Leadership in Action: Creating Access and Opportunity

Throughout his career, Adam has helped diverse talent find a path into commercial real estate and empowered them to thrive once they do. This is no surprise for the devoted father who recharges through time with his son, a rising future developer! Now, as the Chief Operating Officer of Trammell Crow Company (TCC), Adam can multiply his impact for diverse individuals through direct investments in communities.

Serving as the Executive Sponsor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) and Sustainability initiatives, Adam is building on TCC’s long history of community investment led by a 22-member and growing DE&I steering committee. In 2021, TCC launched a new program called the Impact Project, designed to increase investments in diverse communities in each of the company’s U.S. markets.

“The focus for the first year of this program is investments made to support racial equity,” Adam shares. “The Impact Project is a great example of how incremental change, when applied consistently and effectively across a broad landscape and over a long period of time, can have tremendous power.” Each market will make minimum, annual investments of $25,000 -$75,000, scaling to nearly $1 million combined across the country.

Adam developed the vision for this program so it could be implemented across the entire firm, and that meant striking a balance between a consistent approach and securing the buy-in at the local level. “It is a real challenge to create a policy that is firm enough to ensure 100% participation, but flexible enough to fit each office and local market,” Adam says. “It was important that we empower each of our local teams to have the autonomy necessary to make the investment decisions that match with their local context.”

TCC is already seeing widespread adoption and a significant level of excitement across the company, making Adam and other leaders confident they will quickly exceed the minimum investment threshold in many markets.