Urban Habitat Welcomes Allen Fernandez Smith as President & CEO
On May 2, 2011, after a national recruitment process, Allen Fernandez Smith joined Urban Habitat as President & CEO. Allen succeeds departing Executive Director Juliet Ellis. As a Chicago native, Fernandez Smith grew up with family split between Chicago's South Side and its white suburbs, giving him an early, firsthand look at inequality and the systematic exclusion of low-income families and communities of color from economic and political opportunities. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, he studied with leading voices in Black politics and through them, he "began to understand how public policy can be life-altering for our communities and can lead to lasting, systemic change."Fernandez Smith worked most recently as the Executive Director of the California School-Age Consortium (CalSAC), a statewide, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the professional development of youth workers across California through high-quality trainings, policymaking, and advocacy. As President of the Board of Directors and then as Executive Director, he led the organization in developing and implementing a multi-year strategic plan that culminated in a realignment of CalSAC's mission, vision and staffing.
Prior to his tenure at CalSAC, Fernandez Smith served as a Senior Community Development Specialist in the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Community Development. He worked closely with major city agencies, local community leaders, and small business owners to revamp neighborhood economic strategy programs in distressed commercial corridors.
Fernandez Smith also worked at the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. There he managed the first-ever citywide initiative to improve San Francisco's after-school programs, bringing multiple stakeholders together in a comprehensive system to serve youth from all parts of the city.
His first professional experience was as an education coordinator for middle- and high-school students in Boston's low-income Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods. This early work laid the foundation for Fernandez Smith's belief in empowering communities and cultivating authentic voices and experiences as a sustainable means for change.
"Being able to deal with disparate environments has shaped the value system of my life," Fernandez Smith says. "I enjoyed spending time with youth in Roxbury and Dorchester, just as much as I enjoy engaging lawmakers and politicians. It is important to encourage everyone's unique contribution to progress and it is with this value that I approach all community work."
Fernandez Smith graduated from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Illinois and was a graduate fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. In 2011, he was named to The Root 100 national list of African-American leaders under 45 years old.
He now lives in Oakland, California with his wife, Kay Fernandez Smith, Deputy Director at PolicyLink, and their children, Malcolm and Malaya.
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