Our People

mbp@mit.edu
617-324-3759

Martha is an Urban Planner and a knowledge-based Development Economist. Her specialty is in consensus building. Ms. Bonilla studies the knowledge innovation process from invention in research through action in entrepreneurial start-ups and in innovation ecosystems generally. She holds graduate degrees in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in Economics from Colombia; in Promotion of Investment from Japan; and in Consensus Building from Switzerland. She has more than fourteen years of experience leading projects associated with urban and regional planning, innovation, and institutional capacity building.

Martha's work in CoLab involves creating experiences for students and communities in Latin America that take advantage of rapid urbanization and environmental challenges. In this work, Martha seeks to create opportunities for low-income communities to improve their standard of living through economic development. Her project foci include regional and rural systems efficiency of food markets; food chain distribution for low-income neighborhoods; transibility, health, and sanitation.

dayna@mit.edu
617-252-1380

Dayna has over 20 years of experience working in democratic engagement and social justice as an attorney, in philanthropy and in development. Dayna worked as a voting rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, litigating cases in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere in the South.

As an Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation, she funded initiatives that examined the relationship between democracy and race, changing racial dynamics and new conceptions of race in the U.S., as well as innovation in civil rights legal work. She also worked as an officer for the New York City Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. While associated with Public Interest Projects, a non-profit project management and philanthropic consulting firm based in New York City, she managed foundation collaboratives on social justice issues.

Most recently, Dayna directed the ELIAS Project, an MIT-based collaboration between business, NGOs and government that seeks to use processes of profound innovation to advance economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Dayna holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a juris doctor degree from New York University School of Law. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliff Colleges.

cjet@mit.edu
617-253-5746

Carlos manages Gainshare initiatives. His work involves developing the Gainshare concept, establishing partnerships, developing projects in collaboration with partners and supervising student engagement. As an architect and a planner, Carlos brings to CoLab a robust academic and hands-on experience in architectural design and construction, community and economic development.

Carlos was born in Lima, Peru were he lived for 18 years. He came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar in 1994 to study architecture at the University of Kansas. After receiving his Bachelor of Architecture in 1999, Carlos moved to Dallas, Texas, where he became a registered architect. In 2005 he served as an AmeriCorps volunteer for the Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity. Following his service he completed a Masters in City Planning at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

amandamt@mit.edu
617-253-3216

Amanda joined CoLab in July of 2009, and is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Lab. Prior to Colab, she was an assistant to a Boston businessman and ran a mental health unit in central Massachusetts.

Amanda earned her both her bachelor's degree in Psychology and Criminology and her post-graduate degree in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington in her native country of New Zealand.

alexam@mit.edu
617-253-3216

Alexa Mills is the Community Media Sprecialist at MIT's Community Innovator's Lab, where she has combined her passion for stories with her passion for bottom-up urban planning. Alexa works directly with communities to develop media that expresses their perspective on various issues. Alexa's body of work includes Predatory Tales, the true stories of predatory lending scams in Lawrence, Massachusetts; an interactive map of Tambo de Mora, Peru, hand-drawn by local teenagers seeking to describe their town to outsiders; and a series of short films about organizing to protect the environment from the coal industry in eastern Kentucky. All projects use various forms of media to express a community's perspective on an issue.

Alexa earned her BA in English, with a concentration in Medieval Literature, from Cornell University in 2003. She earned her Master's in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. Before attending MIT, Alexa directed the SAFE Victim Advocacy Program in the Domestic Violence Unit of the Washington D.C. city courthouse.

ruhfel@mit.edu
617.715.4307

Christina joined CoLab in October 2008 and is responsible for overseeing many of the administrative functions of the Lab. Prior to CoLab, she worked in MIT's Resource Development Department assisting with fund-raising activities for energy and environmental initiatives. Christina grew up in southeast Michigan where she spent four years as Associate Coordinator of a school-based water quality monitoring program on the Rouge River.

Christina has a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health from Oakland University and is currently enrolled in the environmental management masters degree program at the Harvard University Extension School.

astitely@mit.edu
617-253-7139

Amy Stitely became the U.S. Green Hub Program Director in June 2008. As a former architect, ESL teacher, youth mentor, and non-profit administrator, Amy draws upon a broad range of professional and personal experiences to inform the CoLab practice of “greening with equity.”

Prior to joining CoLab, Amy acted as a project manager for various architecture, planning, and development initiatives in New England. She managed a public housing capital needs assessment for the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development, led a research team studying the neighborhood effects of foreclosure, flooding, and vacant land disposition in the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and drafted the first 23 target neighborhood redevelopment plans for the Office of Recovery Management in New Orleans.

Amy is an alumna of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning Masters in City Planning Program. Her thesis looked at the political, spatial, and social integration of the Cambodian community in Lowell, Massachusetts and won the Donald Schon Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice.

bbuell@mit.edu

Becky works to develop the Green Hub, a project to focus on a missing element in the discussion of environmental sustainability-- the interrelated social and economic issues of poverty-reduction, finance, employment, education and beyond — necessary to bring about comprehensive and equitable green transformation in cities.

Becky's focus is on building partnerships with organizations in the southern Hemisphere as key participants in the Hub's activities and networks. She also works to develop links with the City of London, UK organizations, businesses and universities working on transition to low carbon futures.

Becky joins CoLab from Oxfam GB where she worked as Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. In this role she advised Oxfam's board and directors on organizational strategy and innovation, and managed a portfolio of projects, primarily relating to cross-sector collaboration on climate change, renewable energy, and sustainable supply chains. Until 2006, she held senior management positions for Oxfam in Central America and Mexico, and in Oxfam's Campaigns and Policy Division. She developed Oxfam's work on the private sector's role in poverty reduction, including the Oxfam-Unilever study on the company's "poverty footprint" in Indonesia and a range of cross-sectoral partnerships for poverty reduction.

Becky was an MIT-ELIAS Fellow in 2006-7 and continues to work with the ELIAS network on supporting large organizations and networks in developing their capacity to innovate.

flick@presencing.com

Judith Flick joins CoLab's fellowship program to build our partnership with the Presencing Institute and develop the second cohort of the ELIAS project. Judith was born in Greece, is of Dutch nationality and presently working in South Africa. She has more than 15 years experience in social development, mainly in Latin America and southern Africa.

Judith holds an MA in Social Anthropology from the Leiden University in The Netherlands, where she majored in Gender studies. This was followed by a post-masters degree in Management for Business Administration. In 2006 she enrolled in the ELIAS Project (Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors), a joint leadership development initiative of a multi-sectoral group of global organizations. Hosted by MIT in Boston, this 12-month course is based on the U-theory or "presencing". Over the past 6 years, Judith has worked as a Regional Director for the Oxfam Great Britain first in South America and later for southern Africa, leading considerable change management processes. In 2004, became the lead for Oxfam GB on HIV/AIDS globally, establishing a Global Centre of Learning (GCoL) on HIV/AIDS in Pretoria with the purpose of defining Oxfam GB's HIV/AIDS policy and facilitating learning about HIV/AIDS responses across the globe in search for more profound and lasting answers for people living in poverty.

In partnership with the Presencing Institute, led by Dr. C.O Scharmer, she has initiated and is co-facilitating a cross-sectoral group of leaders in Zambia, who are forging innovative ways to induce systemic changes that could change the present course of the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

joycej@belovedcommunitycenter.org

A former university professor and transportation research director, Joyce is currently Director of the Jubilee Institute, a community-based leadership development and training entity. Joyce assisted the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro (BCC) in developing the Jubilee Institute to provide institutional support, social and political analysis, training, and leadership development for the broad-based progressive movement in that city. Joyce also serves on the North Carolina NAACP State Executive Board, the Guilford Education Alliance Board, the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, and the Faith Community Church Council.

Recently Joyce, the BCC and the Greensboro Justice Fund joined with other Greensboro residents to establish the pace-setting Truth and Community Reconciliation Project. This initiative is designed to encourage truth, understanding, and healing throughout Greensboro related to the tragic murder of five labor and racial justice organizers by Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party members on November 3, 1979.

Joyce received a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from Duke University; a Master of Science in Adult Education from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; and pursued her Doctoral Studies in Higher Education Research and Administration from University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

kaeufer@mit.edu

Dr. Katrin Kaeufer leads the research effort at the Presencing Institute. Her current work includes research on social transformation, distributed leadership, and social technologies.

Kaeufer earned her MBA and Ph.D. from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. Her dissertation on Socially Responsible Banking was published as a book in 1996. While working with peace researcher Johan Galtung, she co-founded and directed "Peace Studies Around the World," a year-long global studies program. She has consulted with a global pharmaceutical company, the World Bank, a learning network of small and mid-sized companies and non-profit organizations, as well as with the United Nations Development Program in New York. She is also a founding member of the Presencing Institute.

mlazu@mit.edu

Malia's work is focused on exploring the opportunities for deepening democratic practice among youth through the development of an experimental Urban Lab. Specifically she is developing the Urban Lab by exploring effective models to reach urban youth using social media and networks to build communities and create critical citizens. The goal is to understand how this demographic interacts with social media and how social media platforms can be used by social justice organizations to build a network of urban youth that helps to support their meaningful participation in civic conversation and develop agency in shaping their future. America's current president and his stimulus package affords an opportunity to build bridges from the academy to main street and include young people of color in all levels of democratic dialogue. Malia is exploring how technology can allow such efforts to reach a large number of unengaged youth and track their network building and policy outcomes.

uyenle@mit.edu

Uyen Le is working at MIT's Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) as a program manager for the "Leveraging the Stimulus" program. In her most recent project, Uyen co-managed a team of Master in City Planning students who are working directly with community-based organizations and local municipalities in order to help these communities locate and qualify for appropriate stimulus funds. Through the CoLab, Uyen is also working as the research director and Emerald Cities Partnership convener with the California Construction Academy on topics related to green jobs and building retrofits.

Uyen also has four years of experience working directly with Vietnamese American communities on community organizing, community-based planning, economic development, and housing advocacy. Uyen worked in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina as a Dan Than fellow for the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies (NAVASA). Following her fellowship, Uyen continued to provide consulting services to Gulf Coast communities in the areas of market analysis, industry analysis, and small business development.

Uyen graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Master degree in City Planning and from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor degree in Political Science.

libmac@mit.edu

Libby McDonald is a writer and a documentary filmmaker. She recently published the book The Toxic Sandbox: The Truth About Environmental Toxins and Our Children's Health (Penguin, 2007) and was featured on more than 60 radio shows, talking about how environmental pollutants impact the social, cognitive, and physical development of our children. Libby has written, directed, and produced film and television for two decades. Film and TV credits include New School Order (Sundance Film Festival Official Entry & national PBS broadcast), The Forbidden Land (National PBS Broadcast), Terror Town (funded by ITVS) and the PBS weekly TV show Bookmark with Lewis Lapham. An advocate for children, Ms. McDonald launched and served as director of The Learning Community Charter School, an alternative K-8 public school for disadvantaged children in Jersey City, New Jersey and Lakeside Preschool, a Waldorf-inspired school in the Adirondack Mountains. Libby is the Director of Educational Initiatives for God's Green America, a communications and consulting company driving a national initiative to educate, refocus and enable millions of Americans to create a new, green America for the 21st century through the mobilization of faith-based communities.

mendonca@mit.edu

Sebastiao, is a Brazilian who has lived in Peru most of his life. In the 80s he co-managed a Peruvian NGO focused on rural and urban development, and in the 90s he became an independent consultant in strategic planning for cities and major institutions. He has worked with national and local governments throughout Latin America, as well as foundations, microfinance institutions, companies and international development organizations, with a diversity of constituencies, such as peasants, public authorities, businessmen and development practitioners.

Sebastiao's work involves development of cognitive methods for community-based knowledge capture and creation, and development of mechanisms for detecting and promoting innovative initiatives in communities. He has written six books in the last 20 years, including "Creacion de Futuros," A study of strategic thinking in communities and organizations. His present inquiry is how to stimulate innovation in communities, primarily in disenfranchised sectors, and how to promote institutional support to creative people.

For more on work by Sebastiao and other CoLab Fellows, click here.

hinrich.mercker@inwent.org

Hinrich Mercker heads the Berlin-based division "Environment, Energy and Water" which is part of InWEnt — Capacity Building International, Germany. He also works as a certified management coach. Hinrich participated in 2006/2007 in the programme Emerging Leaders For Innovation Across Sectors (ELIAS), which has been initiated by the MIT/Cambridge.

Since 2006 he is designing and implementing in-house training programmes on Change Management and Capacity Development for managerial InWEnt staff applying principles of Theory U. 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 admini¬stration. 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 Institute for Development Policy (DIE).

ctumber@mit.edu

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.

xbriggs@mit.edu

Xav is a sociologist whose work is focused on racial and ethnic diversity, democratic problem-solving, and inequality in cities around the globe. He is the founding director of The Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT and Working Smarter in Community Development, two online resources for "self-directed" learning by people and institutions worldwide.

His last book, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press, 2005) won the 2007 Paul Davidoff Award, given every two years to the top book in planning with a focus on racial and economic justice. His next major work, Democracy as Problem-Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe, will be published by The MIT Press in 2008. He teaches courses in collaborative problem-solving, strategy and management, the community development potential in "greening" cities, and the history and politics of planning as a practice. Beyond his nationally awarded research on young people, cities, segregation, and opportunity, he has been a community planner in the South Bronx and other inner-city areas, a senior advisor to The White House and Congress while at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a consultant to leading national and international organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank. He spent six years on the faculty of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Xav has been an expert witness in civil rights litigation and an editorial board member of leading journals in housing policy, urban sociology, and planning. He is a member of the Aspen Roundtable on Community Change, the governing boards of public policy analysis and housing advocacy organizations, and other groups.

He was raised in the Caribbean and educated at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia universities. Xav and his family live in Boston's culturally and economically diverse Dorchester neighborhood.

lorlene@mit.edu

Lorlene is an urban planning scholar, educator, and practitioner who thinks that planning scholarship ("inquiry") should be useful to practitioners on the ground and planning "practice" should inform and advance scholarship. Organized according to these beliefs, Lorlene's online portfolio deliberately positions planning education ("instruction") in the center because she sees the classroom as an effective bridge between planning scholarship and practice.

Lorlene, who is a faculty member of the HCED Group, the UIS Group, Landscape + Urban Initiative, and the Community Innovators Lab, is also the Project Director for MIT@Lawrence — a HUD-funded and regional campus-community partnership between the Institute and the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts. As part of this initiative, Lorlene and Ezra Glenn co-teach what is commonly known as the Lawrence Practicum (11.423 - Information, Asset- building, and the Immigrant City). Students who take this service-learning practicum strategically build on earlier student contributions by strengthening existing relationships with community leaders and residents to increase affordable housing opportunities in a city where homeownership rates are less than half of state and national averages.

With training and experience in both City Planning and Landscape Architecture, Lorlene's core interests include community economic development, downtown revitalization, planning pedagogy, and spatial information technologies. Her research has been published in academic journals such as Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Economic Affairs, International Journal of Public Administration, Geography Compass, Cityscape, and the Journal of Urban Technology. Lorlene continually keeps a foot in the world of planning practice as co-founder and General Partner of Urban Revitalizers, a women and minority-owned real estate development and planning consultancy located in Boston, Massachusetts (see www.UrbanRevitalizers.com).

Before joining MIT, she supervised the crime analysis and mapping unit at the Philadelphia Police Department and worked as a senior planner for the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Lorlene and her wife reside in Boston's eclectic Bay Village neighborhood with their two lively Ethiopian American children.

Click here to view Lorlene's portfolio.

seidman@mit.edu

Karl is an economic development practitioner with 25 years of experience at a community development corporation, in state and local government, and managing a consulting practice. His interests include local economic development strategy, development finance, public purpose real estate development, and commercial district revitalization. His experience includes the preparation of economic development plans and strategies, the design, management, and evaluation of development finance programs, and the financing and supervision of complex development projects.

During his tenure in Massachusetts state government, he authored laws that established two Massachusetts business finance agencies, implemented financing programs and helped capitalize a $120 million state real estate finance and development authority, and oversaw implementation planning for the redevelopment of the Gloucester State Fish Pier and Fort Devens. As a consultant, he has prepared over twenty economic development and downtown revitalization plans, completed market and feasibility studies for numerous development projects and evaluated federal, state, and local government and foundation initiated economic and community development programs. His publications include the textbook Economic Development Finance and Revitalizing Commerce for American Cities: A Practitioner's Guide to Urban Main Street Programs.

He is a board member of the Northeast Economic Developers Association and Boston Main Streets Foundations and serves on advisory committees for the Urban Markets Initiative and National New Markets Fund. Karl teaches Economic Development Finance, Economic Development Planning, Revitalizing Urban Main Streets, and Economic Development Planning Skills (IAP).

jt71@mit.edu

Phil Thompson is an urban planner and political scientist. He received a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University in 1977, a M.U.P. from Hunter College in 1986, and a PhD. in Political Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1990. In the early 1990s, Phil worked as Deputy General Manager of the New York Housing Authority, and as Director of the Mayor's Office of Housing Coordination.

Phil is a frequent advisor to trade unions in their efforts to work with immigrant and community groups across the United States. Phil's most recent academic work includes a 2004 review of public health interventions in poor black communities (written with Arline Geronimus) published in the Du Bois Review, entitled "To Denigrate, Ignore, or Disrupt: The Health Impact of Policy-induced Breakdown of Urban African American Communities of Support," an article entitled "Judging Mayors" in the June 2005 issue of Perspectives on Politics, and a recent book called Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Struggle for Deep Democracy published by Oxford University Press. Following Hurricane Katrina, Phil coordinated MIT's technical assistance efforts in the Gulf.

ipaixao@mit.edu

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.

For more on work by Ilma and other CoLab Fellows, click here.