Terri Ludwig
www.arnoldadler.com
President & CEO, Enterprise Community Partners
Terri Ludwig has spent most of her career trying to bring Wall Street to Main Street, as she likes to say.
Starting out in global investments at Merrill Lynch, Ludwig went back to school at Harvard, seeking to bring more social and financial capital to communities and investors. And at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit provider of development capital for affordable housing and community rebuilding, she’s found exactly that.
“Our commitment is making sure that every person in our country has a place to call home in a safe, affordable, and vibrant community,” says Ludwig, who says her firm expects to deliver $3 billion to $4 billion in capital this year.
One of the largest efforts Ludwig heads is Enterprise’s commitment to serving one million families by 2020 as a down payment on its commitment to end homelessness and home insecurity.
Ludwig spends a lot of her time trying to reach out to a new audience of investors by writing articles for The Huffington Post and LinkedIn. It’s about getting more people, particularly millennials, to see that an investment in the community is an investment in the future—a “pay it forward” mentality.
A diversity of viewpoints is Ludwig’s key to making a large task manageable. By including different perspectives from various backgrounds of age, race, or position, Ludwig finds the outcomes are more creative and inspired.
“We do believe it’s solvable, but it won’t be done overnight,” she says.
