People

Lucia Fernandez is the Global Waste picker's Coordinator at WIEGO, where she has worked since 2008 under the Inclusive Cities project. She has been working for the past ten years together with several waste picker organizations, ranging from assisting small cooperatives and trade unions in her native country, Uruguay, to large scale networking, creation and support of the Latin-American Network of Waste Pickers, to more recently with the international coordination of the Global Alliance of Waste pickers. In collaboration with CoLab and particularly the D-Lab Waste course, Lucia contributed to research decentralized and scalable solid waste management systems that include waste pickers.

Lucia was an adjunct professor at the Uruguayan Architectural School where she conducted interdisciplinary research for the inclusion of waste pickers into municipal waste management policies. She has a MA degree in Architecture from Grenoble, France focused on spontaneous recycling dynamics through a historical and territorial approach. She also graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of Lyon with her second MA degree on Ethical and Sustainable Development.

Deborah Kobes is a Senior Project Manager at Jobs for the Future. She helps manage JFF’s work in the green sector, including support for workforce partnerships that recruit, train, place, retain, and advance new and incumbent workers in key industry sectors. She is currently working with workforce partnerships in eight cities on the GreenWays Initiative, funded by two $8 million grants from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Prior to JFF, Deborah was the Projects Director and first staff member of the Emerald Cities Collaborative, a consortium of diverse organizations – businesses, unions, community organizations, development intermediaries, social justice advocates, research and technical assistance providers — united around the goal of “greening” our metropolitan areas in high-road ways that advance equal opportunity, shared wealth, and democracy within them. She has also consulted for CoLab in several capacities and served as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; Brookings Research Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution; and a Research Associate at the Urban Institute as part of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Deborah received her PhD in Urban Political Economy and Governance from MIT and a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Architecture from Princeton University.

Aditi worked with the Community Innovators Lab as a NOLA Fellow from 2009 to 2010. She was partnered with Broad Community Connections (BCC), a non-profit dedicated to revitalizing Broad Street, a historic business corridor in New Orleans. Although assigned to complete a market study for a proposed grocery store, Aditi was drawn to the people of Broad, who are passionate about the health and future of their community. She worked with business owners, non-profits, and other locals to vision and produce Who's On Broad?, a digital storytelling project about Broad Street with an interactive web-based map and live exhibition, all of which is featured on CoLab Radio. (Meanwhile, her grocery store market study helped result in a $15,000 grant for BCC to improve fresh food access on Broad Street through the J.P. Morgan Chase Community Development Competition.)

She is now a regular blogger and curator for CoLab Radio. Most recently, she organized the International Street Chair Pop-Up Show, an interactive civic art project with forty different people around the world through the blog. Aditi holds a B.S. in Urban Studies from Cornell University and is completed her Masters in City Planning at MIT in May 2010. She is committed to using different media tools to help organizations and individuals share their stories and inform community development.

Hinrich Mercker is director of the Development Policy Forum (Dialogue, Event Design and Event Management) in Berlin, which is part of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). He also works as a certified management coach in cooperation with coachhouse®. Hinrich participated in 2006/2007 in the international leadership programme Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors (ELIAS), which has been initiated by the MIT/Cambridge.

Since 2006 he is designing and implementing training programmes and workshops on Change Management and Leadership Development. 2005 and 2006 he advised the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank on the evaluation of World Bank support for client training.

Between 1997 and 2002, Hinrich lectured at the Otto-Suhr-Institute for Political Science, part of Berlin's Free University as well as at the University of Potsdam's Department of Economics and Social Sciences. Prior to that Hinrich worked for the German Foundation for International Development (DSE), where he headed the Public Administration Promotion Centre. His focus at DSE included environmental administration, local government, diplomatic services and schools of administration. He developed and conducted advanced training and dialog programs for executives from Asia, Africa and Central Asia, including a multi-year program with the Vietnamese Environmental Ministry in Hanoi.

In 1988 Hinrich earned a university degree in Protestant Theology from Georg-August-University in Göttingen (Germany), and he also studied at Serampore College in West Bengal (India). In 1990 Hinrich completed a postgraduate training program at the German Development Institute (DIE).

Ilma trained in Brazil as a nursing assistant and owned and ran a cleaning business. For the past 20 years she has been involved in community-building volunteer work in her home town of Framingham, Massachusetts. A long-standing member of the public school outreach and school development committees, Ilma also works on Framingham Town Hall anti- violence initiatives. Ilma recently directed the "Brazilian Women Helping Each Other Live Healthier," a cancer screening and community empowerment project for Brazilian immigrant women.

Most recently, Ilma earned the "Rising Star" award at the Center for Women's Enterprise in Boston for her work in founding "Handeira Linens and Lace," an international business that supports community development in northern Brazil among the indigenous Xukuru people. Ilma works in partnership with the Xukuru indigenous people marketing their fine handmade lace women's clothing and houseware to create a sustainable livelihood that also preserves their health, their land, and their cultural identity.

In addition to business development, Ilma has helped the Xukuru start several social initiatives in their community, including eye and vision exams for lacemakers, computer classes for teenagers, a farmer's seed bank, and a community-operated general store.

Manish Srivastava is a Systemic Change Consultant with expertise and passion for “coaching leaders and organizations towards seeking inner wholeness and co-creating a sustainable future”.

He brings more than 10 years of experience in organizational change and leadership development with Corporations (like Unilever, Marriott Hotels, Hasbro Inc, Coca-Cola etc), NGOs, Community and Government. His earlier assignments included: coaching top leaders from UNICEF, Unilever and Synergos Institute to evolve India’s pioneering multi-sectoral partnership to address complex societal problem of child malnutrition, and; leading large-scale learning and change project for 3500+ leaders across Unilever India and South Asia (that bagged the enterprise award).

Manish is a certified Organization Development (OD) and Change Catalyst (Level 5) from Indian Society for Applied Behavioral Sciences (ISABS). He holds Masters in Human Resource Management, Graduation in Sociology and Education and, international certificates in dialogue and facilitation.

Over the last 2 years he is based out of Boston area on a learning sabbatical that included a self-directed action-research with leading institutions (including PI, SoL, Harvard, MIT) focusing on Presencing, emerging leadership consciousness and sustainability. He has presented papers at Global OD Forums and delivered guest lectures at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad (IIMA), ISABS and Udai Pareek HR Labs in India.

Manish is currently engaged as a researcher, working with a team of dynamic social innovators at Presencing Institute and MIT CoLab on Transforming Capitalism project . He supports the team in: co-evolving online community platforms for transforming the collective consciousness towards a regenerative economy.

Wenda Tai served as the inaugural Managing Director of Emerald Cities Collaborative, a consortium of unions, labor groups, community organizations, social justice advocates, businesses, local government officials, development intermediaries research and technical assistance providers united around the goal of “greening” our cities in high-road ways that advance equal opportunity, shared wealth, and democracy for all involved. She built the infrastructure of the national organization, managed the business processes, and oversaw the administrative and financial protocols and policies. She transitioned to a consulting role over the last year and helped to pilot ECC’s capacity building program – developing technical assistance and training resources to enable local Emerald Cities members’ implementation of ECC’s mission. Prior to Emerald Cities, she worked in higher education helping interdisciplinary programs and initiatives move from start-up to institution-building stage. Her work focuses on developing best practices for capacity building, resource management and sustainable growth. Wenda also worked for the Massachusetts Port Authority as senior policy analyst on strategic land use planning at the airport and revenue-enhancing business arrangements for the airport and the seaport. Wenda began her career in grassroots advocacy, community organizing and union drives in New York City. Wenda has a BA in linguistics from Barnard College, Columbia University; and a Master in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Tumber is the author of American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and co-editor with Walter Earl Fluker of A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religion and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). She has a doctorate in U.S. history from the University of Rochester, and has worked as an editor for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Review. Her essays and reviews have appeared in both publications as well as in Book Forum, the Washington Post, In These Times, and Commonweal.