CORNERSTONE VENTURES - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Business Development Specialist
- Founder
- Principal
Carol Coren is a business development specialist with expertise in asset development, management consulting, marketing, and the food industry. She has started two US Treasury certified Community Development Financial Institutions and conducted regional branding campaigns for arts and cultural organizations and women's social services.
She worked for six years with Rutgers University's Food Innovation Center where, as a Cooperative Development Specialist and Business Association Mentor, she assisted entrepreneurs, community groups and rural service organizations on an array of projects. Among these are farm based food production and distribution ventures, coastal windmill farms, solar energy enterprises, waste recycling, a municipal Public Market, transportation services, and a cohort of community sponsored Farmers Markets. Prior to that, she served as Director of Community Programs for the Oregon Food Innovation Center where she helped advance food ventures as well as high tech initiatives in areas such as RFID tagging and food safety assurance programs.
Ms. Coren served as a member of the USDA's E-Government Advisory Committee in 2004 and 2005 and has a background in media production, marketing and broadcasting. She is an active member of the Assets Alliance, a nonprofit association of people who played key roles in launching Individual Development Account saving programs around the United States. Her work with this group involves her in developing and presenting programs about financial literacy around the nation.
Ms. Coren holds a Masters degree from Temple University's School of Communications and has worked as a broadcast producer for public and commercial television stations. Her involvement in media as a community development tool led to her involvement in youth broadcasting program overseas; in her advocacy of online distance learning programs; and in her promotion of social networking for business development and marketing. She led efforts to create an innovative financial literacy program for women supported by the US Department of Commerce and shaped the New Jersey State Council on the Arts' long-term JerseyARTS cultural tourism campaign. She has served as a director of nonprofit agencies and led them through workouts of financial problems. She also helped raise funds for environmental restoration and remediation businesses and supported the work of the Roy F. Weston Foundation's development of programs to advance environmental and science education.
Her community service includes participation as a volunteer board member or advisor to the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, CASH-Oregon, Family Planning Council of SE Pennsylvania, United Way of Columbia-Willamette, Community Leadership Seminars of Philadelphia, the Falls Township (PA) Industrial Development Board, and the Portland, OR Community Food Matters. In recent years, she has been involved in efforts to bridge urban-rural divides forming in the USA and overseas. She has traveled widely and has worked as an advisor to economic development programs in Southern Sudan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan where she played roles in advancing micro-enterprise loan programs, business training and management consulting ventures and economic development initiatives in rural communities.
Lisa Kugler has worked in city neighborhoods for most of her career in a variety of roles that have included service as a tenant's rights advocate, community organizer, and neighborhood organization staffer. Her thirty years of development work have produced 750 housing units and over 100,000 square feet of commercial space. She has also bought land for parks and nature preserves and served as a real estate project manager.
Lisa's reputation for persistence, thorough research and total commitment to achieving project goals, has earned her a reputation as a community development professional able to handle challenging projects that involve multiple properties, sites, and complex layers of financing. She has had extensive experience finding, evaluating and negotiating purchases of a variety of property types and understands how to carry out necessary due diligence on title, environmental, zoning issues and related matters.
As a tenacious and highly creative problem solver, she knows how to inspire clients and how to help organizations improve on performance. She has had primary responsibility for site selection, feasibility analysis, purchase and lease negotiations, selection and coordination of development teams, negotiation and coordination of project financing and construction management for more than sixty projects, ranging in size from $150,000 to $110 million.