AHI STAFF
David Smith, Founder
Susan Leff, Senior Vice President of Development
Deidre Lal Schmidt, Senior Advisor
Conrad E. Egan, Senior Advisor
Manal Shalaby, Senior Financial Advisor
Casius Pealer, Senior Sustainable Building Advisor
Bernadette Baird-Zars, Land and Partnerships Advisor
Maysa Sabah Shocair, MENA Advisor
Lindsay Jonker, Special Project Advisor
Evans Essienyi, West Africa Associate
Janaki Kibe, South Asia Associate
Josie McVitty, North Africa Associate
Pilar Martinez-Gohring, Central America Associate
Cristina Garmendia, Associate
David A. Smith
Founder
David A. Smith is the founder of the Affordable Housing Institute, which develops sustainable housing financial ecosystems worldwide. With more than 30 years direct expeience in affordable housing, David uniquely combines the roles of practitioner and theoretician, participant and policymaker.
His work as an international housing finance policy advisor/ program developer encompasses projects on Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Ireland, Kenya, Middle East, Panama, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Turkey, and United Kingdom, and he is a much sought-after speaker on affordable housing issues around the world. In the USA, David provides high-quality analysis to Congress, the Millennial Housing Commission, CBO, HUD, and others, and was a principal member of the 1996 Senate mark-to-market working group. A 1975 Harvard graduate, he is an award-winning author with more than 100 published articles in real estate, valuation, and policy periodicals, and a textbook, as well as an influential blog.
David is also founder and Chairman of Recap Real Estate Advisors. (formerly CASFAS, and before that, Recap Advisors), a Boston-based firm that specializes in complex multifamily asset problems, with an active practice area in the finance of existing affordable housing. In this capacity, he was recently awarded the 2009 Vision Award for his lifetime achievement in affordable housing by The National Housing & Rehabilitation Association (NH&RA). Detailed biography and PDF.
dsmith{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Susan Leff
Senior Vice President of Development
After 30+ years in commercial real estate, including affordable housing finance, Susan Leff comes to AHI to fuse her deep knowledge of affordable housing finance to a longstanding commitment to non‐profit work and social issues affecting lower-income women and children. As AHI's SVP for Development, she builds the organization's philanthropic, institutional, and corporate relationships and raises AHI's revenue base so we can expand our activities globally; in addition, Susan consults with AHI clients and investee entities on their financial product lines, systems and procedures, and organizational development.
Susan's experience encompasses both conventional and innovative capital structures for private and non‐profit developers and investors. During her banking career, Susan has held leadership roles with the nation's major financial institutions; at Shawmut Bank (now a unit of Bank of America), she led their affordable housing and community development debt and equity practice under the Community Reinvestment Act. At Continental Wingate Capital (an affordable housing debt platform), she was national director of originations and marketing and served on both the loan committee and corporate board. After a stint at Goedecke & Company (a national boutique mortgage banker), she was regional market manager for KeyBank, overseeing a $500 million mortgage portfolio, and then SVP and regional market manager for Wells Fargo, leading a business unit that originated and underwrote all types of debt and equity, including construction and interim loans, permanent first and mezzanine debt, and equity both
economic and tax-advantaged.
Throughout her career, Susan's banking and lending work has been paralleled by an equally strong commitment to the social sector and the built environment. Starting as a co‐author of the book version of This Old House, she has served on the boards of the Boston Architecture Foundation, the Boston Children's Museum (chair), Greater Boston Habitat For Humanity, Tufts Medical Center (member of the CEO Search Committee and Chair of the Governance Committee), the Massachusetts affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (chair), and the Advisory Committee of MIT's LIST Visual Arts Center (chair).
From her co‐founding of NEWIRE (New England Women In Real Estate) more than twenty years ago, Susan has always believed in giving back to the next generation of leaders; her efforts have been recognized with NEWIRE's leadership Award, the Real Estate Finance Association's Distinguished Service Award, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from B'nai B'rith's Realty Unit. A graduate of the University of Chicago (bachelor's), Princeton (master's), and Boston University (MBA), she was previously fluent in French, and now begs indulgence for her pronunciation and syntax.
Deidre Lal Schmidt
Senior Advisor
As AHI's inaugural Executive Director, Deidre Schmidt shaped AHI's vision into tangible and ongoing work in both research and consulting spheres, and helped grow the organization's revenue, activities, network, and impact. She has over 18 years' work in affordable housing finance throughout the US, plus several years' academic study on international challenges of housing, urbanization, and finance. She is both a creative and tenacious innovator in affordable housing development and finance, and a passionate advocate of housing affordability for very low income or marginalized urban populations.
International study of informal settlements. Before her tenure at AHI, she completed a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she concentrated on the phenomenon of informal settlement globally and shared her considerable experience in US affordable housing finance and development. At Harvard, she studied and advised on and traveled to Mexico, Brazil and China; worked with Columbia University's SlumLab project and the Graduate School of Design's informal urban settlement landscape architecture seminar; and spoke at Harvard, MIT, and Peking University. A year earlier, Deidre was selected as German Marshall Fellow representing the US on housing and urbanization study tours across Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Germany, the Slovak Replublic, and Serbia. She has also visited informal settlements in Peru, Bolivia, Kenya and South Africa.
Deep experience in US affordable housing development and finance. Before Harvard's Loeb Fellowship, Deidre spent 16 years in real estate development, finance and consulting across the United States, tackling both complicated financial transactions using multiple resources, and also policy challenges in neglected income and tenure configurations. As a consultant, she was part of a team (working with Greater Metropolitan Housing Corporation and the Northcountry Cooperative Development Fund) that pursued preservation transactions for manufactured home communities. Because residents own their physical structure, but not the land on which their homes sit, they face economic dysfunctionality – and political marginalization – strikingly similar to land-tenure problems in the global south.
Before that, Deidre was Vice President of Development for Brighton Development, a US for-profit Mission Entrepreneurial Entity (MEE) whose mixed-use and mixed-income developments are credited with the residential revival of the Minneapolis riverfront. There she developed properties from conception to completion, using the full range of US resources, including Section 8, HOME, CDBG, TIF, 501 c3 and Housing Revenue Bonds, Low Income Housing and Historic Tax Credits, and philanthropic sources. As Acquisitions Manager for the National Equity Fund (a national MEE subsidiary of LISC), she underwrote new affordable housing investments.
In her first position after graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in International Relations, Diplomacy, Deidre was first Project Manager and then Director of National Consulting for Artspace Projects, Inc., a non-profit MEE developer of live/work projects for low-income artists. She worked in historic preservation, cultural facility development/management and cooperative ownership/leasehold cooperative models. Via consulting, Deidre facilitated the organization’s national expansion, increasing earned income, identifying development project opportunities and initiating a national conference and information exchange among arts and development practitioners.
dschmidt{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Conrad E. Egan
Senior Advisor
In May, 2010, Conrad Egan joined AHI as its Washington-based Senior Advisor, the latest accomplishment in a distinguished career that spans over four decades of service to and leadership in the cause of affordable housing.
As AHI's Senior Advisor, Conrad provides comprehensive knowledge of the US affordable housing ecosystem, both in its present form and as it has evolved; he understands not only what is, but why it is and how its shape is a reflection of shifting political and policy priorities. This is an immense resource to affordable housing financial program and product designers, whether from among AHI's partners and colleagues or with policy makers and resource providers. Equally significant, Conrad maintains AHI's continuous presence in the nation's capital, home also to the World Bank, USAID, and numerous other critical global stakeholders.
Public service in the cause of affordable housing has been a hallmark of his career, which began in 1965 in Detroit, where he worked four years on housing and community development initiatives in community, local, and state levels. Moving to the U S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1969, he spent 17 years with the Department, rising from field level community development, through a series of promotions culminating in the senior executive service position of director of the Office of Multifamily Housing Management. As director of OMHM, Conrad was charged with broad oversight of HUD's several million multifamily rental apartments nationwide, including developing policies to provide appropriate government response to new housing finance initiatives such as resyndication.
From HUD, Conrad moved in 1986 to NHP, Inc., at the time the nation's largest owner and manager of multifamily rental, with over 450 properties encompassing 58,500 apartments under all HUD and most state HFA financing and subsidy programs. As executive vice president, had the dual roles of developing asset management into an NHP core competency and of representing NHP's perspectives on legislative and regulatory matters before both Congress and the Administration. In 1993, with the new administration, the call to service came again and Conrad returned to HUD as special assistant, first to
the deputy assistant secretary for multifamily programs and then to the HUD secretary.
In 1996, Conrad became director of policy and in 2002 president of the National Housing Conference (NHC). Founded in 1931, NHC is the nation's oldest housing policy advocacy organization, dedicated to ensuring safe, decent and affordable housing for all Americans. From then until his retirement in 2010 – with a one-year leave of absence as executive director of the Congressionally created Millennial Housing Commission – he strengthened NHC's relevance and sharpened its focus on community and multifamily housing development, public housing redevelopment, and affordable housing finance.
In addition to his professional commitment to housing issues, Conrad is active in the housing community, serving as a commissioner for the Fairfax County, Virginia, Redevelopment and Housing Authority (FCRHA) for eight years, six of them as chairman. Currently co-chair of the Fairfax County Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, he serves on the Governing Board of the County's program to prevent and eliminate homelessness, and was recently appointed to Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell's State Housing Policy Group.
cegan{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Manal Shalaby
Senior Financial Advisor
With over 27 years' experience in residential mortgage and Islamic finance, Manal Shalaby is an expert in housing policies, Islamic funding structures, investment promotion, housing microfinance, financial analysis, economic feasibility studies, privatization and restructuring studies, mergers and acquisitions, as well as due diligence on behalf of national and international investors.
As a key advisor for a USAID $45 million program to develop a privatesector non-banking finance industry in Egypt, she served as a Senior Financial Advisor and Task Leader for the project's largest component. In that role she reported directly to the Chief of Party and worked closely with the Chairman of Egypt's Mortgage Finance Authority, providing specialized technical assistance to activate mortgage finance in Egypt. This included annual work plans, milestones, and budgets, as well as supervising the work of short-term expatriates.
In connection with the first liquidity facility established in Egypt, as well as Egypt's Guarantee and Subsidy Fund, she worked on institutional strengthening, capacity building and training for staff of the Mortgage Finance Authority; development and implementation of the Authority’s strategic business plan; regulatory and supervisory functions for on-site and off-site inspection based on international risk based approach practices; disclosure and consumer protection functions; specialized training, certification and designation programs to lenders, appraisals, foreclosure agents, judges and mortgage brokers, including Training of Trainers programs; introduction of a number of traditional mortgage finance products applicable to the market, as well as Islamic finance alternative products; and regulations, business plan, and offering memorandum for the first Mortgage Refinance Company.
In the regulatory realm, she provided technical assistance in capacity building, training, strategic planning, product development, and devised policies and rules of prudential regulations and consumer protection for Egypt's Capital Market Authority and the Mortgage Finance Authority. This included due diligence assessments of non-bank financial regulators preparatory to their merger.
An accredited professional trainer, fluent in English and Arabic, Ms. Shalaby has conducted extensive local and international training programs, Islamic funding and related products, cost recovery strategies, credit rating and risk analysis, primary dealers, cash flow projections and financial modeling, working capital management, and economic feasibility studies. These were associated with the Arab Academy and Banking Institute, Regional International Training Institute (RITI), Environmental Quality International (EQI), Chemonics International, the Capital Market Authority, Mortgage Finance Authority, and KPMG. She has worked closely with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Bank, Ford Foundation, KPMG, Deloitte Touche, Arthur Andersen, Chemonics International and Wilbur Smith Associates.
A graduate of the American University in Cairo in business administration and computer science, with highest honors, she has attended a number of international specialized training programs, including Wharton's International Housing Finance Program (June, 2007).
mshalaby{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Casius Pealer
Senior Sustainable Building Advisor
With a dual background in architecture and law, Casius Pealer has over 15 years of experience in affordable housing and community development. His experience spans affordable housing finance, public housing law and regulations, architecture and building design, and urban redevelopment and regeneration.
Casius is a leading national expert in green and sustainable innovations as they apply to residential properties. His diverse experience is especially helpful in devising policy and project-level solutions that cut across finance, construction, legal and operations challenges. As the first Director of Affordable Housing at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in Washington, DC, Casius spearheaded the USGBC's entry into that sector, which is a natural leader in greening residential property.
Casius is an industry thought leader, serving as 2011 Chair of the American Institute of Architects’ Residential Knowledge Community; board member of the Association for Community Design; board member of the ASU Stardust Center for Affordable Homes and the Family; and member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at the Tulane University School of Architecture. His writing on housing and development issues has been published in the ABA Journal on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, Affordable Housing Finance (where he was a regular contributor on green building issues), Architecture Magazine, and Architectural Record. He also authored an article for the American Bar Association’s recent update of the Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development – part of a new section entitled “The Future of Affordable Housing.”
As the Gulf Coast Director of the US non-profit Builders of Hope, Casius was responsible for the US's largest documented house-relocation project – rescuing homes that would otherwise have been demolished, moving them to new infill sites, and creating energy-efficient affordable housing for lowincome families. Casius is still based in New Orleans, LA, and continues to work on affordable housing issues in the U.S. and internationally as Principal of Oystertree Consulting, L3C. Before his work at USGBC, Casius was a law associate in Washington, DC, representing public housing entities in Chicago, Memphis, Albany NY, and Washington (Anacostia) on large scale redevelopment projects. During this time, Casius was also the Assistant General Counsel for Real Estate and Development at the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA), where he helped implement a $26 million energy-efficient retrofit of over 5,000 public housing apartments.
Casius coordinates the capstone research projects for the Master of Sustainable Real Estate Development (MSRED) program at Tulane University, where he is an adjunct lecturer. He is a LEED Accredited Professional, certified USGBC Faculty, and is licensed to practice law in New York and the District of Columbia. Casius has a Bachelor's in Architecture and Master's in Architecture from Tulane, and a law degree cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School.
cpealer{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Bernadette Baird-Zars
Land and Partnerships Advisor
An expert in urban land use in Middle East and Latin America, Bernadette Baird-Zars' professional fluencies include urban planning and economics, housing finance, and historic/cultural heritage in transitioning economies. She has worked on-site for urban planning projects in Colombia; India (Delhi); northern Pakistan; Syria (Aleppo and Damascus); and Turkey.
For the last several years her principal focus has been Aleppo, one of the world's oldest continuously-inhabited cities, where she lived and worked for three years with the Aga Khan Development Network in the historic center, and co-founded their socioeconomic development initiatives in the historic center.
Ms. Baird-Zars was a Fulbright Scholar in urban development and has been the recipient of many competitive fellowships in the US and abroad. Before coming to AHI, her recent work included projects on informal settlement and public housing upgrading in Cartagena, Colombia, documenting cultural heritage in the Northern Areas of Pakistan, and developing homebuyer financing with the Salvation Army's EnviRenew initiative in New Orleans.
A graduate of Swarthmore with a special honors major in political science and education, Bernadette recently completed her master's in city planning at MIT with her thesis on historic narratives, zoning decisions, and housing values in Syria. She is a certified Spanish-English interpreter, and is professionally fluent in standard and colloquial Levantine Arabic.
bbairdzars{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Maysa Sabah Shocair
MENA Advisor
Maysa Sabah Shocair is the MENA Advisor to the Affordable Housing Institute. Over the past 15 years, she has worked in various capacities on affordable housing projects in the US and the MENA region.
During her stay in the US, she gained practical experience in developing affordable housing and in evaluating projects and programs. In Boston, she managed the development of an affordable housing project and identified strategies to prevent affordable apartments from being converted to market rate units, as part of her work at the Fenway CDC. She also worked as an analyst at Mass Housing, Massachusetts’ affordable housing bank, evaluating the performance of two key rental programs. In New York, she was a consultant for the Phipps Houses Group, New York City’s oldest and largest non-profit developer of affordable housing, where she evaluated the performance of rental properties and studied the affordable housing market in the Bronx and in the East Village. In addition, she regularly volunteered at Habitat-for-Humanity’s building sites.
Maysa also has research, policy, and educational experience in affordable housing. Prior to joining AHI, she was the Director of Programs at the Urban Land Institute’s Middle East center where she participated in research projects, conferences, and seminars focusing on affordable housing. Earlier at the Arab Monetary Fund, she surveyed national housing finance schemes in the MENA region.
She holds a Bachelor Degree in Architecture from the American University of Beirut, a Master Degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MPhil Degree in Real Estate Finance from the University of Cambridge. She is a regular speaker at affordable housing conferences across the region and is fluent in English and Arabic. She lives in Dubai with her husband and two children.msabah{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Lindsay Jonker
Special Project Advisor
Trained as an architect and development master planner, Lindsay Jonker provides AHI with both sectoral expertise and experience in half a dozen countries around the world, particularly China, central Asia, several Gulf region countries, and South Africa. He has lived and worked extensively abroad in multicultural and multilingual environments, particularly in other emerging markets, as both project or team leader and work colleague in delivering master plans comprised of mixed used and mixed-income housing.
As director of The Salvation Army's EnviRenew program in New Orleans, Louisiana, Lindsay has administered a two-year closed-ended $12 million private capital fund focused on promoting post-Katrina long-term affordability for homeowners through advocating for a comprehensive energy-efficient building standard for households and neighborhoods. Over the next 18 months, this initiative will deliver 125 new energy efficient homes and over 400 energy-efficient packages for existing residents in five separate neighborhoods in the Greater New Orleans. Acting as a mission entrepreneurial entity (MEE), EnviReview has played a key role in developing the city’s community resiliency. Lindsay also sits on the working committee for development of a New Orleans wide Community Land Trust.
Prior to leading this effort, Lindsay graduated with distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he studied housing and urbanization with a specific focus on assessing the compatibility of sustainability and energy-efficient efforts in affordable housing. Lindsay came to the United States as a Harvard South Africa Fellow (now called the Mandela Rhodes Fellowship) where he spent the time studying real estate finance and development. Before Harvard, Lindsay was based in London and Dubai leading project development teams for the Urban and Regional Planning Division for Halcrow, a multinational infrastructure engineering firm. As lead master planning advisor to the executive leadership of real estate and investment company Sama Dubai on the Lagoons project in Dubai, a multi-billion-dollar, 70,000,000 square foot mixed-use master plan. He undertook the same role for Dubai's Sama Al Jadaf and Business Bay projects, and has led the master planning and engineering teams for Emaar’s Canyon Views project in Pakistan, the Saraya Islands project in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, and the Red Sea Gateway Terminal at the Jeddah Islamic Port (JIP) in Saudi Arabia.
After graduating from the University of Cape Town with a Bachelor of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies with distinction, Lindsay worked as an architect in South Africa, Germany, and London. His work with Hamilton Associates included completing mixed-income and affordable housing developments in Slough and Guildford, and the luxury market Hyde Park One (previously Bowater House) project in Knightsbridge. During his time working in Beijing, he led the design and installation of street furniture for the Beijing Metro’s Line 17 station platforms. In South Africa, he was the project architect for the Clock Tower Precinct development part of the award-winning Cape Town Waterfront. He has also completed a post-graduate residence building for Peninsula Technikon in Cape Town, and two primary schools in semi-formal settlements in the greater Cape Town metropolitan area.
ljonker{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Evans Essienyi
West Africa Associate
Evans Essienyi’s multi-disciplinary work experience and academic credentials establish him at the forefront of affordable housing entrepreneurs in West Africa. Evans is an expert in structuring low income housing projects, designing affordable houses, building cost estimation, financing options, project development, negotiation, business strategy and entrepreneurship.
Evans is a trained Building Technologist from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana and a Real Estate developer (MsRED) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Evans comes to AHI with 6+ years of hands-on experience in structuring low income housing projects, designing affordable houses, building cost estimating, financing options and project development in developing countries.
Evans has a rare entrepreneurial perspective to housing and construction in Africa. In 2007, Evans founded and ran ASK1 Company Limited, a general contracting company. As the CEO, Evans managed the development of building projects across Ghana including the senior officers’ bungalow at Gomoah Budumburam refugee camp and a 12-classroom block at Gomoah Fete. As a site engineer with Antartic Contract Works Limited, Evans supervised the efficient delivery of building projects of varying scales and complexities, including construction of the most modern bus terminal in Ghana at Achimota, the Koforidua Poly Hostel, and the office of the former Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs.
At the Center for Real Estate at MIT, Evan’s masters thesis examined strategies to eliminate the challenges of implementing Industrialized Building Systems in Ghana and low income countries. Through an evaluation of both successful and failed case studies of Industrialized Building Systems in various parts of the world, Evans concluded that most developing countries do not presently have the capacities to successfully implement IBS. From his market analysis, developing countries are likely to have more success if they adopt partial prefabrication strategies to address their housing shortages.
In 2010, Evans was selected as a Legatum Fellow at MIT, a highly competitive fellowship that selects individuals from across all disciplines in MIT who demonstrate the “potential to create innovative, sustainable, for-profit enterprises that promote prosperity in low-income countries and who are committed to implementing their business plans upon graduation.” See a video of Evans at http://legatum.mit.edu/profile?pid=839&back=3#top. During his fellowship, Evans worked on the concept of expandable houses as a means of increasing home ownership in Ghana and developing countries. Evans developed a prototype of an expandable house that would be feasible to develop and culturally adapted to the West African context.
Evans is a native of Ghana. He is fluent in English and two popular Ghanaian languages, and conversant in French. Before moving to Boston, Evans lived in Ghana for over 30 years and travelled around West Africa.
eessienyi{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Janaki Kibe
South Asia Associate
As AHI's South Asia Associate, currently based in New Delhi, Janaki Kibe identifies, engages with, and then supports AHI's clients throughout the region, so as to create sustainable communities that link together livelihoods, housing, health, and education.
A trained economist with a Masters in Urban Planning, Janaki connects multi‐disciplinary skills, including financial analysis, community development, and design – a valuable mix given that housing and home improvement are multi‐sectoral problems requiring solutions that combine capital, layout and configuration, and policy.
Janaki has global experience in both evaluating and designing/ implementing housing improvement and urban upgrading schemes. In Ahmedabad, India, she worked with the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) to assess the economic and social impact of relocating poor families to new housing. This entailed in‐depth interviews with over 120 families, then integrating detailed financial and economic analysis. Regarding South Africa, she worked with the Institute for International Urban Development (IIUD) to help design a regeneration strategy for a predominantly black township in Ladysmith. That work included both mapping the township and then envisioning and designing a new motorized and pedestrian network for it.
During her time in Boston, Janaki helped manage the endowments of several non‐profits, universities, foundations, and high net‐worth individuals as a consulting associate with the investment management firm Cambridge Associates. She also spent a summer as an analyst at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, where she helped research new investment opportunities.
In graduate school at Harvard, Janaki specialized in international development and housing, often examining low‐income housing design in the developing world. Her broader academic research often looked at ways to improve community engagement efforts, especially in the context of gentrifying neighborhoods. She designed and led a community engagement strategy as part of the Greater Boston Affordable Housing Development Competition. In 2011, after receiving a Doctoral Student Real Estate Academic Initiative Award, she used the proceeds to travel to Istanbul to research the effects of government‐led urban renewal plans on marginalized communities. This included interviewing community leaders, public housing officials, professors, architects, planners, and activists.
Having lived in Istanbul and Washington DC, Janaki is now based in New Delhi, India. Fluent in English and Hindi, and conversant in Spanish, she has a Harvard AB in Economics and a Masters in Urban Planning from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
jkibe{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Josephine (Josie) McVitty
North Africa Associate
Josie McVitty's research into and work on affordable housing has taken her around the world (including India, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Lebanon) and from the physical and engineering side to the challenges of working in the informal urban built environment
With the Centre of Policy Research in Delhi, she synthesized urban topics ranging from housing, environment, transportation and economy, and participated at the inaugural Habitat Summit on sustainable urban development in India. As an intern at Grameen Bank in Dhaka, she trained in microfinance and social enterprise development and did field resaerch throughout rural Bangladesh on multiple Grameen enterprises related to health, nutritition, water, education, and renewable energy.
As the founder of the Auckland (NZ) Chapter of Engineers Without Borders, Josie led all fundraising and management for the inaugaral project, sending a team of student engineers to Tanna Island, Vanuatu to work with the local community to design improved water supply systems. Subsequently, her chapter of EWB has grown to make a notable impact on improving the living environment for communities in New Zealand and the South Pacific while allowing local professional and student engineers to contribute their knowledge toward poverty reduction activities.
After an undergraduate degree from the University of Auckland, where she won several academic prizes including top of the dean's list and top-ranked engineering graduate, she took a Fulbright Scholarship to Harvard's Graduate School of Engineering, where she completed a Masters in Environmental Engineering with emphasis on the urban environment, covering atmospheric sciences, both local air pollution and global climate change models, as well as water resource management,
environmental impact assessments, and the economics and policy ecosystems that influence the built urban environment. Currently she is pursuing a double masters in International Cooperation and Urban Development in the European Union-sponsored Mundus Urbano program in Darmstadt, Germany.
Born in New Zealand, Josie has also lived in Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Lebanon, South Africa, and the US, as well as having traveled extensively throughout every continent except Antarctica. She has a working knowledge of conversational French and gets by in German, Spanish, and Arabic.
jmcvitty{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Pilar Martinez-Gohring
Central America Associate
For more than a decade, Pilar Martinez‐Gohring has been helping to create and build social enterprises and Mission Entrepreneurial Entities (MEEs) in Latin America, Europe, and South Asia, experience and abilities she brings to her role as AHI's Central American Associate.
As a Framework Change Manager for Ashoka, the world's leading incubator and network of social entrepreneurs, she has been a key team member in Ashoka's development research into Hybrid Value Chains™ (HVC). These linkages connect profit‐oriented formal businesses with impact-oriented citizen sector organizations (CSOs) in mutually productive contractual and financial arrangements whose products and services improve the lives of poor and informally employed people.
Because so many informal workers are women or home-based, improving and formalizing housing are critical elements in this work. Initiatives on which Pilar has worked have been supported by business entrepreneurs and prominent donor organizations such as USAID, National Democratic Institute, and the W.K. Kellogg and Hilti Foundations, which funded her and Ashoka's work on affordable housing business planning and implementation in Latin America. Her research has been featured at industry events and in the groundbreaking book Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid.
Before Ashoka, Pilar led one of Nicaragua's largest grassroots organizations, FIBRAS (Fundacion Iberoamericana de las Culturas), dramatically raising its revenues via major grants from the Open Society Institute (OSI), National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and others, and transforming it into one of the world's most respected CSOs. Further, as the organization’s spokesperson, she appeared on local and international media outlets such as the BBC, CNN en Espanol, and The Economist. This work grew naturally out of her roles in founding a youth-led international network, Jovenes por Nicaragua, which provides scholarship and mentorship opportunities for high‐school students, and in establishing the OSI-supported Nicaraguan Civil Society Leadership Institute. In its first six years, the Institute has graduated hundreds of change agents and leaders who entered the public arena.
Born in Nicaragua, Pilar has lived in Belgium, France, Spain and the US, and has worked in 25 more countries. A graduate of Wheaton College (Massachusetts) where she was awarded a Balfour Scholarship (top incoming students), she is fluent in English, Spanish, and French.
pilumartinez{@}gmail{dot}com
Cristina Garmendia
Associate
The challenge of connecting observable evidence to socially impactful activities has led Cristina Garmendia from architecture school into the work world and back to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she is a 2013 candidate for a Masters in Public Policy. Prior to enrollment, she researched the impact of urban development on public health, of university-nonprofit partnership structure on innovative affordable housingand microfinance products and programs on progress out of poverty.
As a project manager with the Prevention Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, Cristina managed the first health impact assessment in the Midwest with an interdisciplinary team of researchers in social work, public health, and design. In partnership with a diversity of community stakeholders, this project worked to maximize the positive health impacts of a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) redevelopment in a commercial corridor. She also interned for four months in Port-au-Prince, where as part of the Social Performance Management department of Haiti's leading microfinance institution, Fonkoze, she sought to quantify the positive social impact of Fonkoze’s financial products and programs.
Coupled with her commitment to quantitative rigor is a drive to start new innovative activities. When she founded the Rehab Studio Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, Cristina created a collaborative approach to design problems in a low-income community by forging a new partnership among Washington University in St. Louis; non-profit developer Beyond Housing; and the small urban municipality of Pagedale. Since its founding, the partnership has gone on to build a park pavilion for a local art program and pilot community orchards on vacant lots.
Graduating magna cum laude from Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts with an undergraduate degree in architecture and anthropology, Cristina is now a Fellow at Harvard's Taubman Center for State and Local Government, where her studies include econometrics, real estate finance, impact investing, and public-private partnerships. The co-editor of Underwriting: The Harvard Student Journal of Real Estate, she also interns for the Center for Public Leadership.