URBAN FLOODING - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Administrative Assistant
- CNT in 2022 As the Administrative Assistant
Andrea joined CNT in 2022 as the Administrative Assistant. Prior to working at CNT, Andrea was the Front Desk Coordinator at Radio Flyer. She has a BA in Sustainability Studies from Roosevelt University, where she co-founded a student organization funded by Planned Parenthood. Andrea lives in Cicero where she spends most of her time with her nieces and sisters.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Bureau Chief of Asset Management, Cook County, IL
Ms. Kalayil oversees real estate development, capital planning and construction, and facilities management for 19 million square feet of Cook County real estate; she manages an annual capital budget of $269 million dollars, an operational budget or $55 million and manages a little over 530 employees. Previously, Ann was an Obama appointee serving for six years as the first woman Regional Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration in the Great Lakes Region. As the agency's regional chief executive, she headed operations that supported federal agencies and the U.S. Courts in six states. She also served as the first Digital Strategist for GSA's Workplace program, where she developed the framework of integrating technology in workplace strategy and design. Prior to the GSA, Ann worked for more than 18 years at the University of Chicago in Information Technology Services. She's taught courses at DePaul University, Loyola University Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a bachelor's degree in computer science from Northeastern Illinois University, and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ann is a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Vice Chair / Co - Founder and Managing Director, Oceans Holdings LLC
- Vice Chair of CNT 's Board
Bennett is vice chair of CNT's board. He currently is Chairman and President of The UCI Group, Inc. Bennett spent over 15 years working with and assisting the public sector in Illinois and throughout the US become more efficient and effective. A lifelong Chicagoan , Bennett worked with the City of Chicago's Department of Finance and as the city's Budget Director. He holds a bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and a Master of Economics in Industrial Engineering and Personnel Management from the London School of Economics.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Senior Director, Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting ( Link Is External )
Bo Kemp partners with cities, civic entities, as well as private companies to drive growth, tackle major initiatives and boost efficiency. He is particularly experienced in public-private partnerships (P3), municipal operations and infrastructure development. Bo has built a national network of advisors, advocates, and government leaders, and he has a reputation for driving innovation in municipal utilities, public infrastructure, and economic development for "legacy" cities. Bo spent the first decade of his professional career in finance with Morgan Stanley & Co. and TSG Capital Group, a private equity group. Then, after leading Cory A. Booker's successful transition to the office of Mayor of Newark, N.J., Bo became the city's Business Administrator (COO). In his three years with Booker (now a U.S. Senator), Bo and the senior leadership team helped Newark evolve from a city close to bankruptcy to a community growing in population for the first time in 40 years. Bo enjoys traveling and hopes to visit 100 countries in his lifetime. He's a dangerous golfer (and not in the good way) but an aspiring aquaponics and micro farmer. Bo holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in economics from Yale University.
Job Titles:
- Manager, Outreach and Engagement
Brandon Evans is a business development professional with 14 years of experience. He joined CNT in June of 2021. Brandon is the former Director of the Illinois Small Business Development Center for the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago. In this role he lead the organizations business development efforts while working to maintain the designation as a Small Business Development Center. Additionally, he is a former project manager and Director for the Rainbow PUSH Coalitions International Trade Bureau. Here he worked to organize businesses as members of the organization and worked to bring attention to issues facing women and minority owned businesses. Brandon loves music, working out and cooking. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and lives in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director
- Member of the Board
- Managing Director for Policy and Government Affairs, Sustainable Cities Fund
Chris Wheat is Managing Director for Policy and Government Affairs, Sustainable Cities Fund. The Fund works with donors to support and enable equitable climate action at the local level. Through strategic grant-making, it focuses on building the civic power of cities and communities, working together to implement ambitious, equitable climate solutions. The Fund also leverages and aligns state, federal, and international resources alongside cross-sector engagement to enable and amplify local progress.
Chris joined the Fund from the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at Chicago Booth, where he served as Executive Director. Previously Chris worked alongside Mayors to adopt environmental policies as Strategy and City Engagement Director for the American Cities Climate Challenge at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Before NRDC, Chris spent seven years in various roles in the Office of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, including Chief of Policy, Chief Sustainability Officer, and Innovation Delivery Team Director. Chris also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Strategy at Chicago Booth, Vice-Chair of the Chicago Development Commission, and is on the Board of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Chris holds a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MBA from Chicago Booth.
Job Titles:
- CNT in 2020 As the Project Associate
- Senior Manager, Community Infrastructure and Resilience
Cyatharine Alias joined CNT in 2020 as the Project Associate for the Urban Resilience team. She conducts research and data analysis for a wide range of projects that the team works on. Prior to CNT, Cyatharine taught 7th and 8th grade science and interned at the Merck Family Foundation, a small family foundation providing grants to environmental organizations. Cyatharine holds a master's degree in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. Cyatharine is originally from Skokie, IL.
Emily (she/her) joined CNT's Urban Analytics team in 2022, where she partners with communities to use data and stories to dismantle structural inequities. Her work focuses on making a public health argument for environmental justice, affordable housing, accessible transit and equitable community development. Emily lives with her partner and son in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago and spends much of her spare time pruning and planting trees as a certified Openlands TreeKeeper. She has a Master of Public Health degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Job Titles:
- Communications Consultant
- Writer
Gordon Mayer is a writer and storyteller who has been ensuring all stakeholders have a voice in shaping effective and fair policy for more than 20 years. He focuses on helping nonprofits and businesses with complex stories share their work and impact with the people they care about. A longtime fan of CNT, he is thrilled to have signed on as communications consultant in 2023. More about Gordon at his website, gordonmayercommunications.com(link is external).
Job Titles:
- Director of Transportation Equity
Heidy Persaud joined CNT to implement the agency's work on transportation with a multidisciplinary and equitable focus. Prior to CNT, Heidy worked in urban planning and community development at Teska Associates, Inc., the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and the Chicago Transit Authority (RPM) providing assistance to communities across the Chicago metropolitan area through plan-making, community outreach, transportation/construction, and implementation. She holds a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Public Health. Heidy and her husband live in Chicago with their two little kids and APBT.
Job Titles:
- Vice President, Government Affairs
Jacky joined CNT in 1992, and has since developed its capacity to engage in public policy advocacy and transportation planning, transportation research, environmental justice, public participation tool development, GIS mapping, community economic development and air quality. Jacky advocates for and provides expertise to increase transit in the Chicago region. She created and led CNT's transportation and air quality programs and led CNT's Transit Future campaign in the fight for mass transit reform and dedicated funding in the Chicago region. Since 2005, she has led CNT's policy efforts at all levels of government.
Jacky has served on numerous boards, including: Chicago Transit Authority, National Academy of Sciences' Transportation Research Board's Environmental Justice and Public Involvement Committees. She has just completed terms on the Women's Issues in Transportation Committee.
Prior to CNT, Jacky spent time as a researcher in hematology and gastroenterology, in both state and federal government, in the Chicago Public School district and served in numerous other capacities, including political advisor for the late Mayor Harold Washington and Director of the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
Jacky has completed the Master of Arts in Public Policy requirements at Governors State University and holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director, Transportation & Sustainability
Jen joined CNT in 1999 and leads CNT's strategy to promote sustainable anti-poverty solutions for communities and manages CNT's West Coast office. Jen has worked to promote urban sustainability in the areas of climate change, transportation, energy, stormwater, air pollution, and household cost of living.
Jen has conducted GHG research for the Clinton Foundation, Chicago Climate Action Plan, National Academies, Presidential Climate Action Plan, and many communities, and she has advised the development of national and international GHG protocols. Jen was the lead staff member and manager in developing the Memphis Blueprint for Prosperity.
Jen has a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and bachelor's degrees from UC Santa Cruz.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Secretary / Principal, Creative Ecology ( Link Is External )
- Senior Fellow at PolicyLink
Jeremy Liu is a Senior Fellow at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, where he leads an initiative to integrate arts and culture into equitable development, including economic inclusion, housing, health equity, and policy change. He co-edited the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Community Development Innovation Review issue Transforming Community Development through Arts and Culture, he co-authored the PolicyLink report Creating Change: Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development, and contributed chapters to the National Endowment for the Arts' book How to Do Creative Placemaking and the Routledge Handbook of Placemaking. He is also the managing partner of Creative Development Partners, an investment and real estate development firm that is pioneering the creation of "community benefits by design" ventures in hospitality and real estate. Previously, he served as the chief executive of two community development and real estate social enterprises in Boston and in the Bay Area, for which he has held full P&L responsibility for a $15M operation, managing total assets of over $200M, a staff of 110, social service programs providing direct support to over 5,000 individuals, over two dozen properties including 2,000+ units of housing and 300,000 SF of commercial space, and a development pipeline of six-to-ten projects annually. His strategic repositioning of a nationally-recognized community development corporation from a focus on the activity of housing production and service provision to a performance focus on the social determinants of health has led a transformation across the entire community development sector. He also serves as a consultant and advisor to community developers, foundations, and businesses around the country.
Job Titles:
- Transportation Coalition Associate
Julia (she/her) is a planner and policy advocate interested in the intersections of equity and transportation, as well as building community power and civic engagement through organizing. She joined the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) as a Transportation Coalition Associate in 2023.
Her past work experience in the public and non-profit sectors has given her skills in qualitative research, data analysis, community development, and planning. Prior to joining CNT, she worked as a research assistant with the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement at UIC, a transportation planning intern with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, a research intern with Equiticity, and a Program Delivery Manager at FEMA. Julia holds a master's degree in Urban Planning & Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and bachelor's degrees in Economics and Urban Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. In her spare time, she loves reading, writing poetry, and going on long runs and bike rides down the Chicago lakefront.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Director of Planning at Far South Community Development Corporation
- Planner, Designer, Artist
- Planning Director, Far South Community Development Corporation ( Link Is External )
Katanya Raby is an urban planner, designer, artist, and activist. Katanya currently serves as the Director of Planning at Far South Community Development Corporation (CDC) and is the founding principal planner of Urban Dreams, LLC. She is also the founder of the Al Raby Foundation, a family-led organization that works to preserve the legacy of Al Raby's civil rights work in Chicago. Katanya is an alumnus of the Chicago United for Equity Fellowship, co-founder and former president of Society of Black Urban Planners at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a board director with the American Planning Association Illinois Chapter.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Principal Program Manager - People Team, Atlassian
- Principal Program Manager on the People Team
Katie Maher is a Principal Program Manager on the People Team at Atlassian. Katie holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland and spent two years in Healthcare Public Relations prior to joining PwC in 2013, where Katie spent eight years, specializing in deals and transformational Human Capital management consulting across various industries.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Vice President, Hub International ( Link Is External )
Mr. Chamberlain's career comprises more than 25 years of experience in project management, advisory, line management, technology evaluation, capital formation, business development and due diligence roles for a wide variety of private and public sector clients in the capital projects, risk management, healthcare, life sciences, PPP/PFI, energy & utilities, oil & gas, technology, social services, and media sectors. Over his professional career, Mr. Chamberlain has been posted in the US and abroad while working on projects in more than 50 countries, and has been a periodic speaker and presenter at various international conferences and industry seminars on project development, PPPs/infrastructure privatization, construction & project risk management, risk financing, private equity, and Islamic (Shari'ah-compliant) investment & risk management issues. Mr. Chamberlain sits on several boards for companies in the biofuels, smart grid management, energy storage, healthcare IT, technology accelerator and broadcast media sectors.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Principal of Rosenthal Advisors LLC
- Treasurer / Principal, Rosenthal Advisors LLC
Mr. Rosenthal is the Principal of Rosenthal Advisors LLC, which provides strategic, operational and financial advisory services to public and privately held companies with a focus on financial services and technology-enabled businesses. Mr. Rosenthal was previously Managing Director of The Chicago Corporation, an investment banking firm, where he now serves as Senior Advisor.
Mr. Rosenthal has over 35 years of experience in financial services and technology and has served in executive positions at Bank of America and LaSalle Bank as well as a global executive role for ABN AMRO Bank NV. Prior to joining The Chicago Corporation in 2013, Mr. Rosenthal was an organizer of a de novo bank and was a partner in a financial services advisory firm. His experience extends across investment banking, project finance, commercial and consumer lending, as well as technology and operations. Mr. Rosenthal began his career at The Bank of New York.
Mr. Rosenthal received a B.S. in business administration and accounting from he University of Florida. He currently serves on a number of advisory boards of start-up and not-for-profit entities and is an avid boater and long-distance cyclist.
Job Titles:
- Director of Operations
- Finance
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Consultant
- Member of the Board
Margaret served for 20 years as program officer for environment at the Joyce Foundation, and now consults for foundations and not-for-profits and is working on a book on philanthropy and global challenges. She has academic degrees from Carleton College and the University of Chicago. A long-time resident of the Great Lakes basin, she is an avid supporter of freshwater lakes, energy and water efficiency, natural landscaping, and sustainable cities.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Senior Vice President, Red Stone Tax Exempt Funding
Molly Rutzick has been a professional in finance for over 15 years. As a commercial real estate lender, Ms. Rutzick has generated over $1 billion in commercial real estate loans over the course of her career in lending. Ms. Rutzick is currently Senior Vice President of Originations for Red Stone Tax Exempt Funding, providing the financing for the construction and preservation of affordable housing. Ms. Rutzick also serves as a board member at Riverton Community Housing and is a member of Minnesota Housing Partnership's Investor Committee. Ms. Rutzick holds degrees in Finance and Risk Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison business school and has completed her Associate in Risk Management certification through the Insurance Institute of America.
Nina joined CNT in September 2023 as our new CEO. As a native Detroiter, Nina understands firsthand how the built environment shapes the lives of society's most vulnerable populations. This fuels her passion for empowering people to be change agents through urban planning.
Previously, she served as Chicago Recovery Plan Director for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, where her primary focus was to ensure equitable grant distribution across 11 critical program initiatives supporting Chicago's economic revival. In addition to overseeing a staff of 19 and dozens of delegate agency contracts, Nina helped create and lead a data management and impact team to create new standards for how the department analyzes its economic investments for equitable outcomes.
She has also helped to lead MUSE Community + Design, where she served as Director of Planning, and has previously served as a planner for the City of Los Angeles.
Nina specializes in equitable community development, inclusive outreach strategies, and organizational innovation for planning agencies. She has three awards from the American Planning Association; is a Vanguard Fellow, a New Leaders Council Fellow, and a Civic Leadership Academy Fellow; and was also honored with a SHEro award by Los Angeles Councilmember Curren D. Price, Jr. for her community leadership.
Also in 2023, Nina was elected the first Black President for the Illinois Chapter of the American Planning Association. She is also a board member of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
Nina is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. She is currently a resident of the Archer Heights neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side.
Obi Ekwueme is responsible for the day to day management of a loan portfolio for Fifth Third Bank as well as new loan origination, with specialties in commercial real estate lending, CNI lending, residential property, and wealth managerial investing. Obi prides himself on being well rounded, passing the CFA 1 exam and is a Series 7/66 holder in Investment Advising. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Vice President, Business Banking Relationship Manager, Fifth Third Bank
Obi Ekwueme is responsible for the day to day management of a loan portfolio for Fifth Third Bank as well as new loan origination, with specialties in commercial real estate lending, CNI lending, residential property, and wealth managerial investing. Obi prides himself on being well rounded, passing the CFA 1 exam and is a Series 7/66 holder in Investment Advising. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Executive Director, Southeast Environmental Task Force ( Link Is External )
Olga Bautista has a deep commitment to the future of South Chicago and has dedicated her professional career to improving the community. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF). As one of the lead organizers for both the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke and the Campaign to Stop General Iron, Olga has led local environmental justice campaigns that have forced federal, state and local politicians to address the pressing environmental issues in the 10th Ward. For the last decade, her work has been featured in local, national and international news outlets. Olga has also served her community as a Local School Council Parent Representative at John L. Marsh School, a YWCA Crisis Intervention Specialist, a Board Member of the Immigrant Defense Alliance, and a member of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE).
Job Titles:
- Project Policy Associate, Transportation
Pamela (Pam) Jones joined CNT in 2023 as the Project Policy Associate (Transportation). She believes transportation is a basic need and a vital component of a healthy community and is excited to join CNTs efforts to enhance sustainable transportation systems.
Before joining CNT, Pam worked in different roles at various institutions in the nonprofit sector, including Northwestern University, the University of Chicago Booth School, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She brings over ten years of professional experience.
Pam holds a Master's in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois-Chicago and a Bachelor's in Psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She loves trying new things and visiting other communities within and beyond her hometown of Chicago. She lives in the Avondale neighborhood with her husband and their 12-year-old rabbit.
Job Titles:
- Senior Application Developer
Paul is responsible for application and database development at CNT and has been integral in the creation of models and websites for the Housing + Transportation (H+T®) Affordability Index; the HUD/DOT Location Affordability Index and My Transportation Cost Calculator; the National Transit-Oriented Development Database; Right Size Parking Calculator for King County, WA; and various other web-based mapping tools. He manages the All Transit TM GTFS dataset and metrics, and is also responsible for deploying and maintaining CNT's web servers in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment.
Paul has developed several additional web applications since joining CNT in 2003, including a Fleet Management system that was used by CNT's I-GO Carsharing in their early years. With over 15 years of web development experience, Paul has worked with a wide range of technologies.
He has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Science in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Paulina Vaca is a proud 2021 graduate of Loyola University Chicago's School of Environmental Sustainability. While pursuing her BA in Environmental Studies, she was among the first cohort of students to live in Vietnam as a semester-long international sustainability intern. During her senior year Paulina worked alongside the Chicago Food Policy Action Council as an undergraduate social and environmental researcher. She is ecstatic to join the CNT team and apply her skills to help make cities work for everyone! During Paulina's free time, she enjoys going on long walks, reading great books, and cooking for friends.
Peter joined CNT in 1994, and has revolutionized the geographic analysis of social, environmental and economic data to produce ground breaking tools for measuring sustainability in urban areas. Peter has been integral in the development of CNT's location efficiency metrics, and developed its Housing + Transportation (H+T ®) Affordability Index, co-produced with the Brookings Institution. He acted as the Analytical Director for the 22-member CNT Research Team producing a greenhouse gas emissions inventory and 33 mitigation strategies for the Chicago Climate Action Plan, and served as lead analyst on CNT's subcontract to develop the Location Affordability Index and related web tool for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Department of Transportation. His work in GIS, web development and data analysis have come together into the Geographical Research and Information Department (GRID) at CNT, where he and his colleagues work to provide technical, geographical and analytic input to all of CNT's programs.
Prior to CNT, Peter was a systems manager at Sieben Energy Associates, Adjunct Faculty at the William Rainey Harper College, and post-doctoral researcher at Cornell University's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies, and The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Peter has a Ph.D. in particle physics from Ohio State University.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Inventor, Wrapperoo® ( Link Is External )
PJ's entrepreneurial instincts brought her invention, the Wrapperoo®, to market and has been successfully embraced by a diverse customer base. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain complications, PJ pivoted her business model to keep up with a rapidly changing landscape. By March 2020 PJ started home-sewing and donating protective face masks, using leftover Wrapperoo fabric and N99 filters she had on hand. She was spurred to action after hearing the anguished stories of her healthcare professional friends treating COVID-10 patients in Chicago-area hospitals. To meet soaring demand for both donated and for-sale masks, PJ launched a "buy one, give one" sale that has generated donations of more than 1,000 high-quality, multifunctional, reusable masks to medical personnel, essential workers and nursing homes all over the country.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Executive Director of the Neighbor Project
- Executive Director, the Neighbor Project ( Link Is External )
Rick Guzman is the Executive Director of The Neighbor Project, a grassroots housing and community development organization formed through the merger of Joseph Corporation and Emmanuel House, which he co-founded with his wife to help refugee and immigrant families access homeownership. In 2016, Emmanuel House's "Networked Savings Program" was recognized as one of the "100 most innovative non-profit or social enterprise programs in the world," as a Classy Award finalist, which is sponsored by Guidestar and The Stanford Social Innovation Review. Previously, Guzman served as Deputy Chief of Staff to two Aurora Mayors working on housing, economic development and neighborhood planning and worked as a Policy Advisor to Illinois' Governor on issues of human rights and criminal justice. Guzman serves on numerous local and regional non-profit boards and in 2019 was elected to serve as a Trustee of Waubonsee Community College.
Job Titles:
- Planner
- Project Manager, Urban Resilience
Ryan Scherzinger is a planner and an experienced program and project manager in the nonprofit sector with an extensive background in providing resources to spur community-driven action in partnership with governments, CBOs, businesses, foundations, and academic institutions. He joined CNT in February 2023. Prior, he worked for 13 years at the American Planning Association (APA) in both their Washington, DC and Chicago offices. In various roles, he helped organize and manage a variety of programs and special projects, including community planning workshops, grant-funded research, symposia and lecture series, study tours, international initiatives, allied outreach and coalitions, award juries, and interactive public exhibits. He also helped create, then manage and grow APA's Community Planning Assistance Teams program whereby he recruited and worked with multidisciplinary teams of volunteer experts to engage local stakeholders and create focused plans and implementation strategies for specific challenges in low-capacity and underserved communities around the U.S. and abroad.
Ryan is also a woodworker, music fan and maker, and appreciates opportunities to explore and learn about new places, near and far. He is an AICP certified planner and holds a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Louisville and a master's in public anthropology from American University.
Job Titles:
- Founder and Director Emeritus, Innovation
Scott leads CNT's work to understand and better disclose the economic value of resource use in urban communities, and helps craft strategies to capture the value of this efficiency productively and locally.
He studied at Northwestern University, served on the research staff of Northwestern's Center for Urban Affairs, taught at UCLA and was a founding Board member at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Center.
President Clinton appointed Scott to the President's Council for Sustainable Development, where he co-chaired its task forces on Metropolitan Sustainable Communities and on Cross-Cutting Climate Strategies and contributed to other federal advisory panels on global warming, development strategy, and science policy. He helped write a climate change strategy for the first 100 days of the new Administration. Scott is a Fellow of the Center for State Innovation; a Board Member of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy(link is external)and Congress for the New Urbanism;(link is external) works with governors, mayors and metropolitan organizations across the US; and helped create the Chicago Climate Action Plan at the request of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Scott also offered strategies for incorporating location efficiency into Memphis Mayor A C Wharton's visionary plan to reduce the city's poverty rate by 10% in 10 years. CNT is a signer of the Charter of the New Urbanism(link is external) and Scott is a member of the Urban History Association, which includes urbanists old and new.
Some key ideas in Scott's work are that successful urban and metropolitan economies are "high-road," that is, they provide higher wage, lower waste and most inclusive economic pathways; that they work best if founded on economies of scope or network economies as opposed to simple economies of scale, and that communities contain assets that too often are hidden, disconnected or poorly deployed; all of which are changeable conditions. A beneficial result of these ideas is a blurring of the lines between "consumers" and "producers" of public goods.
Bernstein, Scott, and Carrie Makarewicz. Rethinking Affordability: The Inherent Value of TOD. Center for Transit-Oriented Development, 2005. Bernstein, Scott, Carrie Makarewicz, and Kevin McCarty. Driven to Spend. Center for Neighborhood Technology and Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, 2005. Bernstein, Scott. "The New Transit Town: Great Places and Great Nodes That Work for Everyone." The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development(link is external). Ed. Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohland. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004. Bernstein, Scott, and John Spengler. "Traffic Emissions, Urban Design and Public Health." Prepared for workshop on emissions from urban traffic. Harvard and Columbia Schools of Public Health. Environmental Health Perspectives. Institute of Medicine, 2004. Bernstein, Scott, and Kara Heffernan. Improving Quality of Life While Reducing the Cost of Living: Identifying, Capturing and Redirecting the Hidden Assets of Places. Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2004. Center for Transit-Oriented Development. Hidden in Plain Sight: Capturing the Demand for Housing Near Transit. Reconnecting America, 2004. Bernstein, Scott, Bruce Katz, and Robert Puentes. TEA21 Reauthorization: Getting Transportation Right for Metropolitan America. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2003. Bernstein, Scott, David Burwell, and Steve Winklemann. Climate Matters: The Case for Addressing Greenhouse Gas Reduction in Federal Transportation Policy. Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, 2003. Dernbach, John C. and Scott Bernstein. "Pursuing Sustainable Communities: Looking Backwards, Looking Forward(link is external)." Urban Lawyer 35 (2003): 495. American Bar Association. Center for Neighborhood Technology. Travel Matters: Mitigating Climate Change with Sustainable Surface Transportation(link is external). Transit Cooperative Research Program, Federal Transit Administration, 2002.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director, Urban Resilience
- Strategist, Consultant
Shavion Scott is a strategist, consultant, urban planner and advisor with a keen sense of collective power and social impact. She joined Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) as the new Managing Director of Urban Resilience in June 2022 and brings with her more than 15 years of experience in the marketplace. Her background includes management consulting, information technology and the digital divide, sustainable land use as well as community, economic and human capital development. Prior to CNT, Shavion served as the Deputy Director with Austin Coming Together (ACT) on the west side of Chicago, where she led people, operations, and programs management to guide the successful implementation of Austin's first ever quality of life plan, the organization's strategic plan, Hub activities, policy efforts, wellness initiatives, as well as COVID response. Prior to ACT, she served as the Director of Developer Services with Quad Communities Development Corporation (QCDC) on the south side of Chicago, where she led their compliance, construction management and real estate development consulting division and managed a multimillion-dollar project portfolio of residential, commercial and mixed-use developments. An urban planner and entrepreneur, Shavion has transferred private sector knowledge into nonprofit environments to empower communities with ownership in the development process; aiming to create spaces that revitalize, not displace. She has vast experience in economic development and is driven to cultivate strategic partnerships that will be beneficial at all levels and across industries.