Maurice grew up in public housing in Trenton, New Jersey. His mother is a kindergarten teacher in an urban public school; his dad was a custodian. Throughout his life, Maurice has followed his mother’s sage advice: “The best exercise for the heart is to reach down or back to pull someone up or forward.”
Maurice was the first in his family to go to college (though he was soon followed by his sister). Without financial aid, college would have been an impossibility.

A history and economics major and a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship, Maurice earned his Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, from Columbia College. He was subsequently awarded a Jacob Javits fellowship to attend Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Following graduation, he worked at Simpson, Thatcher, Bartlett, a major law firm, from 1991 to 1993, before moving on to teach history at Noble and Greenough (Nobles), a coeducational, nonsectarian, day and boarding school in Dedham, Massachusetts. While on the faculty of Nobles, Maurice founded Brother 2 Brother, a support group for young men of color. He also created a math and science-oriented Upward Bound program, which offers promising low-income high-schoolers a chance to live and study on the Nobles campus. As a direct result of his mentoring efforts, three students from that program are now enrolled at Columbia.

Maurice was recruited by Fleet Development Ventures, an equity investment unit of FleetBoston Financial, to serve as investment officer and relationship manager, with a focus on minority- and women-owned companies. He was promoted to senior vice president and director of Fleet’s community economic development unit, where he led a team responsible for promoting access to equity and debt capital in “under-banked” markets throughout the metropolitan New York area.

In 2002, Maurice joined Bank of America. Responsible for overseeing community development banking, he is the bank’s youngest senior vice president. Among the tremendous strides made by Maurice and his team are the financing of the $71.5 million Strivers Garden complex in Harlem, with its 170 units of housing, both market-rate and affordable; the Bronx Charter School; and an environmentally sound “smart” residential building in Harlem called 1400 on 5th Avenue. He is currently working on several economic development projects in Brooklyn, Queens and the South Bronx.

Maurice also served as executive producer of A-Alike, an award-winning film created by Randall Dottin as his 2003 film thesis project at the Columbia School of the Arts. The film, which was picked up by HBO and Cinemax, tells the story of two brothers, raised by a single mother in the projects, who follow different paths, yet share a common struggle with their identities. Subsequently, Maurice became a cofounder—with Randy Dottin and his brother, Ron—of the production company Middle Passage Filmworks.

Maurice serves on the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Board, Abyssinian Development Corporation, the Local Initiative Support Council, the New York Mortgage Coalition, the NAACP, RainbowPUSH Coalition and Urban Financial Services Coalition, as part of his broader mission of building and strengthening underserved communities across the country.