LISC Announces Major New Hires
26 Feb 2008
VP to head training/educational unit, plus new directors for Boston program, New Orleans Vacant Properties Initiative, Green Development Center, Family Income and Wealth-building program, and the housing preservation unit.
Contact:Stephanie O'Keefe (LISC) |
For Immediate Release:February 26, 2008 |
NEW YORK – Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) has tapped six new professionals to help drive its work building Sustainable Communities, a comprehensive program to reverse stagnation and decline in distressed neighborhoods so they can become good places to live, work, do business and raise families.
They are Sandra Abramson, vice president for Field Resources and Learning; Madeline Fraser Cook, director of LISC’s Green Development Center; Lucinda Flowers, director of the New Orleans Vacant Properties Initiative; Kevin Jordan, director of Family Income and Wealth-building; Bob Van Meter, executive director of LISC’s Boston program; and Michelle McDonough Winters, program director of LISC’s affordable housing preservation unit. All will be engaged in LISC’s Sustainable Communities strategic plan that emphasizes capital investment in housing and other real estate; increasing family income and wealth; stimulating local economic activity; improving access to quality education; and supporting healthy environments and lifestyles.
Sandra Abramson brings more than 30 years of community development experience to the new position with Field Resources and Learning Unit, which houses LISC’s training and educational programs. Most recently she was chief operating officer of SFDS Development Corp. in East Harlem, helping that organization manage more than 600 units of affordable housing. Prior to that she spent 13 years as a community development consultant throughout the greater New York and New Jersey area, where she was involved with asset management, tenant organizing, board development and low income housing tax credit development. For several years, Abramson led staff teams in New York’s Housing Preservation and Development Department and has taught real estate and urban development courses at CUNY-Queens. She will work out of LISC’s New York headquarters.
Madeline Fraser Cook is ideally suited to direct LISC’s Green Development Center, which supports green design, construction, and management principles in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. LISC thinks that greener buildings are key components in achieving Sustainable Communities of choice and opportunity – good places to work, do business and raise children.
Since 2004, Fraser Cook was vice president of New Ecology, Inc., the Cambridge, Mass.-based organization that supports green technologies in underserved urban communities. She managed the greening of affordable housing developments, guiding developers through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification process. She also presented training seminars on costs and benefits of greening affordable housing.
From 2001 to 2004, Fraser Cook was director of special projects at New Ecology, where she initiated statewide educational efforts around green affordable housing and sustainable development. Earlier, as an analyst at Abt Associates in Cambridge, she implemented program management for HUD HOPE VI grants and assisted housing authorities with HOPE VI projects. She has a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a master’s of city planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will be based in Boston.
Lucinda Flowers is heading up the New Orleans Vacant Properties Initiative, a partnership of LISC and the National Vacant Properties Campaign to help the City of New Orleans and other participants identify and return to productive use thousands of vacant and abandoned properties.
After many years in New England and the Washington, D.C, area, Flowers returned to her home town in 2003 to serve as public policy and advocacy manager for New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative, a nonprofit engaged in revitalizing neighborhoods through affordable housing. More recently, she managed public policy and communications for UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a collaborative of 60 agencies working to end homelessness.
While in the Washington, DC area, Flowers was a writing and communications consultant for almost a decade, working mainly with national housing and community development organizations. She started her work in housing and community development in Rhode Island, where for almost six years she was the public information officer for the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corp. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Brown University and a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Kevin Jordan, LISC’s new director of Family Income and Wealth-building, will oversee the company’s Centers for Working Families national expansion as well as formulating LISC’s overall family asset building and economic self sufficiency initiative. The Center for Working Families (CWF) is a new approach to help low-income families reach financial stability and move up the economic ladder. Pioneered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and now supported by other major funders, the CWF offers an innovative framework for how families can increase their earnings and income, reduce their financial transaction costs, and build wealth for themselves and their communities. CWFs are now operating in 13 U.S. cities.
Jordan brings a significant amount of experience in multiple aspects of economic self-sufficiency, including income improvement, asset building and financial services. Most recently he served as director of the Working Families Department of the Bon Secours Baltimore Health System, where he developed and managed six family asset building and income support programs. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and a master’s in community planning from the University of Maryland. He is based in LISC’s Washington, DC office.
Bob Van Meter, the new executive director of LISC’s Boston program, has 25 years of local experience, including 15 years as executive director of the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation, a long-time LISC development partner. There, he spearheaded efforts to develop 450 affordable homes and apartments, establish individual development accounts for low-wage residents and create a program that allowed more than 500 families and individuals to acquire their first home. During that time, from 2003 to 2005, he was also a member of Boston LISC’s local advisory board.
Prior to his work at Allston Brighton, Van Meter spent six years as a key staffer at the Fenway Community Development Corporation—another local LISC partner—where from 1987 to 1993 he was director of housing development, a senior project manager, and acting executive director. He has also worked as an organizer and lobbyist for the Massachusetts Tenants Organization and as an organizer for Illinois Public Action and the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition.
He has served on the board and chaired the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, was a steering committee member and chair of the Ricanne Hadrian Initiative for Community Organizing, and was a member of the MACDC housing committee and other committees. Van Meter, 51, has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago. He will join LISC in mid-March.
The Boston LISC program provides loans, grants and technical assistance to spur the development of affordable housing, new businesses, recreational facilities, safety programs, and other elements that define healthy, sustainable neighborhoods. Since 1981, Boston LISC has made $166 million in grants, loans and equity investments to nonprofit developers, resulting in 7,500 affordable homes and apartments and more than 1.4 million square feet of commercial space in underserved neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area.
Michelle McDonough Winters, the new program director of LISC’s Affordable Housing Preservation Initiative, most recently was director of mission strategy and community analytics at Fannie Mae, in Washington, DC. Prior to that, she held various other positions at Fannie Mae, including director of housing goals and regulatory policy and as a policy analyst for its national community lending center. She has also worked for the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership, the MIT Center for Real Estate and The Urban Institute. She has a bachelor’s degree in urban affairs from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
LISC’s Affordable Housing Preservation Initiative was established in 2001 to preserve affordable rental apartments whose uses were in jeopardy because of expiring federal subsidies, and to promote preservation-oriented public policies. Since then, LISC has helped nonprofit community development corporations acquire and preserve housing developments, build partnerships with housing authorities and other organizations, and advocate for government policies that can reduce the loss of affordable homes and apartments.
“All of these executives bring unique skills to LISC that we think will be invaluable as we implement a Sustainable Communities strategy,” said Michael Rubinger, LISC’s president and CEO. “They know our business, they know neighborhoods and they’ve had extensive experience working in a number of metropolitan areas.”
LISC is expanding its traditional focus of working directly with community development corporations to developing partnerships with a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit organizations that support the larger issue of comprehensive community health and sustainability. Five core program objectives have been identified that, taken together, can lead to this larger goal:
- Expanding capital investment in housing and other real estate; Building family income and wealth, including improving residents’ skills and access to living wage jobs;
- Stimulating local economic activity, including connecting targeted neighborhoods to the regional economy and beyond;
- Improving residents’ access to quality education; and
- Developing healthy environments and lifestyles, including safe streets and recreational amenities, community clinics, and environmentally sound design.
Each of these objectives must be rooted in strong neighborhood planning and organizing functions. LISC will thus become more engaged in building relationships among residents, funders, policy makers and others, and less focused on the business of financing real estate transactions. While LISC will clearly continue its historical role in underwriting real estate developments, it will be working much more intentionally to integrate those efforts with other strategies—all in the context of a given neighborhood’s overall vision.
About LISC
LISC combines corporate, government and philanthropic resources to help community-based organizations revitalize underserved neighborhoods. Since 1980, LISC has raised more than $8.6 billion to build or rehabilitate more than 230,000 affordable homes and develop 32 million square feet of retail, community and educational space nationwide. For more information, visit www.lisc.org.
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Article Type: Press Release