Danielle Cummings
Danielle Cummings is an independent consultant who partners with social impact organizations to evaluate programs and policies, analyze complex datasets, and translate findings into compelling stories and actionable recommendations. Since 2008, Danielle has worked in the social and public sectors as a mixed-methods researcher and evaluator, practitioner, and trainer. Her experiences span several domains, including housing, workforce development, human services, education, and public health. Danielle uses inclusive learning and evaluation methods to ensure that the questions that are asked, the answers that are generated, and the learning and action that result from the work center the interests and perspectives of the most impacted communities. Danielle holds a master’s in public administration from New York University.
Alexandra Curley
Alex has more than fifteen years of experience studying affordable and mixed-income housing communities, tenant-based housing voucher programs, housing mobility initiatives, and other efforts focused on reducing structural barriers—rooted in racism, power, and economic advantage—for lower-income families of color and expanding access to opportunities from which they have been historically excluded. Alex collaborates with community groups, public, private, and non-profit stakeholders to better understand resident and community needs and assets, design programs and policies, identify impacts, and inform strategies to advance racial and economic equity. Her research blends methodologies to identify important demographic and residential patterns and gives voice to those who are often unheard to ensure their experiences, ideas, and desires are informing programs and policies that affect their lives and communities. Alex has worked as an independent consultant and previously worked with the Urban Institute, the American City Coalition, the OTB Research Institute for Housing and the Urban Mobility Studies in the Netherlands, and the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University. She received a B.A. from Northeastern University and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University.
Prentiss Dantzler
Prentiss Dantzler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Affiliate and Advisor to the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. Previously, he held faculty appointments at Georgia State University and Colorado College. His research focuses on housing policy, neighborhood change, and residential mobility with a particular focus on urban poverty, housing assistance programs, race and ethnic relations, and community development. Dantzler’s work has been published in various academic journals with recent articles in Cities, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, and Law and Inequality. Currently, Prentiss is working with the Toronto Community Housing Corporation to assess the perceptions and effects of housing affordability, neighborhood change, and public policymaking. Prentiss received his Ph.D. in Public Affairs with a concentration in Community Development from Rutgers University-Camden. He also holds an M.P.A. from West Chester University and a B.S. from Penn State University.
Nick Falvo
Nick Falvo obtained his PhD in public policy from Carleton University in 2015. While at Carleton, Nick developed and taught one of Canada’s only university-level courses on affordable housing and homelessness. He is currently President of Nick Falvo Consulting Inc.
Nick’s decade-long experience working front-line with individuals experiencing homelessness in Toronto provides him with a deep understanding of the ‘on the ground’ phenomena that influence poverty, a lack of affordable housing and homelessness. His extensive research of the macroeconomic and public policy factors that intersect with those phenomena inform his analysis, and, combined with his unique capacity to ‘cut through the jargon,’ makes his work accessible to academia and the public at large.
Michael R. Fisher Jr.
Michael R. Fisher Jr., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the political economy of race/racism in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Fisher’s areas of specialization include race, public policy, and socio-economic inequality and housing and urban redevelopment. His current book project, Black Community Building: Public Housing Reform and the Promise of an Alternative Model to Mixed-Income Neighborhoods (under contract with Georgetown University Press), reorients the debate on public housing reform by arguing that mixed-income housing creation as market-driven urban policy must be abandoned given its disparate impact on Black communities living in high-poverty neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Before his career as an educator, Dr. Fisher was a public policy advocate on Capitol Hill. His policy portfolio focused on federal social welfare programs addressing poverty. He currently serves as a founding steering committee member of the DC Legacy Project: Barry Farm-Hillsdale, a group dedicated to uplifting the Black-led struggle for land and housing in D.C.
April Jackson
April is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Research Affiliate with the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University. As a community-engaged scholar-practitioner her research explores how to enhance planning practice and the built environment by promoting plans with a focus on equitable, inclusive, and just communities. Her work examines place-based, neighborhood-level affordable housing strategies that seek to embed racial equity in spatial plans and policies, highlighting inclusive planning processes that aim to improve communities of color. She also investigates ways to further advance diversity, equity and inclusion in planning education, workplaces and the communities in which planners serve.
Her current research explores how Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) facilitates racial equity in implementation of the built environment, community building practices, and neighborhood change in Chicago, IL. April has recently completed two projects that examine how urban planning programs, institutions and workplaces can work towards creating more inclusive places that value and promote diversity in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (Planner of Color Interest Group). More recently, she has expanded her work to address gentrification and implications for affordable housing and vulnerable populations through an evaluation of climate-driven displacement in Miami/Miami-Dade County, Jacksonville/Duval County and St. Petersburg/Pinellas County in Florida.
April also teaches courses in Spatial Planning, Community Engagement, Plan Making, Neighborhood Planning, Urban Design, Affordable Housing, and Visualization Methods. Prior to joining UIC in 2021, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. She also has extensive experience working in the private sector as an architect and urban designer at Destefano Partners and AECOM in Chicago, IL and Irvine, CA on public housing redevelopment projects, neighborhood revitalization plans, and new urbanist communities in the U.S., China, and the Middle East. She earned her Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds dual master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in Architecture and Urban Planning and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Joni Kaden
Joni Hirsch is a Policy Analyst at the Center for the Study of Social Policy. She partners with NIMC to manage a team of community builders who design and implement network-building strategies in public housing communities slated for mixed-income redevelopment through DC’s New Communities Initiative. She also leads learning and documentation efforts around innovative approaches to social inclusion and economic opportunity in mixed-income communities. In addition, as a member of the Mixed-Income Strategic Alliance, she helps manage the Mixed-Income Innovation and Action Network. Prior to her work with NIMC, Joni’s work centered on fair housing policy. Joni holds a BA from Amherst College and a Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley.
Lasse Kjeldsen
Lasse Kjeldsen, M.P.S., is an Industrial PhD Fellow at Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University, and Chief Advisor at Center for Urban Regeneration and Community Development (CFBU) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Lasse has 12 years of experience evaluating social programs and community building initiatives in disadvantaged housing estates. As Chief Advisor at CFBU, Lasse guides policy-makers and practitioners across Denmark.
Lasses PhD project focuses on developing methods for bridging community work and strategic physical transformations of disadvantaged social housing estates. The aim is to refine the planning and implementation of strategic physical transformations so to promote socially inclusive and well-functioning communities. Lasse has a master’s in political science from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
JaNay Queen Nazaire
Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire is building a world where every person has the right to a healthy, abundant and connected life. A facilitator, advisor, investor and researcher, she is actively working to dismantle oppressive systems and restructure power and resources to enable an authentic multiracial democracy for future generations.
As a Senior Advisor for PSG, a growth equity firm, she leads racial equity initiatives across a portfolio of more than 80 companies and 15,000 employees, leverages networks to expand access to diverse talent, and creates connections for investable opportunities. Working across sectors, Dr. Queen Nazaire also serves as a PolicyLink Senior Advisor to move 100 million Americans out of poverty and recreate just, fair, and equitable systems that ensure a healthy, strong and prosperous society.
A consummate educator, Dr. Queen Nazaire serves as faculty and advisor for leaders and
students, namely for the Health Foundation of Western and Central New York, FUSE Corps and
the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. She is a collaborator with Equity & Results,
a board member for Global Electronics Council, and serves on numerous advisory committees
that are public-private partnerships focused on closing gaps and building wealth.
Dustin Read
Dustin C. Read, Ph.D./J.D. joined Virginia Tech in 2014 and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Property Management and Real Estate within the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He previously served as Director of both the Center for Real Estate and the Master of Science in Real Estate (MSRE) program at UNC Charlotte. In addition to his background in real estate, Dustin has extensive experience in international education. He created UNC Charlotte’s international real estate study tour program in 2008, which provided over a hundred graduate students with the opportunity to travel abroad to learn from real estate practitioners working in a diverse array of countries. He also served as the Belk College of Business’s Director of International Initiatives from 2013-2014. Dustin holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also holds the Juris Doctor degree from University of Missouri.
Akira Rodriguez
Akira Drake Rodriguez is a Vice Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of City and Regional Planning at PennDesign. Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Using an interdisciplinary and multiple method approach, her research engages scholarship in urban studies, political science, urban history, black feminist studies, community development, urban policy, and critical geography using both qualitative and quantitative data and methods. This research agenda is particularly relevant in these politically unstable times, where cities continue to marginalize underrepresented minority groups by defunding public institutions, promoting urban policies that subsidize their displacement while limiting affordable housing options, and continuing the funding and support of a militarized police force. Prior to her fellowship, Dr. Rodriguez taught in the Planning department at Temple University and the Political Science department at Rutgers University – Newark. Dr. Rodriguez is currently working on her manuscript, Deviants in Divergent Spaces: The Radical Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. The book explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments. This research offers the alternative benefits of public housing, outside of shelter provision, to challenge the overwhelming narrative of public housing as a dysfunctional relic of the welfare state.
Shomon Shamsuddin
Shomon Shamsuddin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Social Policy and Community Development at Tufts University. He studies how social problems are redefined by policies to address urban poverty and inequality. His research examines the effects of local and federal housing policy on socioeconomic mobility for poor families. In addition, he studies barriers to educational attainment for low-income students. Prior to joining Tufts, Shomon was a National Poverty Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT, M.Arch. from Yale University, and Sc.B. from Brown University.
Shehara Waas
Shehara Waas is Research Manager at the Chicago-based Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), an urban planning and policy change nonprofit serving the city of Chicago and greater Chicago metro area. Her research at MPC, while interdisciplinary, has a particular focus on community development and uses a mixed-methods approach. She has a background working at the intersection of environmental justice and community development, honed in part through her previous work as a community development analyst with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Office of Environmental and Historic Preservation. She is particularly interested in long-term racial wealth gap eradication strategies—research she conducts as a 2020 Chicago United for Equity Fellow. Shehara has a master’s in public policy from the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.
Danielle Walters
Danielle Walters, MPH is an independent consultant at the 35th Street Consulting, LLC. Danielle has extensive experience in the mixed-income and public health fields as an epidemiologist. Her main interest is the intersection of health and community development, particularly in the context of public housing redevelopment. For thirteen years Danielle was the Executive Director of a non-profit organization that provided services to residents of a mixed-income development, and as a consultant she assisted the City of Chicago to prepare HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods proposals and developed the requisite collaborations and data sharing agreements for broad community change. She’s worked to inform and guide policymakers through qualitative and quantitative research, while working on the ground as part of public housing redevelopment efforts. During her time in Chicago, she developed exemplary, creative and innovative youth programs in the mixed-income development context that were unlike any others throughout the city. She continues to work as a liaison between practitioners implementing housing initiatives and the policymakers shaping those initiatives. Danielle has a master’s in public health from the University of California, Berkeley.