Marion Mollegen McFadden is longtime champion of safe, welcoming communities and play for all kids. While working at City Year/AmeriCorps in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Marion organized a community-led playground build with Darell Hammond (who later went on to create KABOOM!).
Currently Marion serves as Vice President of Disaster Recovery at IEM, leading a team of several hundred employees supporting states, local governments, and Puerto Rico as they harness federal funds for long-term disaster recovery. She brings technical knowledge of federal funds and supporting resilience from her career’s greatest passion: improving the way the nation supports communities after they are brought to their knees by the worst disasters.
In her most recent position, Marion served as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) principal deputy assistant secretary for community planning and development, where she led a nationwide process to solicit feedback from disaster-impacted communities, resulting in dozens of changes to HUD’s disaster grant program (CDBG-DR). She updated energy regulations to reduce carbon emissions by the same amount as taking more than 45,000 cars off the road annually – saving households an average of $80 per month on utility bills.
Marion has been called by both Democrats and Republicans to testify to the U.S. Congress about disaster recovery six times. While at Enterprise Community Partners, she led the nation’s largest affordable housing policy team and supervised updates to green building criteria for affordable housing. She formerly served on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Disaster Recovery Task Force. Her publications include Stronger, Safer, a federal platform policy sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and adopted by two dozen mayors, and a chapter in What’s Possible: Investing Now for Prosperous, Sustainable Neighborhoods, issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of NY.
Marion has received awards from Rebuild by Design/NYU Institute for Public Knowledge, the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation, Comcast NBCUniversal, challenge,gov, the Administrative Conference of the United States, and two HUD Secretaries. She was a finalist for a Service to America Medal and was profiled in the Washington Post for her leadership of the federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force.
She holds a J.D. magna cum laude from Howard University School of Law and a B.A. from Northwestern University.