Alvin Brown was elected Mayor of Jacksonville on July 1, 2011. He served from 2011 to 2015. Prior to being elected, Brown served as an Executive in Residence at Jacksonville University’s Davis School of Business. He is the past president and CEO of the Willie Gary Classic Foundation, an organization that helps provide scholarships for historically black colleges. Brown has also served as the executive director of the Bush/Clinton Katrina Interfaith Fund and as chairman of the board of the National Black MBA Association.

In Washington, D.C., Alvin served as Vice President Al Gore’s senior advisor for Urban Policy and vice chair of the White House Community Empowerment Board, where he led the Clinton-Gore Administration’s $4 billion overall community empowerment initiatives, with a special emphasis on the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community program which included the new market tax credit initiatives. The highly successful programs helped revitalize economically impoverished urban and rural communities and generated unprecedented levels of public-private partnerships resulting in more than $10 billion in private investments to the designated communities.