say that in this spirit of grant maker humility, I do think it’s important for us to bring our grantees together because, again, grant maker, if I were smarter, I would be a practitioner. I don’t have original ideas. Any original idea I have, I’ve probably subconsciously stolen from a grantee, something that I heard from them.
So let’s bring them together and not just to assume… it’s like just to learn for the sake of learning. I do think that we should think about collaboration. I’d love to see us using those resources to bring others around the table to create a collective voice.
Because I do think in this moment of so much angst and again, the divisiveness, having us… we may have different tactics. But if we have the same North Star, let’s collaborate together to have a collective voice so we’re all focusing and getting closer to that North Star in our own unique way.
Denver: Yep. Yeah. So the collaboration is where we want to go, not necessarily how we’re going to get there.
Brandee: Yes.
Denver: Mm-hmm. You’ve had a very interesting journey to your current position, starting as an intern in 1991. Share it with listeners.
Brandee: First of all, I can’t believe that I’ve had this great career for so long because I think at the heart of what I would share is that it’s been a reinvention. Someone may say, “Oh, you’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years,” and what I say is, “No, if you’re working in the social change space for this long, over so many decades, you have to be someone who’s versatile.”
And what that’s meant is that I’ve had different types of roles. I started in philanthropy, in corporate philanthropy. I then went into the… on the bank’s lending and financing side, focusing on affordable housing, took what I knew from philanthropy, and went in to say, How do we direct more capital to these issues?
I then left the private sector. I went over to the Ford Foundation. And the interesting thing about my work at Ford was that was all about: How do we influence the private sector to better serve low-income households and communities? So it was a kind of a reverse flip of what I had been doing.
And then I had the chance to come back to Citi at a time when we were really… it was during the financial crisis. And we really had recognized that if we were going to come out of this and be a successful company, right after the financial crisis and really towards the tail end, the company celebrated its 200th anniversary, we said, What is it going to take to be around for another 200 years?
And there was a recognition that we’ve got to begin to see how we support economic and social progress. And so my career shifted a little bit to the resources I had a chance to direct through our philanthropy and community investing, and innovating and creating the Impact Fund, but also really looking across the company and saying: How do we think about the way we go all in as an institution and not just in this one vertical?
“So the first thing I advise young people is to not think about: What job can I get that’s going to allow me to think about having a positive social or environmental impact? Think about what you do day in and day out in your current role, and how does that make a difference. How do you help the institution that you’re in currently? Think about these things.”
Denver: I have an observation that I find across the board, is that the longer time horizon an individual has, or a company has, the more successful they are. And so many of us think of a year or two years, but I talk to people all the time, or 10 or 25 years, and that’s the way they think, and it just changes the way they approach so many different things.
Well, we have a lot of people who listen to this show who are young. I looked at the demographic the other day, late 20s, early 30s, really want to make an impact in this field. What advice would you have for a newcomer or a relative newcomer who wants to get into the ESG, CSR philanthropic space?
Brandee: Yeah. These roles… so first of all, I think it’s a really interesting time to be interested in this work. So I would encourage individuals to look in this space. I mean, I think back about when I started 30 years ago… these were needle-in-a-haystack jobs.
Denver: Yeah.
Brandee: There were no career paths. There were no degrees in this space. You couldn’t get a degree in sustainability or in… even you couldn’t get a degree in community development when I started. I mean, maybe urban planning a little bit. So there’s been a real professionalization.
So I think if you really want to go into this, well, and let me say one other thing, there’s been an integration, professionalization and integration. So if you are in business school right now, you are likely taking courses on this topic, even though it may not be something that you specialize in.
So, the first thing I advise young people is to not think about: What job can I get that’s going to allow me to think about having a positive social or environmental impact? Think about what you do day in and day out in your current role, and how does that make a difference. How do you help the institution that you’re in currently think about these things?
And it’s not about starting something new, but even sometimes it’s a recognition and a mindset shift. We have lots of people who work across the city on the business side, and what I say is: We like to think about the work that we do in the community investing function as a primary way we drive societal good, but it’s not.
It’s a very small way. It’s what we do day in and day out throughout the company. So, one is, think about who you are today, how you add value. Two, you probably have had some introduction to this work. But the best way to go out if you don’t feel like you’ve had that professionalization path is volunteer; get involved in your community.
And don’t just volunteer on doing; carve out time in your life for the deepening your understanding about these challenges, and again, being part of a productive dialogue on these topics. I think there is… if you want to be part of the solution, please be part of eliminating the polarization that we see.
Denver: Yeah. Yeah.
Brandee: And then practically, if you really want to get a job in this space, go for it. Apply, apply, apply, apply.
Denver: Well, I love your mindset shift because I think a lot of people, in their jobs, they just check off activities that they’re doing. And I think it leads to a lot of ennui and boredom. But when you begin to think about what it leads to and how it fits into a larger whole, it actually can make your everyday world much more exciting than it currently is and lead to other things.
Finally, Brandee, what’s got you really excited right now? You’re doing so many different things, but if you look at the next five or 10 years, or next months for that matter, what really has got you going that keeps you up at night? Not because you’re worried about it, but just because you’re so excited over it.
Brandee: Yeah, yeah. Well, sometimes worry and excitement in my… the way that feels to me physically, the physicality of those two things, feel very similar. So sometimes it’s hard for me to differentiate between the two.
But one, I would say, I worked for many, many years to get issues of racial equity, wealth inequality on the radar and in the general discourse, and I’m both optimistic about how these issues are now front and center, but I’m also very nervous and uncomfortable, again, at how divisive this has all become.
So I’m excited about the fact that we no longer have to sort of create a spotlight; the spotlight’s on us. So this is our moment. If you’re working in any kind of social impact space, whether it’s philanthropy, the public sector, working in government, or in the private sector thinking about market-based solutions, there is a real hunger and desire for entities to come together and to do things differently.
And so what I’m excited about is that energy. And what I hope is that there’s a real willingness to continue to innovate, to not worry. I think the only failure in this space that we can have is the failure of inertia and the failure of continuing to be so divisive.
Denver: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s also true that when a moment comes, it may not last forever, so there really has to be some urgency to seize the moment. Because we think it will, but just… you got to grab it while it’s there and build upon it.
For listeners interested in learning about the foundation and all that social impact work we’ve talked about, tell us a little bit about your website, Where do they need to go… and the kind of information they’ll find there.
Brandee: Yeah, terrific. So you can certainly find quite a bit on citifoundation.com I would be remiss if I didn’t say, I think it’s obvious, but in the social media-driven world that we live in today, we have lots of real-time information that comes out.
So please, follow me on LinkedIn, on, I think we now call Twitter:X. But the real…
Denver: It is.
Brandee: Yeah. But the other place is please follow citi.com because again, big shift is seeing that I don’t lead the social impact work for Citi. It is built into the leadership ethos of our company, and we have shared ownership of this.
So follow the company to see the broad range of ways that we are working to deploy resources in new ways, test new ideas, and really back the institutions that are the important change agents and solutionists of our day.
Denver: Cool. You don’t look at yourself as a leader as much as a master facilitator.
Brandee: Yes.
Denver: Well, thanks so much for being here today, Brandee. It was just wonderful to have you back on the program.
Brandee: Thank you, I appreciate it. Look forward to talking again soon.
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Trusted Advisor and Executive Coach to Nonprofit Leaders. His Book, The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.