Alumni Profile

 

Recy Benjamin Dunn recalls sitting at his desk as a market analyst at Amoco Energy Trading Corporation in Houston, pondering his life. “I knew I had the ability to do more—to work on getting equality and access for people like me,” says Dunn.

 

After earning a Stanford M.B.A., Dunn worked for several years and then became a Broad Resident in the District of Columbia Public Schools, where his plan was to take the skills he mastered in the private sector and apply them to a public school district where poor and minority students would be the direct beneficiaries.

 

Dunn was antsy to bring creative thinking and new ideas to the school district, which had a steadily declining enrollment. He realized that the exodus of students and empty schools meant the district’s valuable real estate was underutilized. 

 

“Districts aren’t typically thinking of doing deals or property valuations,” he says.

 

But Dunn was.

 

He brokered a deal allowing a local housing authority to redevelop schools being closed by the district. The district would use the cash from the real estate sale to meet other critical needs. The genius of the deal? The new housing development would bring in families, who would ultimately need a new school. And the deal required the housing authority to eventually help the district build that new school.

 

In less than two years, Dunn was able to apply his finance background to bring a host of these “out of the box” solutions to the district. “Knowing I was part of a team that was going to affect children—kids who literally have ceilings falling on them would get a new school—that was what drove me,” he says.

 

Today, Dunn continues to leverage new approaches as the executive director of office of early childhood education in the New York City Department of Education, which serves more than 55,000 children in universal prekindergarten.

 

Dunn says he often hears his corporate sector friends say how “cool and noble” his work is, something they plan on doing after they “make their millions.”

 

“Why not now?” says Dunn. “There is so much work to be done—so much we can actually do today.”