Elyse D. Cherry
CEO, BlueHub Capital
President, Boston Community Venture Fund, Aura Mortgage Advisors & NSP Residential
Elyse Cherry has served as the CEO of BlueHub Capital since 1997. Under Cherry’s leadership, BlueHub has invested over $3 billion, leveraged an additional $15 billion, and built a national tax credit practice to: finance affordable housing, health centers, schools and other community facilities; provide foreclosure relief through the creation of a mortgage lender aimed at stabilizing urban neighborhoods; create jobs; benchmark and drive down energy and utility costs; promote resiliency; and remove financial barriers to US citizenship.
Cherry is a former partner at the law firm of Hale and Dorr (now WilmerHale), where her national transactional practice focused on multi-family and commercial real estate finance and development, affordable housing and open space preservation.
An active civic and business leader, Cherry is a member of the Wellesley College Board of Trustees, the Board of Advisors of Eastern Bank, and the Board of Directors of The Boston Foundation, where she co-chaired the Advisory Committee for The Equality Fund--a fund supporting Greater Boston nonprofits that strengthen the LGBTQ community. In addition, Cherry is on the board of the ADA Forsyth Institute, having served as chair of the board of the Forsyth Institute for nearly 4 years--and the board itself for over a decade—before negotiating Forsyth’s successful merger with the ADA in 2023, an event that will support Forsyth for decades.
Cherry has been named one of 50 most influential Bostonians and an LGBT Trailblazer by the Boston Business Journal, one of the Top 100 LGBT Executives in the World by the Financial Times and OUTstanding, and one of 21 Leaders for the 21st Century by Women’s eNews. In 2014, the White House named Cherry a Solar Champion of Change. She received Wellesley’s Alumnae Achievement Award in 2017, and she received the Susan M. Love Award from Fenway Health in 2014. Boston Globe Magazine and The Women's Edge have named BlueHub Capital one of the Top 100 Women-Led Businesses in Massachusetts every year since 2014.
Cherry is a frequent speaker and panelist at national gatherings and has been cited and published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Boston Globe, among others. She has been featured on the CBS Evening News, NPR’s Marketplace, PBS’s NewsHour and MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes.
Cherry is a former or present member of more than a dozen privately held company boards including Zipcar. She chaired the Massachusetts Cultural Council, served on Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s statewide transition team and was a member of Governor Patrick’s Foreclosure Impacts Task Force. Cherry also chaired the Board of Mass Equality during that organization’s historic fight for marriage equality.
Cherry, an attorney, graduated from Wellesley College and Northeastern University School of Law.