Senior Consultant - Real Estate & Development Advisory

In her role as a real estate and development advisor with Gro, Kendra Stensven provides input on mixed-use buildings and connecting YMCAs with development partners. She works with clients to understand their site’s potential through a review of zoning, land use, topography, geopolitical attributes, and capital markets dynamics. 

It’s hard to imagine someone with more stellar credentials for this work. For her undergraduate degree (University of Wisconsin, Madison), she studied real estate and urban land economics. “I got to take cool city classes like ‘Geography: Intro to the City,’ urban politics, housing economics, and transportation economics – and saw how everything was interconnected when it came to design, finance, planning, and policy.”

She didn’t stop there. She also earned a master’s degree in real estate development at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Her focus there was historic preservation as a sustainable development method.

Much of what Stensven is able to accomplish comes from two decades of experience. Not just from her work in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors (“I think there’s more to learn from each other than one might think,” she remarks), but from literature she ingests and what she does in her spare time.

“I listened to the audiobook of ‘The Bill of Obligations’ by Richard Haass,” she says. “It spoke to me in many ways and gives me hope for civility in our demography. It provides a lot of guidance on how we can be strong in our local communities, choosing to be informed, being open to compromise, remaining civil, and promoting the common good. I want to model these for my children.”

Community volunteering is a value and avocation to her as well. “’Acts of Service is one of my love languages,’” she says, a reference to the 1992 bestseller, ‘The Five Love Languages,’ by Gary Chapman, PhD. Her other interests: connecting people, plant-based nutrition – and Excel pro forma spreadsheets.