| Work address
48 West 105 Street
New York, NY 10025
http://www.grandrew.com
Work: 212 - 866-6813
andrew.h.french@gmail.com
Probably more than anything, I’m a New Yorker. I grew up in Ohio, but always knew I would come to New York. Finally, I did, in 1969, summer of Woodstock. I like it; I think I’ll stay.
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I’ve done a lot of things in New York: driven a cab and a truck, built boats, worked behind the counter in a deli owned by concentration camp survivors, run a store-front “anti-gang” youth center, gone to graduate school (New School for Social Research), coached baseball, basketball and football, and managed structured after school programs for immigrant kids -- 700 kids a day from 56 different countries at four different sites in Queens..
I also spent twenty-three years in City government -- nine with Parks, mainly in Central Park, nine providing housing, mostly to formerly homeless families, and six with the New York City Finance Department trying to ensure local taxes are fair and that we can collect them. I liked working in the public arena in New York City; I think I’ll keep doing it.
The thread here is that I’m a child of the 1960’s who came to New York to try to make a difference in the world, starting here. My theory was that the one way I could reconcile my ‘60’s ideals was to make New York work so well that more people would want to come here, and we’d stop suburbanizing the rest of the country and isolating diversity. (Be careful what you wish for. Nowadays, it’s getting pretty difficult for anyone to find an apartment here.)
I first leaned about PSG when I heard David Osborne hump The Price of Government at a Governing Magazine conference in Austin, Texas. A month or so later I sent them a request for proposals that I’d just finished for some performance management consulting for the agency where I was working at the time, and PSG won the contract. Together, we entered into a partnership to transform how my now former agency does business, using PSG’s 5-C’s.
When I’m not having fun at work -- and I pretty much always have fun at work, or I move on -- I love to spend time with my wife, Kate; 20-something son, Henry; stepchildren, Chris and Anne, and their spouses, Pat and Erik, and my two grandsons, Charley and Rafael, both 3 and cousins, as different as night and day but both miraculous and joyful, and 1-year-old Sadie.
I am also fanatical about baseball and about flyfishing, and regularly travel all around the US and the Caribbean in search of baseball fields I’ve not seen before and fish dumb enough to fall for my extremely limited bag of tricks. I hope to keep doing these things, too.
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