Mr. McFarland holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and a Master of City Planning from Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been involved in community development in Atlanta for the past twenty years; for ten years he served as the Executive Director of a neighborhood-based community development corporation in the Peoplestown neighborhood, located just south of downtown Atlanta and Turner Field.
William has extensive experience in facilitating public involvement and stakeholder engagement, collaboration and consensus building, strategic planning, project management and implementing comprehensive community revitalization initiatives in the non-profit sector. As a community development consultant, he successfully combined his planning expertise, communication skills, and proficiency in technology adaptation to provide value added interventions for varied clients in multiple areas of operations, project management and program development and implementation.
McFarland worked for Enterprise Community Partners as the Director of the Atlanta Renewal Community program. During his five-year tenure at Enterprise, he directed a staff which served, at the direction of a seven-member Board of Directors, as the management entity for a program responsible for marketing federal business tax incentives designed to spur economic development in low-income communities and developing implementation approaches – consistent with a community developed Integrated Strategic Plan – for the investment of $47 million of federal Social Service Block Grant Title XX funding.
Since 2015, William has worked in a part-time capacity for Georgia Advancement Communities Together (Georgia ACT), leading their state and local affordable housing advocacy and engagement efforts. He works to educate community-based non-profits, housing advocates, governments and elected officials on affordable housing challenges and solutions and to support the adoption of policies and programs that positively impact housing affordability and accessibility. Through his work with Georgia ACT, McFarland has been instrumental in development of both the Atlanta-focused City for All Affordable Housing Coalition and the statewide Housing Georgia coalition.