Wendell L. Johns Biography


Photo:Wendell L. Johns

Wendell Johns joined the Group Hospitalization and Medical Services, Inc. (GHMSI) Board of Trustees in December 2011 and was elected Chair of GHMSI in May 2015. He was also elected to the CareFirst, Inc. Board in September 2014.

Mr. Johns serves on the boards of the Great Lakes Capital Fund as chair, Girls, Inc. of the Washington DC Metropolitan Area as vice chair and treasurer, the Graduate Theological Union as treasurer and finance committee chair, and the Howard University Middle School for Mathematics and Science.

From 2006 to 2010, Mr. Johns served as Executive Vice President and CFO of The NHP Foundation, a nonprofit owner and operator of affordable rental housing in 11 states. During a leadership transition and headquarters relocation, he was asked to serve as acting COO/CEO. He had retired in 2005 as Vice President for Multifamily Housing at Fannie Mae, where he helped direct its development of an industry-leading portfolio of community development and affordable rental housing assets. There, he played a critical role in creating tools for the industry including: structuring the first single investor equity fund, capitalizing some of the premier state and local equity funds and designing the “recapture exclusion” which was proposed to Congress to advance affordable rental housing preservation. He also pioneered housing finance models that later became Fannie Mae's American Communities Fund.

Earlier, Mr. Johns was chief financial and administrative officer for a number of divisions of Oxford Development Corporation in Indianapolis, IN and later in Bethesda, MD. Prior to that, he was an audit supervisor with Coopers & Lybrand in Indianapolis, IN.

A trained CPA, Mr. Johns holds a BS from Indiana University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. Mr. Johns is married to the Honorable Marie C. Johns and lives in Washington, D.C.