Was your social consciousness this developed when you came to New York as a young lawyer?

It was not so much top of mind. To be clear, I wanted to make sure I had some financial security. One of the things about growing up poor is that you never want to be poor again, and to have clarity on that is good. For me, it was always about working in a profession that allowed me to have some semblance of financial security. There was nothing romantic about it. But when you work on Wall Street, you realize a lot of people are passionate about piling up money. To really do that, you have to actually have a passion for it, and I don’t.

When did you realize that?

What happened is that in 1991, I was walking past the reception area on the trading floor at UBS, and there was a copy of The Economist sitting on the table with the headline “America’s Wasted Blacks.” It was just such a provocative headline, and this was right around the time that I met Calvin Butts at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and he was starting this new development organization in Harlem.

I had some money, and I realized I wanted to work in Harlem. So I took a year to figure out what I was going to do. And eventually I was hired as chief operating officer at the Abyssinian Development Corporation. What got me excited was, “Oh my gosh, I can really add value to this idea of revitalizing Harlem, because I actually know something about financing projects.”

What was the transition from Abyssinian to Rockefeller like?

At Abyssinian we worked with a sense of urgency. Every day, more often than not, I was the first person to arrive in the office, and there were people lined up wanting to get into Head Start, looking for housing, looking for jobs. Every day you have to be accountable to those people in that line. When I went to Rockefeller, there was a more, I would say, deliberative approach to everything. Some of it felt academic.