PORT ST. LUCIE PEOPLE
The BRIDGE BUILDER
BY ELLEN GILLETTE
58 Port St. Lucie Magazine
JOHN BIONDO
After working in Afghanistan, Derek McSween returned home and joined Port St. Lucie Toastmasters where he discovered help with decompressing.
Derek McSween has been building bridges a long
time. Raised in a poor neighborhood, he built
bridges between the predominantly white students
and fellow black students throughout school. Later,
he trained minority business owners to succeed with the big
boys. Until recently, he built bridges between Afghan workers
and himself, between East and West. Today, he’s building
bridges in Port St. Lucie.
Choate Rosemary Hall, the Connecticut boarding/prep
school whose alumni includes JFK, was not immediately welcoming,
although he became friends for life with several students.
“There were only six of us black guys,” McSween says.
Elementary school and junior high in Flushing, Queens, with
their 90 percent Jewish populations, had prepared him for holding
his own — he was voted class president at both schools.
After graduating from the University of Rochester with
an English degree, McSween worked for Bovis Lend Lease,
managing projects worth millions. As director of diversity for
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, his goal was to award at least 10
percent of the contracts to minority- or female-owned compa-
MASEER AHMED
McSween was part of a demobilization project in Kabul, where he used
bridge-building skills to improve relationships and communication with,
>> and opportunities for, the local workers.