Michael Swack is a professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has appointments at the Carsey School of Public Policy and at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics. He founded the Center for Impact Finance in 2013 and served as director through 2023. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Center. He also started the Master’s Program in Community Development at UNH, a program designed for adult practitioners. He continues to teach in that program. At Carsey, he works on building scale in the community development finance sector, innovations in community development finance, microfinance, and equitable clean energy financing. He also directs the Financial Innovations Roundtable, an annual convening hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank. He has over forty years of experience in the fields of economic development, finance, and development banking.
Michael was the founder and former dean of the School of Community Economic Development (CED) at Southern New Hampshire University. He has been involved in the design, implementation, and management of a number community development lending and investment institutions both inside and outside the United States. He was the first chairman and served for seventeen years as a board member of the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority (CDFA), a state-chartered equity fund for community economic development ventures and projects. He is the founding president and a current board member of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund. He was a founding board member of the National Association of Community Development Loan Funds (now the Opportunity Finance Network), a trade association of Community Development Finance Institutions. Internationally, he has been involved in development finance and microfinance work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In 2019, the Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) awarded Michael the 2019 Ned Gramlich Lifetime Achievement Award for Responsible Finance—the community development finance institution (CDFI) industry’s highest individual honor. In 2021, Michael was appointed by President Biden to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Advisory Board.
Michael has published in the areas of economic development and development finance. He received his doctorate degree from Columbia University, his master’s degree from Harvard University, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
