Senior Consultant - Real Estate Development Advisory & Capital Formation (CapForm)

Danny Forrester has all the cred to be a great builder and planner. He has an undergraduate degree (Pitzer College) in Sustainability and the Built Environment, a master’s (Tulane University) in Sustainable Real Estate Development, plus he worked for seven years on drought tolerant landscapes in Los Angeles and spent a year in nonprofit historic preservation and main street economic development.

Building and planning are never far from his eye. But what he’s particularly talented at is getting all such things funded. Because if there isn’t money, there isn’t a project.

“My education in New Orleans [at Tulane] was centered around nonprofit development strategies,” he says. “Think major tax credit and grant programs.” He also studied green building systems, sustainable urban planning, real estate finance, and related legal issues. His capstone project at Tulane was prescient: he created a subsidy toolkit for an upstate New York nonprofit that inventoried available funding sources and identified strategies to find additional funding.

That’s largely what he does today for Gro clients., He guides staff and board leadership in the early stages of capital projects when they are tasked with finding essential resources. Philanthropy covers some of it, but municipal, state, and private sources – and non-profit partnerships, such as co-location social impact hubs – can go a long way toward making great ideas become great facilities, sometimes debt-free. 

Forrester’s passion for achieving these outcomes, for YMCAs and similar organizations, is grounded in the social equity part of the triple-bottom-line. It’s what he studied, it’s what he does, and it’s what passionately wants to see happen.

“The work we do at Gro in support of Ys and other non-profits reaches so many people in meaningful, impactful ways that foster a healthier society across the board,” he says. It’s consistent with his life goals, which are to transition the world to a place of climate resilience – for people from all walks of life – by fostering innovation and creativity in public finance. One such project in development that illustrates this is the Ocean Community YMCA in Westerly, Rhode Island. It will combine several non-profits into a single facility, paid for by public, corporate, and philanthropic organizations.

He and his wife Tess live in Los Angeles where he keeps his hands in the dirt. “I grow some pretty mean fruits and veggies, if I do say so myself,” he says.