Andrea Batista Schlesinger

Managing Partner

For over 25 years, Andrea has designed and implemented initiatives for non-profits, governments, and think tanks that make cities better, fairer places.

From her time as a young student member of New York City’s school board to her experiences as a queer daughter of an immigrant, Andrea deeply understands how the systems that shape policy are often disconnected from the people they are supposed to serve. Andrea’s work acknowledges that conventional approaches to economic development, public policy, public service delivery, and urban planning have created or worsened existing inequities in our society. She is a tireless defender of basic universal rights and leads initiatives with non-profits, local governments, and community organizations to confront the status quo and lead systemic change to benefit historically marginalized and disenfranchised people.

Andrea is a leader in HR&A’s Equity in Governance Practice, which has helped to shape how local government engages and serves over 11 million people — from New York City to Oakland to Allegheny County, PA to Miami-Dade, FL to Harris County, TX. With this work, Andrea designs and executes transitions for newly elected leaders to seize the transition period as an opportunity to clarify how they will translate campaign promises into action, generate policies grounded in the reality of people’s lives, express their values through their first budget, and attract talent to get things done. Andrea supports new City and County executive leaders who represent a “first” for their office, including the first woman County Executive of Allegheny County and the first Hmong American and the first formerly homeless Mayor of Oakland. Her proven ability to translate their campaign promises into tangible reforms has been enshrined in a playbook prepared for Local Progress, a movement of elected municipal officials who activate the powers of local government to advance racial equity and economic justice.

Andrea was instrumental in the formation of La Liga, an organization that equipped Puerto Rican mayors with unprecedented communication channels in the wake of Hurricane Maria. La Liga is emblematic of Andrea’s impact — it presented a first-of-its-kind, community-focused, collaborative vehicle for Puerto Rico to address fiscal, economic, rebuilding challenges and to gain deserved visibility and support from the U.S. mainland.

Andrea consistently drives deep systems change within cities to confront the dangers faced by marginalized people within our nation’s food security, criminal justice, mental health, public safety, and housing systems. She works with a broad array of stakeholders to understand the historical challenges they’ve faced and to co-design strategies for action and policy change. Her projects range from micro to macro scale — from working with a neighborhood to imagine their future to building new systems for large cities to understanding how the policies and funding regimes established by federal government have created and reinforced racial divides. This approach is exemplified through her leadership in Gainesville, Florida, where her team performed focused research to identify and address areas of the City’s Comprehensive Plan that failed to combat the increases in racial inequity. Similarly, her leadership and execution of a race equity audit for the City of Beverly, MA, which holistically evaluated policies, practices, and cultures of the city, led to a governance framework that provided a much-needed foundation for the City to build towards racial equity.

Andrea’s work consistently challenges traditional economic development approaches to place equity at the heart of progressive change. Her work with the City of Dallas — a city that prioritized communities of color for the first time ever in 2021 — led to an unanimously approved equitable Economic Development Policy and Incentive Policy. In Los Angeles County, Andrea worked to center racial equity and inclusion in the outcome of its regional plan and its internal operations. She also led work on the Gwinnett Place Mall in Georgia, which transformed a conversation around an aging mall into one of opportunity that placed equity foremost in its redevelopment planning, especially when considering anti-displacement and regional inclusion of its diverse surrounding communities.

In her justice reform work, Andrea interrogates existing criminal justice system structures and works with multi-stakeholder groups including formerly incarcerated people, activists, municipalities, and more to design strategies that promote human dignity and more equitable outcomes. In one such project, she is advising the City of Philadelphia in its efforts to reform its parole system to reduce incarcerated populations and envision supportive diversion strategies for the recently incarcerated through the formation of “community resource centers” (CRCs). With city partners, Andrea and the HR&A team conceptualized the holistic strategy for these centers including wraparound care, operations, governance, and financial sustainability.

After working with cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and others on public banking initiatives, there is a growing interest in Andrea’s work around public banking. Andrea partners with leaders and policy innovators across the United States who are exploring the potential of municipal public banking to help cities take bold steps towards addressing banking inequities and associated challenges like racial wealth gaps, poverty, and disparities in local economic development. Andrea has lead studies and initiatives that help clients: understand the impact of significant policy initiatives at the state and local level, quantify the financial feasibility and economic impact of public banking institutions, and work with public, private, and community stakeholders to design and execute tailored plans that address each city’s unique needs. Notably, the State of California recently passed legislation (California Public Banking Option Act AB-1177) to explore a banking option grounded by support and analysis performed by Andrea’s team.

Andrea joined HR&A after serving as Deputy Director for the United States Program of Open Society Foundations, where she oversaw program operations and grant-making portfolios. She also served as Special Advisor to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, where she focused on reducing disparities facing young African American and Latino men and spent 10 years running the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. She holds a Master’s Degree in History from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Death of ‘Why?’: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy.