Clay Akiwenzie has a bachelor's degree in religious studies from Stanford University and a Berkeley MBA. Before coming to Haas, he was the youth services director at the Native American Health Center in Oakland, California. At Haas, he acquired new skills to complement his background in the nonprofit sector.

A nonprofit focus

Before going to Haas, I'd worked at a few nonprofit organizations and I'd done strategic planning work. Haas exposed me to a variety of new concepts and ideas.

Low-income housing contacts

While at Haas, my team was a runner-up in the Bank of America Low Income Housing Challenge. Three of us from Haas, two graduate students in city planning and one in architecture worked together to develop a proposal for the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center in San Francisco that featured a 50-unit affordable housing development with both community and retail space on the ground floor.

During the competition, we worked with many of the major players in the low-income housing industry in the Bay Area. In fact, my internship with a local affordable housing developer came about as a direct result. With my MBA, I landed a job as a Relationship Manager for the Community Lending Division, making construction and permanent loans to affordable housing developers in California, Utah, and Nevada.

After working in Wells Fargo's affordable housing finance group for three years, I now cover the western United States for Wells Fargo's Multifamily Capital division, where I originate permanent financing for both affordable and market rate multifamily properties.  I started working in the newly created Multifamily Capital group in April of 2006 as their first West Coast hire. The experience and contacts I developed at Haas have been instrumental to me as I have worked to build the Multifamily Capital brand within the Wells Fargo footprint.