NEW YORK — Chelsea Clinton says she left her career on Wall Street three years ago to find more purpose.
“Intellectually, I loved my job, but I didn’t get any meaning from it,” says Clinton, 32, who worked from 2006 to 2009 as an associate at Avenue Capital Group LLC, a New York-based hedge fund firm. “I didn’t fundamentally become re-motivated every day in the way that I do now.”
Clinton has since earned a Master’s degree in public health from Columbia University, where she teaches a course in cross-national health policy, and is working on a Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University. She’s on the boards of IAC/Interactive Corp, the School of the American Ballet and Weill Cornell Medical College, and is a special correspondent for Comcast Corp.’s NBC television network.
She spoke about her Wall Street job in an interview at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting last week, fresh from a discussion about the future of Haiti.
She still appreciates the finance business, she says. Her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, is the co-founder of the hedge fund Eaglevale Partners LP. Clinton says she believes in the industry’s ability to improve the lot of the world’s poorest citizens, by investing in their enterprises.
“They need people like those on Wall Street, who will be dispassionate about it and who will be gender-blind,” Clinton says. Increasingly, “the development world is moving toward an investment mindset.”
Financial institutions can help push it in that direction, she says. “The people I know on Wall Street are engaged and interested in our city and our country. I hope that people will just look out their proverbial back door.”
At the three-day CGI conference, Clinton joined her father, former President Bill Clinton, in cajoling bankers, executives, philanthropists and non-profit leaders to commit time and money to global quandaries, such as human trafficking, land rights for women and sustainable farming in Africa.
She watched her mother, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, talk about Libya. She hosted her own panel, called Optimism in the 21st Century, steering discussion among a teenaged cancer researcher, the president of the Ford Foundation and the finance minister of Nigeria.
“One of the things that CGI, as a platform, aims to do is to bring people together so at least conversations are happening in the same room and, hopefully over time, in the same language,” she says. “Academic-ese, Wall Street-ese and development-ese historically have all been rather distinct.”