Prior to moving to South Carolina, Fran spent a decade working at Self-Help, a nationally known community-development financial institution, headquartered in Durham, North Carolina.  While at Self-Help, Fran led a real estate development team tasked with developing affordable housing for homeownership, and with carrying out commercial adaptive reuse projects.  Consisting primarily of long-abandoned downtown bank headquarters, these eyesore buildings across North Carolina were converted into productive multi-tenant small business and nonprofit centers, often utilizing historic tax credit investments and other creative financing, and remained under Self-Help’s management post-renovation.

Fran was more recently a member of the start-up Board of Directors for Spartanburg’s Hub City Cooperative, South Carolina’s first retail grocery co-op. She prepared multiple successful loan applications, worked with community members to raise equity investments, and wrote several grant applications for the Co-op’s initial financing.

She earned a Master’s of Regional Planning and MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Sociology.