COO & Co-Founder
Greenworks Lending
Alexandra “Ali” Cooley has been a lifelong environmental advocate. In co-founding Greenworks Lending, the nation’s largest provider of C-PACE financing, she has channeled her passion for combating climate change while also helping to support sustainable economic growth and development of the commercial real estate industry across the country. Ali’s commitment to the clean energy sector was cemented through her early professional experience, where she traveled extensively through the developing world and analyzed traditional energy infrastructure projects and how policy, as well as market shifts, influenced investor returns. This inspired her to find a way to connect her day-to-day work with the issues she cared most about solving, and upon returning to the States, she entered Yale University’s joint MBA/Environmental Management program with a focus on the intersection of public energy policy and finance. Here she gained perspective on how the government, through public-private partnerships, can lay the foundation to create private enterprises that solve environmental and energy issues without overly burdening taxpayers. After Yale, Ali joined the Connecticut Green Bank, the nation’s first green bank, where she oversaw and managed the development of over $100M in financial products for deploying clean energy in the state focused on using private capital. One of the initiatives she worked on was developing and implementing the underwriting criteria and capital markets strategy for the award-winning CT C-PACE program – the first successful C-PACE program in the country. There she found common ground with Jessica Bailey, who was leading the Green Bank’s initiatives in the commercial real estate sector. In their time at the Green Bank, Jessica and Ali discovered how C-PACE could be transformative in unlocking and scaling clean energy in the commercial real estate market. In 2015, Jessica and Ali founded Greenworks Lending to bring the benefits C-PACE financing offers to building owners and developers across the country. Ali holds an MBA/MA from Yale University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. For her work structuring the first ever Commercial PACE securitization, she received a 2017 Fairfield County CFO of the Year award; and for her work co-founding Greenworks, she received a Westfair Millennial of the Year Award. She also serves on committees for PACENation, the Florence Griswold Museum and the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center and is a member of the New York City chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization.