Terri L. Baltimore has a BA in Journalism from Duquesne University. For the past 25 years, she has been working as a community organizer. Currently, she is the Vice President of Neighborhood Development for the Hill House Association, a forty-five year old social service organization based in Pittsburgh’s Historic Hill District neighborhood. She is responsible for developing partnerships, arts programming and specialized programs. She is the co-founder of "Find the Rivers!" The mission of FTR! is to improve the health – economic, physiological, and socio-cultural -- of low-income communities by demonstrating key “smart growth” principles and applying them at the neighborhood level. Zeinab Eyega, MSc, Executive Director and Founder of Sauti Yetu Center for African Women. Sauti Yetu means Our Voice in Swahili. Sauti Yetu is grass roots community-based organization that works on violence against women and girls. Ms. Eyega provides the oversight, management and leadership in developing the strategic focus of Sauti Yetu's programs. This includes direct services, public policy analysis, community engagement and advocacy, and fundraising. She is from southern Sudan and received her BA from the School for International Training in Vermont and a graduate degree in Health Policy from the New School University. In addition to publishing, teaching and public speaking, Ms. Eyega has had over sixteen years working on issues affecting African women and girls. She has developed training and educational materials as well as facilitated numerous cross-cultural competency workshops for health care providers and reproductive health promotion seminars for African immigrant and refugee communities throughout the United States. In addition to her activism, she is on the board of Family Advocates of NY and Save the Darfur Coalition. Her commitment to the advancement of African women and girls was recognized in 2004 by the Open Society Institute, which awarded her the Soros Community Fellowship Award and she was recognized by NYC Mayor Bloomberg during the immigrant week, a celebration of the contributions of immigrants to the City of New York. Ms. Eyega's current areas of work include but are not limited to issues of gender, race and ethnicity in Africa, in particular the Afro-Arab border lands. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. She has been studying epidemics in poor communities, with a focus on the relationship between urban form and mental well-being. In 2009, she launched a Main Street NJ, a study of the role in Main Streets as social and commercial centers. This study will take her to 100 Main Streets in the US, France, the Netherlands and Japan. She has authored/edited 5 books, including Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts American and What We Can Do About It. She has re-released Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People's Power, written with her father, Ernest Thompson. She is also completing a book, Designing the Just and Beautiful City: The Urbanism of Michel Cantal-Dupart.
Tom Hanchett is staff historian at Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, NC. He earned his Ph.D. in urban, African American and U.S. southern history at UNC Chapel Hill, and taught at Youngstown State and Cornell University. His book Sorting out The New South City (UNC Press) tracks the surprising history of both racial and economic segregation. As an essayist and exhibition curator, his interests range from African American education history to southern music and food traditions. His American Historical Review article "US Tax Policy and the Shopping Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s" has been hailed as “groundbreaking” by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. tom@historysouth.org
Mehret Mandefro, MD, is an HIV adolescent physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Founding Managing Editor of www.truthaids.org, a nonprofit that uses digital media to translate health-related information. Her ethnographic work about HIV positive women's lives in the South Bronx and Ethiopia is the subject of a full-feature film entitled All of Us, which recently aired on Showtime Networks. Mehret is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where she is studying the intersection of violence prevention and HIV prevention and producing a new film about healing from trauma entitled David the Piano Player.
Patrick Morrissy is the founder and Executive Director of HANDS, Inc. a community development corporation working in Orange and East Orange, New Jersey since 1986. The HANDS strategy of “high-impact development for long-term sustainable neighborhood change” is built around clearing title to and redeveloping pivotal eyesore properties that are eroding the quality of neighborhood life. Morrissy is a founder of Shelterforce magazine, the National Housing Institute, New Jersey Citizen Action and the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey. He is a member of the State Planning Commission.
Kiara Nagel delivers training, consulting, and coordination services to foster collaboration and support equitable community development. She has led multi-stakeholder change processes involving universities, community organizations, foundations, and grassroots activists and engaged youth directly in decision-making about how their neighborhoods would be shaped, understood and represented. As a fellow of the Design Studio 4 Social Intervention and an associate of The Community Research Group, she has explored the historical patterns of redevelopment and forced displacement along with the possibilities for organized resistance and creative interventions. Currently, Kiara serves as faculty for University or Orange, a free people's university, and as Project Manager for Sisterhood for Peace, where she is providing strategic design, capacity building, and coordination for a diverse network of Sudanese and African American women working to end the violence in Sudan and build global peace. Kiara holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and a Masters in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute for Technology. She is more committed than ever to people and places struggling for sustainable community development that ensures a viable future for generations to come. Susan Saegert, Director of Center for Community Studies and Professor, Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University, has published studies of health, housing, community development, social capital, environmental psychology, and women and environments in many journals including American Journal of Public Health. Books include The Community Development Reader (with James DeFilippis, Routledge, 2008); Social Capital in Poor Communities (Russell Sage, 2001) (with J. Phillip Thompson and Mark R. Warren), From Abandonment to Hope: Community Households in Harlem, with Jackie Leavitt (Columbia University Press, 1990) and Urban Health: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research and Practice with Nicholas Freudenberg and Susan Klitzman, Jossey Bass, 2009. Dr. Saegert's co-authors are Desiree Fields and Kimberly Libman. Ms. Fields is a doctoral candidate in environmental psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research is on the social and psychological impact of mortgage foreclosure on individuals, families and neighborhoods. She is a researcher in the Housing Environments Research Group at the Center for Human Environments. Ms. Libman, MPH, is a doctoral candidate in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research addresses structural and social determinants of health with special focus on housing and food environments. She is a researcher in the Housing Environments Research Group at the Center for Human Environments and teaches Food Studies at the New School.
Pat Sharkey is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University and is currently a scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars program at Columbia University. Pat?s research focuses on stratification and mobility, with a specialized interest in the role that places and neighborhoods play in generating and maintaining inequality across multiple dimensions. One strand of his research seeks to describe and explain the persistence of neighborhood inequality in America?s cities, and the mechanisms by which this inequality persists over time and across generations of family members. A second strand of his work focuses on the consequences of persistent neighborhood inequality for the life chances of individuals from different racial and ethnic groups in America.
David Vlahov, Ph.D., is Director for the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He brings expertise in epidemiology, infectious diseases, substance abuse and mental health. Dr. Vlahov has conducted studies of urban populations in Baltimore for over 20 years including several longitudinal cohort studies for which he received the NIH MERIT Award. More recently, Dr. Vlahov led epidemiologic studies in Harlem and the Bronx, which have served as a platform for subsequent individual- and community-level intervention studies and community based participatory research (involving partnerships with residents, community based organizations, academic/ public health departments) to address social determinants of health. This work has contributed information on racial/ethnic disparities in health and approaches to address such disparities. Uniting these interests, Dr. Vlahov initiated the International Society for Urban Health (www.isuh.org), serving as its first President. He is a Visiting Professor at the Medical School in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to develop their programs in urban health, and is working with the WHO’s Urban Health Center in Kobe, Japan. Dr. Vlahov is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Health, has edited two books on urban health and published over 560 scholarly papers.
Rodrick Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He holds a PhD in physics and a BS in mathematics from Columbia University, and is the author of numerous books and papers on public health, disease ecology, urban studies, and the dysfunctions of cognitive process. He is a 1995 recipient of an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His most recent book, coauthored by Prof. Mindy Fullilove of Columbia University, is titled Collective Consciousness and its Discontents: Institutional distributed cognition, racial policy, and public health in the United States. The book received a laudatory review in the Journal of the American Medical Association. |