Adrienne Farrar Houël

Adrienne Farrar Houel is President and CEO of Greater Bridgeport Community Enterprises, Inc. (GBCE). Ms. Farrar Houel, a Little Liberia descendant, is a Bridgeport area native with 25 years of international executive experience in France, Russia and Ireland; in the fields of real estate development and marketing. In 2002 she returned to the United States, and pursued a career in economic development. She designed, funded and operated workforce training programs.

In 2006, under the umbrella of ABCD, Inc., Adrienne Farrar Houel created GBCE and The Green Team. They encompassed three areas of green contracting: Environmental and Brownfields remediation; weatherization and energy conservation; and deconstruction, reuse and recycling. In the last two years, Ms. Farrar Houel has worked with partners to develop a unique, triple-bottom-line mattress deconstruction and materials recycling enterprise.

Ms. Farrar Houel ‘s service to the community is extensive – both through local board and coalition memberships, and on state and federal commissions and boards. In 2010, Mayor Bill Finch named Adrienne Farrar Houel to Bridgeport’s newly created Energy Improvement District. In April of 2012, Governor Malloy named her to his Modernizing Recycling Working Group. Ms. Farrar Houel also serves on CT Department of Labor’s Green Jobs Committee.

In 2012, she designed and executed the Mary & Eliza Freeman Center’s first green preservation internship initiative. Specialized preservation contracting skills pay higher wages. Non-historic additions to the historic Freeman Houses were deconstructed by displaced local workers given green construction, preservation, and archaeology training in a program funded by the 1772 Foundation, the City, HUD, and the EPA.

Most recently Adrienne Farrar Houel has been appointed to the CT Energy Efficiency Board and to the US Department of Agriculture’s New Beginning Farmer Advisory Committee. A graduate of Antioch College, AB History and Economics, Ms. Farrar Hoel earned her MBA from Harvard Business School, in the first class of women to do so. In 2019, Adrienne Farrar Houel was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.