Speaker Biographies
Mary Kay Bailey is director of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative and the Partnership for Regional Opportunity/Corridors of Opportunity initiative at the Saint Paul Foundation. She manages the operations of these cross-sector initiatives that focus on advancing development in the region's transit ways to benefit people of all incomes and backgrounds. Bailey initiates program activities for the working groups, boards, and other partners and has sought, reviewed, and recommended investment opportunities for both initiatives. Previously, she provided policy analysis, research, and communications support to a variety of national and local clients. In 2009, Bailey launched the Live MSP initiative to promote city living in Minneapolis and St. Paul, including the popular livemsp.org website. From 1999–2007, she served as a senior policy analyst in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's smart growth office, helping to shape EPA policies around land use and environmental quality; leading state and local technical assistance programs; and coauthoring key publications in the field, including "This is Smart Growth," "Getting to Smart Growth II," and "Our Built and Natural Environments." Bailey has a master of public administration from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Minnesota. She lives in St. Paul's Hamline-Midway neighborhood with her husband and two young children, all of whom love the Green Line.
Chase Billingham is assistant professor of sociology at Wichita State University. His research focuses on urban development, gentrification, and inequality. In particular, he conducts research on urban schools and parental choice behavior, studying the ways in which schools as urban institutions influence patterns of wealth, poverty, stratification, and segregation in American cities. His research has appeared in Urban Studies, Sociological Forum, Urban Education, and other academic journals, and he has also published commentaries on urban policy issues in the Boston Globe, the Wichita Eagle, and other media outlets. He received his doctorate in sociology from Northeastern University in 2013.
Hattie Dorsey is a leading advocate for housing and neighborhood stabilization issues. One of her most important accomplishments has been the shifting of perceptions about the importance of revitalized neighborhoods and the critical need for an affordable, mixed-income housing approach that includes all segments of the population. As the former president of the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership (ANDP), a nonprofit organized in 1991 to formulate and implement community development strategies, she ensured that housing issues were always on the agenda. Under her leadership ANDP worked to strengthen metro Atlanta neighborhoods and community development corporations (CDCs) that worked in specific communities through a variety of services and activities. A large part of Dorsey's expertise was an innate ability to develop financial resources from all sectors—private, public, and philanthropic, which enabled ANDP to provide grants, loans, and technical assistance to both nonprofit organizations and for-profit developers. Dorsey continues to affect local and national dialogues through her consultant company, HBDorsey & Associates. The company specializes in organizational development, community engagement, corporate networking, and fund-raising advice to community-based organizations. A Clark College alumna, Dorsey participated in both Leadership Atlanta and the Regional Leadership Training Institute.
Meagan Ehlenz is an assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Geography and Urban Planning. Her major fields of study include urban revitalization and community development, with specializations in the role of anchor institutions in urban places and mechanisms for building community wealth. Prior to joining Arizona's faculty, Ehlenz was a research associate at the Penn Institute for Urban Research. In this capacity, she developed a set of case studies for Penn IUR's Anchor Institution Roundtable, The Power of Eds & Meds: Urban Universities Investing in Neighborhood Revitalization and Innovation. She was also a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy C. Lowell Harriss dissertation fellow. Previously, Ehlenz worked as a planning consultant in southeastern Wisconsin and as a senior planner for the city of Milwaukee's department of city development. She earned her doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania and her master's in urban planning from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Ernestine W. Garey is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Invest Atlanta, Atlanta's development authority. Invest Atlanta focuses on developing and fostering public-private partnerships to accelerate job creation, economic growth, workforce housing, neighborhood revitalization, and innovation and entrepreneurship. Garey manages and directs the day-to-day activities of five operating departments and is the strategic liaison with the board of directors, Atlanta City Council, and other governmental and community stakeholders. Invest Atlanta's economic toolkit includes bond financing, revolving loan funds, housing financing, tax increment financing, and tax credits. Garey previously served the agency as managing director of housing finance, guiding the successful implementation of over 60 multifamily and single-family tax exempt bond initiatives. She has been instrumental in the issuance of over $1 billion in housing revenue bonds, creating over 15,000 units of affordable workforce housing, both rental and homeownership, in the city of Atlanta. From 1989–97, Garey served as deputy director at the Urban Residential Finance Authority of the city of Atlanta. She holds a master's degree from Clark Atlanta University in French with further studies at Georgia State University in urban policy. A graduate of the 2014 class of Leadership Atlanta, she is on the board of directors for the National Association of Local Housing Finance Agencies (NALHFA). She also serves on the board for Atlanta BeltLine Inc. and is the board chair of the Diabetes Association of Atlanta.
Renee Glover is the founder and managing member of the Catalyst Group LLC, a national consulting firm focused on urban revitalization, real estate development, and community building; urban policy; and business transformation. Previously, Glover served as the president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Housing Authority for almost 20 years. During her tenure, the housing authority sponsored 16 master-planned, mixed-use, mixed-income communities, in partnership with private sector real estate developers and other investors, leveraging $300 million of federal funds into over $3 billion of private investment and economic impact. She has been nationally recognized for her role in transforming U.S. urban policy. The mixed-use, mixed-income model (conceptualized through the creation of Centennial Place) holistically addresses the needs for quality housing, excellent crib-to-high-school public education, transit access, employment, and economic development. This model has been used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 1996 as a blueprint for holistic redevelopment. Glover served as a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta until December 2014. She is the current chair of the board of directors of Habitat for Humanity International, having previously served on its board for seven years. Glover was appointed to the board of advisers of the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Urban Research in June 2015.
Young Hughley earned his bachelor of art degree from Morehouse College. He also has earned three executive certificates from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. Under his direction as founder and former chief executive officer of Resources for Residents and Communities of Georgia, aka Reynoldstown Revitalization Corporation (RRC), over $24 million was invested in the Reynoldstown community and over 500 housing units were affected. There, he designed a "place-based" revitalization strategy to make Reynoldstown, a once disenfranchised neighborhood within the city of Atlanta, a thriving, diverse, inclusive locality of choice for those who desire urban living. His professional skills include housing development, community building, capacity building, facilitation, partnership development, fund-raising, production/special events planning, and program and staff management. He has served on the advisory council of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, board of directors of the National Housing Association (trade associations for organizations in the NeighborWorks America, or NWA, network), and NWA's national community building and organizing and neighborhood stabilization committees. The Fannie Mae foundation honored him as a Fannie Mae fellow and with the James A. Johnson Award, which is for those who excel in the community development profession. He has been recipient of a United Way/Casey Foundation fellowship and also served as an inner city adviser for the Urban Land Institute. He has formed YTH and Associates LLC, whose focus is conversing, coaching, volunteering, and consulting with peers, professional, and grassroots' leadership in community engagement, development, and the arts.
Henrietta Muñoz is the United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County's vice president of grant research and evaluation, providing research and evaluation oversight of both federal and private grants for San Antonio's Eastpoint Neighborhood. Muñoz oversees all grant-related data collections, research, and evaluations for the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Dual Generation initiative, and the U.S. Department of Education's Eastside Promise Neighborhood, working primarily with San Antonio independent school district (ISD). Her experience has spanned 15 years in San Antonio's family economic success and education initiatives through work with city nonprofits, the city of San Antonio's department of community initiatives, and now United Way. Previously, she was the manager of the Making Connections Partnership, a two-generation strategy that improved opportunities for children to read on grade level by third grade while strengthening family economic security in San Antonio's Edgewood ISD. She received her doctorate in culture, literacy, and language from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in 2009. She is an adjunct professor at UTSA and a 2010/2011 Annie E. Casey Foundation Children and Family fellow. She was named one of the Community Indicators Consortium's 2013 emerging leaders and joins the 2015 Community Leaders Forum cohort for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Amanda Rhein is senior director of transit oriented development and real estate at Atlanta's MARTA, the nation's ninth largest transit system, which includes heavy rail, bus, and paratransit services. She oversees the Office of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and Real Estate, whose vision is to create transit oriented communities that connect people to opportunities, drive sustainable community development, and promote regional prosperity. Rhein previously served as interim managing director of redevelopment at Invest Atlanta, Atlanta's development authority. She oversaw the team responsible for managing and marketing the city's primary economic development tools, tax allocation districts (TADs) and new markets tax credits (NMTCs). While at Invest Atlanta, Rhein doubled the number of TADs and funded over 30 projects, which resulted in the investment of $3.5 billion in Atlanta's most underserved communities. Rhein graduated from Boston College with a bachelor degree in sociology and earned a master of city and regional planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Rhein is a regular guest lecturer at the School of City and Regional Planning. She has also published articles in Urban Land Magazine, the Atlanta Business Chronicle, and other outlets. Rhein is active in the Urban Land Institute at both the local and national level and a member of the national Transit Oriented Development Council, a group of 50 national industry experts. In 2015, Rhein received the Longleaf Award from the Georgia Conservancy's Generation Green for her work to promote and implement sustainable growth and multimodal transportation options in Atlanta.
Charles Rutheiser is a senior associate in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Center for Community and Economic Opportunity. He manages national grant portfolios that advance best practices in community development and support universities, hospitals, and other anchor institutions in improving educational and economic outcomes in low-income neighborhoods. Prior to working with the Casey Foundation, Rutheiser directed the Graduate Program in Applied Anthropology at Georgia State University and taught cultural anthropology and urban studies at the Johns Hopkins University, Bryn Mawr College, Western Michigan University, and Gettysburg College. A former Fulbright and Inter-American foundation fellow, his publications include the books Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams and The Opportunity Makers: The First Half-Century of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and reports on urbanization. He is the founding cochair of the Anchor Institution-Philanthropy Project of the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities and serves on the board of the Art of Leadership, a Baltimore-based youth leadership development program. Rutheiser received a master of arts and doctorate in cultural anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor of arts in anthropology from New College of Florida.
Ben Scuderi is a predoctoral fellow in the Harvard economics department. He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor of arts in applied mathematics in 2014. He was awarded a Thomas Temple Hoopes prize for outstanding achievement in his senior thesis, which tested whether mayors can have significant impacts on city outcomes. His research interests include labor, public, and urban economics.
Rubye Sullivan is a product of the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) where she is currently the executive director of data and information. She recently completed her fellowship with the Harvard Strategic Data Project. Sullivan was formerly the APS director of research and evaluation responsible for a team of data strategists providing actionable data to schools, the state accountability system, and establishing research relationships with local university partners. She received her bachelor of science in secondary mathematics education from Boston University and master of education in secondary mathematics education from Emory University. She completed her doctoral degree at Emory University in educational studies. Her research interests include measuring the effects of teachers on student learning outcomes within urban learning contexts and the equitable distribution of effective teachers across student race and class. Previously, Sullivan taught mathematics in grades seven and eight in the APS. Additionally, she served as a model teacher leader charged with providing coaching and support to teachers of mathematics and science. In 2001, she left APS to lead the professional development work of Project GRAD Mathematics nationally. Sullivan also served as a research associate at the Georgia Department of Education in the assessment and accountability division immediately prior to her return to the Atlanta Public Schools in November 2010.
Brad Weinig joined Enterprise Community Partners in June 2011. Enterprise is a national nonprofit organization that concentrates on bringing affordable housing expertise and investment to low-income communities. In his role as the program director for transit oriented development (TOD), Weinig is focused on creative financing solutions to ensure affordable housing and community facilities are developed and preserved near public transportation. He oversees the Denver Regional TOD Fund, a blend of public, private, and philanthropic capital providing acquisition financing to mission-driven borrowers for the preservation and creation of affordable housing and community facilities in proximity to high-frequency transit. He led the expansion of the fund from a $15 million single-borrower line of credit limited to the city and county of Denver to what is now a $24 million multiborrower fund utilized throughout the seven-county Denver metro area. Previously, Weinig spent five years with Citi Community Capital in San Francisco, where he underwrote over $600 million of loans to finance the development or acquisition/rehabilitation of low-income apartment communities nationwide. He is a LEED Green associate and an active member of ULI Colorado's Workforce Housing Council.