Craig Howard is the Director of Community and Economic Development for U.S. Programs, with responsibility for grantmaking in neighborhood revitalization and public housing transformation.

Howard has more than 25 years of nonprofit experience, most of it in workforce and community economic development, designing and implementing replicable programs that create jobs and opportunities for disadvantaged people here and abroad. In 1999, he was recruited to be vice president and subsequently, co-director, of the Low Wage Worker and Communities unit of MDRC, a national program design, management and evaluation organization, where he managed and guided the research and evaluation of MacArthur’s New Communities Program, and directed the Jobs-Plus Demonstration for Public Housing Residents and the Neighborhood Jobs Initiative teams. Howard also was project director for California Works for Better Health, a joint project of the California Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Prior to joining MDRC, Howard was senior program director for the James Irvine Foundation in San Francisco; before that. he was a planner with the National Economic Development and Law Center and a program officer at the Ford Foundation, first in the Office for Eastern and Southern Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, and later in the Urban Poverty Program in the Foundation’s New York office.

Howard serves on the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Advisory Committee and on the Executive Committee of the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change. He holds a BA, magna cum laude, in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, and Masters degrees in Public Health and in International Affairs from Columbia University.