Mary Dupont is the Executive Director of the Nehemiah Gateway Community Development Corporation in Wilmington Delaware. She has thirty years of experience in community organizing, non-profit program design and organizational development and management. With the launch of Nehemiah Gateway in 2001, she started an array of programs to promote savings, financial education, access to financial services, and small business development. This includes the statewide Delaware EITC Campaign which, in seven years, provided free tax preparation for over 54,000 low income taxpayers, opened 1400 savings accounts and CDs, and brought back $79 million in refunds.
Prior to her work with Nehemiah Gateway, she founded several successful programs focused on small business, career and asset development at YWCA of New Castle County. During her tenure there, she started the Working Capital program which was designed to support micro entrepreneurs with loans and technical assistance and won a Presidential Award in Microenterprise Development in1997. Throughout her career in Delaware, over the past 15 years, she has worked in the forefront of community economic development and served on the Governor’s Task Force for Financial Independence in 2002.
Earlier on, she worked in Philadelphia running a microenterprise program and as a community organizer for a faith-based network of community organizations in Philadelphia. She has also consulted nationally with the Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Grameen Foundation, and several international organizations on program design, evaluation, and industry development. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Social Administration from Temple University.