Speaker Biographies

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ODESSA ADAMS-PAYNE is the Director of the Individualized Development Account (IDA) Project for United Way for the Greater New Orleans Area. She is responsible for the direction, management, and day-to-day operational quality of the IDA Project. She earned a Bachelor's of Science Degree in Business Administration and Masters of Social Work Degree from Southern University at New Orleans. Prior to her employment at United Way, she briefly worked with the Road Home Program and the Governor's Office of Disability Affairs.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast Area she was employed by Louisiana State University's (LSU) Human Development Center where she worked in their Community Development Program as a Housing Coordinator. She was responsible for coordinating and facilitating Community Housing Advocacy Networks (CHANs) in targeted areas throughout the state of Louisiana, working directly with housing professionals, local and state government officials, and disability advocates. She assisted communities in coalition building, strategic planning, and grassroots organizing to promote transformation in housing policies, programs, and funding allocation.

Odessa has extensive experience in working with IDA programs and community-based housing initiatives. As one of the founding members of the IDA Collaborative of Louisiana, the program administered by Tulane University, she worked closely with program administrators, as well as other non-profit organizations and social service providers to help develop and implement the local initiative which later developed into a statewide IDA program. Her specialized housing experience includes her position with LSU's Human Development Center in the Home of My Own (HMO) Project, a statewide project that assisted people with disabilities in becoming homeowners. Through both programs, she provided both administrative and support services, developed training materials and conducted Financial Education classes. She was able to successfully partner services and resources from both programs in order to secure homeownership opportunities for many Home of My Own program graduates.

BOB AGRES has been the Executive Director of the Hawai`i Alliance for Community-Based Economic Development (HACBED) since 1999. Through more than 20 years of community and economic development experience, he has worked to increase opportunities for families and communities to exercise more choice and control over their future in order to achieve self sufficiency. He has also worked to advance asset building policy and community practice through HACBED's capacity building initiatives and Ho`owaiwai - Asset Building Policy for Hawai`i. He previously served as Maui County's Director of Housing & Human Concerns, the City & County of Honolulu's Director of Housing & Community Development, and Coordinator for the State CBED Program within the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism. He is a member of the Board of Directors of The Nonprofit Quarterly; teaches graduate courses in community-based planning and community-based economic development at the University of Hawai`i's Department of Urban & Regional Planning; served two terms as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, Africa; and has an M.S. in Community Economic Development.

JESSICA ANDORS is the Deputy Director of Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a nonprofit community development corporation with over 2,000 resident and stakeholder members, which over the last 8 years has invested over $30 million in affordable housing, family asset building, and community organizing and development. Andors holds a Master's in City Planning from MIT, where she was honored for outstanding contributions to the intellectual life of the Department. She and three colleagues joined forces in 1999 to re-start the then-dormant LCW in the old mill city of Lawrence, MA - site of the famous Bread and Roses Labor Strike of 1912, and currently home to the largest Latino population in New England. At LCW, Jessica has worked as a Community Organizer, Program Developer, and Director of Resource Development, and was instrumental in creating LCW's first IDA and other asset-building programs in 2001. Jessica has served on the boards of the Lawrence Teen Coalition, the Hope Street Youth Center, and the Essex Art Center, and is currently chair of the Massachusetts state-wide asset-building collaborative, MIDAS. Jessica is bilingual in English and Spanish.

DAVID ARIZMENDI is a full-time instructor of Sociology at South Texas College. He has a BS in Economics and a MS in Sociology from the University of Texas Pan-American. During the late 70s and 80s, David had the opportunity to work directly under Cesar Chavez. He designed and organized the Education and Legal Defense Fund, a legal service component of the National Farm Worker Service Centers and traveled with Chavez during the national grape boycott.

For seven years beginning in September 1999, David served as the Executive Director of Proyecto Azteca, a nationally known community housing development corporation that operates a unique self-help housing program in Hidalgo County, Texas. In 2000, he founded the Azteca Community Loan Fund (ACLF), a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that serves the financial needs of colonia residents along the Texas/Mexico border and served as its President/CEO until May 2008. David has also directed Iniciativa Frontera, a community/economic development organization founded in 1994.

David has received recognition, as well as a number of awards for his work in colonias. He was featured in The Forgotten Americans, the Hector Galan documentary about Texas colonias which aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in December 2000. In 2001, he received the James A. Johnson Fellowship award by the Fannie Mae Foundation, and in the same year became a Fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation's Next Generation Leadership program. In December 2004, David received the Skip Jason Community Service Award from the Housing Assistance Council (HAC). He was also awarded the 1997 Leonard Lesser Award from the Center for Community Change.

LINDA AUSTIN is Director of Operations for the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo in El Paso, Texas. She has devoted thirteen years to the Pueblo in areas of program planning, development and government administration. During her tenure with the Pueblo, she has created and maintained governmental administrative systems and programs that establish an efficient, consolidated direct and indirect service infrastructure. She has extensive administrative experience working with HUD, I.H.S, B.I.A., DOL, and other federal programs where opportunities exist to promote social and economic self-sufficiency for the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo government, tribal members, and families. She is the site coordinator of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program on the YDSP reservation. She oversees the site management of the VITA site and is a member of the El Paso Coalition for Family Economic Progress, a partnership of local nonprofit agencies providing free tax preparation, financial education and asset building services to the local community. She is also a VITA volunteer for the site. Education: Masters in Business Administration from the University of Texas at El Paso; Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Texas at El Paso.

SARAH AXEEN is a Program Associate with the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy think tank in Washington, DC. Ms. Axeen conducts research on rising health care costs, expanding health insurance coverage, and improving the quality of health care. Utilizing economic and data-driven analysis, she works to determine the effect of policy interventions on access to and the cost of healthcare. She has published on the employer role in providing health insurance and the effect of health insurance on the health status and economic security of individuals, families and society. Currently she is conducting research on the relationship between insurance status and the asset holdings of low- and moderate-income families. Ms. Axeen is a cum laude graduate of Pomona College where she studied public policy analysis with an emphasis in politics. Before joining New America, she researched the political viability of large-scale reforms to the Medicare program.

ANN BADDOUR is a Senior Policy Analyst at Texas Appleseed and the director of the national Appleseed project to promote access to fairly priced financial services for low-income immigrant communities. She has worked on consumer financial service issues and issues impacting low-income communities for over 10 years and has written multiple articles and publications in this policy area. She holds an M.P.Aff. from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a founding member and advisory board member of the Texas New Alliance Task Force and is currently an Executive Committee member of the Texas Alliance for Economic Inclusion. Texas Appleseed is one of 16 Appleseed Centers throughout the United States and in Mexico City. The Appleseed Centers work to promote justice in communities nationally and internationally by leveraging the volunteer skills of lawyers and other professionals to find practical solutions to broad-based problems.

PETER BARNES is an entrepreneur, writer and senior fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute in California. He is the author of Who Owns The Sky?, Capitalism 3.0 and Climate Solutions. While at CFED several years ago, he proposed a system for paying dividends to all Americans from revenue generated by auctioning rights to use common assets such as the atmosphere.

MICHAEL S. BARR, Professor of Law, University of Michigan, joined the faculty in fall 2001, teaches Financial Institutions, International Finance, Jurisdiction and Choice of Law, and Transnational Law. Barr is currently engaged in a large-scale empirical project on financial services for low- and moderate-income households as the Faculty Investigator for the Detroit Area Study. He served as chair and now is on the Executive Committee of the Section on Financial Institutions of the Association of American Law Schools. Barr recently co-organized the World Bank's conference on financial access.

Professor Barr earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University, an M. Phil in International Relations from Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Barr was an articles editor for the Yale Law & Policy Review, and was active in the homelessness clinic and in the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic, where he co-directed Haitian Centers Council v. McNary, challenging U.S. policy of repatriating Haitian refugees. He was co-recipient of the 1992 Human Rights Award of the American Immigration Law Association, and co-recipient of the Charles G. Albom Prize for appellate advocacy.

Barr served as a judicial clerk for Justice David H. Souter of the Supreme Court of the United States, and for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Southern District of New York. His wide experience includes serving as: special adviser and counselor on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department, 1994 to 1995; Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin's special assistant, 1995 to 1997; and deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for community development policy, 1997 to 2001. He helped to negotiate final passage of the financial modernization law, and to enact over $25 billion in initiatives for low-income communities. From 1999 to 2001, Barr also served concurrently as special adviser to the President, responsible for the District of Columbia. In the spring of 2001, Barr was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he remains a nonresident senior fellow. He is a member of the bars of New York and the District of Columbia.

DON BAYLOR joined the center in 2004 and focuses on asset building, postsecondary education, and workforce-economic development. Before coming to the center, he served as Senior Consultant for KPMG Consulting's Public Sector practice from 1998-2000. During his tenure with KPMG, he performed strategic planning and performance audits for several public entities, including Kamehameha Schools (Hawaii), California Department of Insurance, City and County of San Francisco. In 2001, he joined New York ACORN as Legislative Director, and advocated on issues such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the minimum wage, job training, affordable housing, and predatory lending. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Georgetown University in 1994 and a Master of Arts in African American and Southern History with honors from The University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1997.

JARED BERNSTEIN, Director of the Living Standards program, joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1992. His latest book is "Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)," which follows "All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy." His areas of research include income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, low-wage labor markets and poverty, international comparisons, and the analysis of federal and state economic policies. He is the co-author of eight editions of the book The State of Working America and has published extensively in popular and academic venues, including The New York Times, Washington Post, American Prospect, and Research in Economics and Statistics. He is also a contributor to the financial news station CNBC.

ALAN BERUBE is Research Director and Fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. His areas of expertise include metropolitan demographics, and social policies affecting urban low-income families and communities. Alan's most recent work includes research on the role and functions of U.S. cities and metropolitan areas in a globalizing economy, the causes and consequences of concentrated urban poverty in the United States, and the use of low-income tax subsidies, including the Earned Income Tax Credit. He has authored numerous Brookings publications, including the recent MetroNation: How U.S. Metropolitan Areas Fuel American Prosperity. Prior to joining Brookings in February 2001, Alan was a policy advisor in the Office of Community Development Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, and a researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He holds a master's degree in public policy from the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University. In 2004 Alan served as an Atlantic Fellow in Public Policy at the UK Treasury, focusing on mixed-income housing policy.

PHYLLIS BETTS is the founding director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis. She has over ten years experience working with community development organizations and agencies, including both practitioners and grassroots stakeholders, with a special emphasis on how activists can work with researchers to create "actionable knowledge" and design locally meaningfully interventions. Her work revolves around sustaining neighborhood housing markets and enhancing quality of life in low-moderate income neighborhoods. Dr. Betts is the research partner for the Community Development Council of Greater Memphis and the Shelby County Anti-Predatory Lending Coalition on mortgage lending and foreclosure and the Problem Properties Collaborative on strategies for dealing with blighted and vacant properties; the coordinator of the SouthEast Memphis Initiative, a public-private comprehensive community initiative working to stabilize neighborhoods of choice in a recently annexed part of Memphis; the evaluator for four HOPE VI redevelopment projects in terms of their impact on neighborhoods; a pilot site partner for The Brookings Institution Urban Markets Initiative; the lead organization partner in Memphis for The Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership; and on the faculty of NeighborWorks America's National Training Institute. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, with a special emphasis on urban and community studies and poverty and social inequality.

PHIL BLACK is a Senior Consultant for the Institute for Social and Economic Development (ISED) and is responsible for its economic development programs. He has directed a private sector consulting group providing assistance to economic development and small business lending organizations throughout the United States. The group specializes in providing capacity building and strategic planning services to Community Development Financial Institutions and other community development organizations to include Native Communities and Refugee Resettlement organizations.

Phil has more than 22 years experience in economic development focusing on business finance, rural development, and Community Development Financial Institutions. As the Director of Community Economic for People Incorporated of Southwest Virginia and Southwest Virginia CDFI, he was responsible for creating and managing a business financing corporation providing loans and development services to start-up and growing businesses in a 14 county market.

Phil held senior positions with a number of organizations in North Carolina and South Carolina including the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center, the University of South Carolina's Small Business Development Center and the James F. Byrnes International Center.

He has been active in the business development and the finance industry serving on the Board of Directors for several organizations including a 3 year term for the Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO). He has worked on consulting projects and training teams funded by The Aspen Institute, the U.S. Small Business Administration, the U. S. Department of the Treasury, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, USDA Rural Development and the Opportunity Finance Network.

He holds a BS from the University of South Carolina and is a Certified Business Finance Professional by the National Development Council.

JANIS BOWDLER, Associate Director, Wealth-Building Policy Project, National Council of La Raza. Since 2005 Janis Bowdler has been an advocate at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. She is responsible for managing NCLR's wealth-building policy, research, and advocacy work, including issues surrounding banking, homeownership, credit, and household debt.

Ms. Bowdler oversees a team that is dedicated to research, advocacy and policy analysis on wealth-building and oversees the development of materials such as toolkits, fact sheets, congressional testimony, and policy position papers. Her team is responsible for raising the visibility of NCLR's wealth-building work among key constituencies, including Congress, community leaders, and other stakeholders. She also represents NCLR before policymakers, industry representatives, and in partnership negotiations in the areas of housing and wealth-building. She conducts and manages research, including coordinating and moderating roundtables, designing and conducting focus groups and surveys, analyzing data, and documenting case stories from NCLR grantees.

As part of her national-level policy and advocacy activities, Ms. Bowdler has authored a number of publications on Hispanic homeownership and abusive mortgage lending practices, among others, and has testified before Congress on issues regarding wealth-building challenges in the Latino community.

Prior to her work at NCLR Ms. Bowdler was a project manager for Famicos Foundation, running day-to-day operations for a corridor redevelopment project with a $20 million budget. She received a bachelor of arts degree from Malone College in Canton, Ohio and a master of science degree from Cleveland State University.

RAY BOSHARA is Vice President, Domestic Policy Programs, and Director, Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think-tank. His expertise is on public policies to promote savings and asset ownership for low-income persons, and in that capacity he has testified before Congress, published widely, and advised leading policymakers around the world. Before joining New America, he worked for CFED, the U.S. Congress, the United Nations in Rome, and Ernst & Young. He has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and the Brookings Institution, and has appeared on CNBC, C-SPAN and radio programs across the nation. His book, The Next Progressive Era: A Blueprint for Broad Prosperity, co-authored with New America Senior Fellow Phillip Longman, will be published in 2009. Boshara is a graduate of Ohio State University, Yale Divinity School, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

PAUL BRADLEY is President of ROC USA, LLC. ROC USA makes resident ownership viable in 29 states through two subsidiaries focused on expert technical assistance and community financing. ROC USA Network includes nine nonprofit organizations that have been trained and certified as Technical Assistance Providers to support homeowner groups with the purchase of their communities. ROC USA Capital is capitalized with investments from leading nonprofit community development organizations, including the Ford Foundation, NeighborWorks America, the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), the NH Community Loan Fund and NCB Capital Impact, to finance resident-owned communities. As well, in service of its mission, ROC USA works in collaboration with several other national organizations including, Fannie Mae, Merrill Lynch Community Development Company, LLC and Opportunity Finance Network. Paul is holds a degree in Economics from the University of New Hampshire and is a recent graduate of NeighborWorks America's Achieving Excellence in Community Development, an executive training program through Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.

JENNIFER BROOKS, CFED's Policy Director, directs CFED's state and federal policy work and manages CFED's Policy Team. She provides technical assistance to policymakers and advocates to help low-income people build assets and become entrepreneurs, and to create incentives for equitable economic development. Prior to joining CFED, Ms. Brooks worked for U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wa.) as a policy advisor on education and training, welfare, labor, and women's and children's issues. Ms. Brooks also worked for many years at Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that works nationally and locally to build economic independence for women and girls. In that role, she oversaw WOW's federal policy involvement, and led a multi-state project designed to both implement positive social policies at the state level, and to demonstrate the need for change at the federal level. Ms. Brooks has testified before Congress, and spoken widely on strategies to help families reach economic self-sufficiency. Ms. Brooks holds a master's degree from the George Washington University, and a bachelor's degree from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

RENÉ BRYCE-LAPORTE is an independent consultant serving the asset-building field. For the past eleven years Rene has served as an advocate, convener, trainer, technical assistance provider and director of multi-site programs advancing social and economic opportunity for low-wealth individuals in America. Previously, René served as Financial Education Specialist at the Pennsylvania Office of Financial Education, working with community-based financial education providers, public and private agencies, and Pennsylvania residents. René served as Senior Program Manager at CFED. His positions and responsibilities included; Director of the American Dream Demonstration (ADD); Coordinator of the National IDA Learning Conference; Community Partner Liaison for the Savings for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment (SEED) Initiative; and, Interim Manager of CFED's Microenterprise Policy Project. René also served as Domestic Legislative Associate at RESULTS, Inc., a grassroots, anti-poverty organization. He held primary responsibility for policy initiatives including restoration of food stamps to legal immigrants, microenterprise, and Individual Development Accounts. René is a graduate of Columbia University and the UCLA School of Law.

OLIVIA CALDERON is the California Legislative Director of the New America Foundation Asset Building Program, which aims to significantly broaden savings and asset ownership in California. Based in Sacramento, her primary responsibilities include educating legislators, government officials, and interest groups about asset policies, developing related policy proposals (including drafting measures, amendments, and reports), providing expert testimony on pending legislation, identifying partnerships to build a broad coalition in support of asset building policies, and managing the Asset Policy Forum, which the program launched in August 2007.

Before joining the New America Foundation, Ms. Calderon served in the California Legislature as a consultant to the Assembly Transportation Committee, as a legislative assistant to Senator Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach), and as a Jesse Unruh Assembly Fellow. Among her more notable accomplishments as a legislative staff member, Ms. Calderon drafted six major pieces of legislation, four of which were signed into law. She has testified before the California Senate committees on education, health, and labor, as well as the Assembly committees on appropriations, banking and finance, revenue and taxation, and higher education. Ms. Calderon is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a NSEP Scholar, McNair Scholar, Wasserman Scholar, and UCLA Law fellow.

DENNIS J. CAMPA was appointed Director of the City of San Antonio's Department of Community Initiatives (DCI) in May 1998. He has more than 36 years of experience in human development services, including work at the city, county and state levels.

DCI promotes human development opportunities for San Antonio and the region. Through a comprehensive network of private and public sector partnerships, the department uses its investments and influence to address the complex and changing issues confronting families, elderly and the workforce of a major urban community. Mr. Campa leads several nationally recognized efforts including school readiness, family economic success, senior services, and human services reform. DCI, directly and through its funded partner delegate agencies, serves more than 226,000 residents annually. DCI employs 400 City employees and has an annual budget of $150 million.

Prior to his appointment, Mr. Campa served as Neighborhood Initiatives Officer for the City Manager's Office in Austin, coordinating issues of welfare reform, workforce development and community revitalization. In 1997, he was selected as one of ten Children and Family fellows by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He has also served in numerous leadership and management positions dealing with juvenile and community justice, children and family services, substance drug abuse, management audit and evaluation issues.

Mr. Campa spent four years on active duty with the U. S. Army, and retired from the Texas Army National Guard in June 1998. Mr. Campa did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his certified public manager recognition from Texas State University.

Mr. Campa, a native of San Antonio, and his wife, Elaine, have two sons, Dennis and Paul.

LISA CAMPBELL has worked as a Project Officer in the Office of Refugee Resettlement since November 2002, focusing mainly on the IDA and Microenterprise Development programs. In addition, she has managed a number of other discretionary grant programs for refugees, including the Wilson/Fish Program, Preferred Communities program, and Cultural Orientation. Prior to coming to ORR, Lisa was at the Mustard Seed Foundation in Arlington, VA as a Regional Director for West and Central Africa and an Associate for Europe and Central Asia. She also worked on programs in Rwanda with World Relief, and worked for the U.S. Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Washington, D.C. Ms. Campbell received her BA from Wheaton College (IL) and her MS in Peace Operations at the George Mason University School of Public Policy.

CAROLYN CARTER is the Deputy Director for Advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit organization founded in 1969 that advocates for consumer justice. She works on NCLC's manufactured housing initiative and is one of the co-authors of the 2004 AARP publication Manufactured Housing Community Tenants: Shifting the Balance of Power. She has contributed to many other NCLC publications, including chapters on manufactured housing in NCLC's Consumer Warranty Law, Repossessions, and Foreclosures. She is a past member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council.

MICHELLE CHAO is the Program and Operations Director for The Family Independence Initiative (FII) and has worked at FII since 6 months after its inception. During her work with FII, she helped the start up of the project including development of awards, matched savings, and resources. She provided oversight and management for all family support initiatives as well as oversight of cash flow and fiscal documentation. Additionally, she administered all human resources areas, the tracking system and worked directly with the families in support of achieving their goals. Michelle is a native of Oakland, California, where she has volunteered as a committee member of the Iu Mien Scholarship Fund, a community raised fund that provides scholarship awards to graduating high school Iu Mien youth in California since 2000. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Lao Iu Mien Cultural Association (LIMCA) from 2004-2006. Michelle holds a Master's in Business Administration/ Management degree from California State University, Hayward.

JOSÉ CISNEROS, Treasurer for the City and County of San Francisco. As Treasurer, he serves as the City's banker and chief investment officer, managing all tax and revenue collection for San Francisco. He was elected to a full term in November 2005 Treasurer Cisneros strongly believes that his role of safeguarding the City's money extends to all San Francisco residents. In January of 2005 Treasurer Cisneros led the implementation of the Working Families Credit Program, an innovative public/private partnership providing a tax credit to qualified San Francisco families. Treasurer Cisneros continued to expand his role as a financial educator and advocate for low-income San Franciscans through creating innovative programs aiming to give all city residents access to a bank account and lessen the need for check cashers and payday lenders. The Bank on San Francisco initiative brings together community organizations, city agencies and fifteen banks and credit unions to help unbanked San Franciscans transition into the financial mainstream. Treasurer Cisneros launched the initiative in January 2007 in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

MARGARET M. CLANCY is the Policy Director at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. At CSD, Margaret is responsible for design and leadership of large-scale policy demonstrations, including the SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) research experiment. She also led the Account Monitoring community partner project work in SEED, a multi-year, national children and youth savings policy and research initiative. Since 2001, she has been researching features of 529 college savings plans as a model for inclusive asset-based policy. Margaret has been involved in data collection, analysis, and reporting for national, state, and local Individual Development Account (IDA) initiatives. She previously led the Account Monitoring Research project in the American Dream Demonstration, the first national study of IDAs. Working as a Vice President of a large trust company, Margaret administered corporate 401(k) and defined benefit pension plans. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from Southern Illinois University and her Master of Social Work degree from Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a Certified Employee Benefits Specialist.

KIPPI CLAUSEN is the Project Director for Bridging the Gap at Mile High United Way, one of the SEED demonstration sites and Jim Casey Initiative sites. BTG, a cross-systemic practice model, builds the capacity of communities to support needs of young people ages 14 and 23 that are transitioning to personal and financial stability from foster care.

Previously, Ms. Clausen coordinated the Colorado Collaboration for Youth, a five year demonstration grant housed at the Colorado Department of Human Services. This statewide effort encouraged collaboration among state agencies, community organizations and young people to enhance services and develop greater resources using youth development practices in communities throughout Colorado. In that role she provided training for members agencies on such topics as youth leadership, group development, facilitation and crisis intervention. In addition, Ms. Clausen has served as the project coordinator of City and County of Denver's Safe City Youth Leadership Program. This citywide youth initiative is comprised of youth employment, peer-centered activities and community service with a focus on diminishing violence against and by youth. Prior to her recent activities, Ms. Clausen served as the National Director of Program Support of Youth Power where she developed and implemented program curriculum.

ROSALYN CRAIN is the legislative manager for CFED. She leads efforts to enact legislation and improve regulations to help low-income families build wealth and build stronger communities. Prior to coming to CFED, Rosalyn served as the policy associate for the National Housing Conference where she worked on affordable housing and community development issues. In that position she led advocacy efforts for the Housing America's Workforce Act. Prior to coming to Washington, D.C., she was a HUD Fellow in Federal Policy working with the Chicago Rehab Network and the University of Chicago Hospitals, Office of Community Affairs. She is the 2005 winner of the National Urban League Rising Star Award for her policy paper on reaching minorities with homeownership and has written articles for Policy Today and Northern Virginia magazine. Rosalyn has a bachelor's degree in political science from Xavier University in Louisiana and a master's in public policy from the University of Chicago.

REID CRAMER works in the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, where he leads the program's policy research activities. The Asset Building Program aims to promote policies and ideas that expand savings and asset ownership, especially among lower-income families. His work has provided analytical support for the development of the ASPIRE Act, a bipartisan proposal to create a savings account for every newborn child in America. Recently, he has served as Co-Director of the New America Foundation's Next Social Contract Initiative, an effort to examine the delivery of social policy for the 21st century. Prior to joining New America, Dr. Cramer served as a policy and budget analyst in the Clinton and George W. Bush White Houses, where he helped coordinate policies on housing, taxes, savings, and economic development. He has also worked for a range of nonprofit housing and community development organizations, the National Research Council, and the Urban Institute. He has a doctorate in public policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a master's degree in city and regional planning from the Pratt Institute and a bachelor of arts degree from Wesleyan University. His written work has appeared in scholarly journals and popular media.

LYNNE CUTLER is Founder and President of the Women's Opportunities Resource Center (WORC), a nationally recognized Philadelphia- based non-profit organization helping low-income women and their families become socially and economically self-sufficient. WORC provides comprehensive business services including training in self-employment, incentive savings program, and financing. Ms. Cutler is active in effecting national policies such as the Savings for Working Family Act and the Assets for Independence Act. Ms. Cutler created one of the largest statewide IDA programs in the nation. She is President of the Pennsylvania Microenterprise Coalition, and on the board of the Sustainable Business Network. Over the years, Cutler and the organizations she founded have received numerous awards including the 2001 Presidential Award for Excellence in Microenterprise Development for excellence in poverty alleviation and the 2005 AEO Innovation in Technology Award for its online financial literacy program.

SAUNDRA DAVIS is a financial planner and management consultant with fifteen years experience in providing grant writing, capacity building, and technical assistance to non-profit and local government agencies. Saundra holds a B.S. in Management and a M.S. in Financial Planning from Golden Gate University. As President and CEO of Sage Financial Solutions, Saundra provides comprehensive personal financial planning and financial education services for individuals, small business owners, and community based organizations. Saundra is an adjunct professor in the Golden Gate University Financial Planning program and serves on the University of California at Berkeley Financial Planning Program Advisory Committee. Saundra is a member of FPA Pro Bono National Advisory Committee.

STACY DEAN, Director of Food Assistance Policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, works extensively with program administrators, policymakers, and non-profit organizations to improve the food stamp program and provide eligible low-income families easier access to its benefits. She focuses on nutrition programs, immigrant issues, the federal budget, and cross program integration.Dean started at the Center in April 1997 as a Senior Policy Analyst working on national policy issues such as the federal budget, the food stamp program, and benefits for immigrants. Before joining the Center, Dean worked as a budget analyst at the Office of Management and Budget where she worked on policy development, regulatory and legislative review, and budgetary process and execution for a wide variety of income support programs.

DANIEL DELEHANTY, for the last fifteen years, has worked in the field of community development. He got his start international development, running the Trickle Up Program's microenterprise efforts in Africa before serving as Deputy Executive Director from 1998 - 2000. Daniel then turned his attention to community development in the New York area, working as Deputy Director of the Staten Island EDC. He also served as Deputy Director with the Business Outreach Center Network in Brooklyn, where he help launch innovative microenterprise programs for child care providers, refugees and women entrepreneurs.

Daniel then joined the public sector, serving as the Director of the Community Affairs Unit at the New York State Banking Department. There, he focused on facilitating partnerships between banks and community groups related to affordable housing, financial education, lending and investment opportunities. He also spearheaded the Banking Development District Program, a highly successful program to bring banking services to underserved areas.

In September 2006, Daniel returned to the private sector and joined the Community Development Banking team of Capital One Bank as a Vice President. At Capital One, he directs CRA related philanthropy to support economic development and is responsible for community development activities in the field of economic and small business development.

A resident of Queens, Daniel is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of SUNY at Stony Brook and attended graduate school at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.

MARCEL DIALLO, Executive Director of Black Dot Artists, Inc. and Village Bottoms CBDC is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, poet, writer, cultural historian and activist best known for his philosophies, writings and public actions on Black self-determination, neighborhood revitalization through the resurrection and preservation of Black cultural districts and his role in the 1990s underground Bay Area arts scene that transformed and popularized the call and response aspect of spoken word and blurred the lines between poetry, emceeing and theater prior to the influence of slam poetry in the region. He is considered by many to be the father of the current Bay Area spoken word/hip hop theater movement, a title he shuns. Because of his community activism, he is also often referred to as "The Mayor of West Oakland", yet Diallo defies genres and labels and often refers to himself as simply an artist. He is the founder of various Bay Area cultural arts institutions including Black Dot Artists, Inc., Black New World Social Aid & Pleasure Club, The Eastside Arts Alliance and Cornelia Bell's Black Bottom Gallery and the father of four beautiful sons. He has a forthcoming book, Black New World Book One: Sanctified Gumbo (Black Dot Cafe Press) exploring the global implications of the current art and activist trends occurring in Black localities (Winter 2009).

MANUEL A. DIAZ, Mayor, Miami. First elected in 2001 and re-elected to a second term in 2005, Manny Diaz has led Miami toward a renaissance of prosperity and opportunity. Having never before held elected office, Mayor Diaz is now recognized as one of America's most innovative Mayors, chosen to lead the United States Conference of Mayors as its president beginning in the Summer of 2008.

When he first took office, Miami city government was bankrupt, held junk bond status, and was under a state financial oversight board. Mayor Diaz pursued a vast administrative overhaul that brought with it financial stability, healthy level of financial reserves, continued tax cuts, lowered millage rates, and an A+ bond rating on Wall Street.

The City further lowered costs, improved performance and introduced private sector business approaches that have lead to better service delivery and recognition awards for several city departments.
Internal operational excellence has allowed Mayor Diaz to pursue capital reinvestment and quality of life initiatives in long abandoned and forgotten neighborhoods. Plans include a billion dollar Capital Improvement Plan that will rebuild the city's infrastructure without levying new taxes and Miami 21 (http://www.miami21.org/), a revolutionary land use and zoning master plan that incorporates new urbanism and smart growth.

Guided by principles of conservancy and sustainability, Mayor Diaz has launched an expansive effort to "green" the city, erasing decades of environmental neglect. He is a signatory to the Mayor's Climate Protection agreement, pledging to reduce global warming emissions. Diaz has also promoted "Green Building" throughout the City and has pledged to convert the city fleet to hybrid or other fuel efficient vehicles by 2012. His efforts have earned him recognition by Vanity Fair Magazine as one of North America's leading environmental conscious Mayors.

Mayor Diaz brought former Philadelphia and New York Police Chief John Timoney to return public confidence to the Miami Police Department. On the day Chief Timoney took office, a dozen officers faced federal charges for improper shootings. After instituting what is regarded as one of the nation's most progressive shooting policies, Miami Police went 20 months without firing a shot, a claim no other major American city can make. The Miami Police Department has now become an international model for law enforcement, placing Miami as one of the top five U.S. cities in crime reduction, having reduced crime rates in every category and in every neighborhood to new lows.

The Mayor also joined the National Drug Czar to launch the City of Miami Drug Strategy Plan, treading new ground in coordinating the work of all interrelated agencies to address the multi-dimensional issues related to substance abuse with a coordinated effort to reduce the scourge of drugs in the city.

Private investment has poured into Miami, increasing to well over $30 billion dollars worth of development projects at various stages in the planning and construction process, bringing with it a changed Miami skyline along with thousands of new jobs. As a result, Miami has become a national leader in job creation, with unemployment cut by more than half since 2001, from above 12% when Mayor Diaz took office to 4% or full employment.

This boom has dramatically improved Miami's tax base, which grew by over $7 billion in 2006 to a new all-time high of $34 billion. Yet, the City's millage rate has been reduced every year since Diaz took office, presently at its lowest rate in half a century, resulting in $128 million returned to tax payers.

The city has also increased its production of affordable housing by leveraging public/private investments toward 3500 affordable units since 2001 at a combined public and private investment surpassing $600 million with a billion dollar investment pledged by 2010.

Poverty reduction efforts have also been launched, including ACCESS Miami, uniting City resources with public, private, and non-profit sectors, offering tools and education that enable City residents to break out of poverty through financial literacy seminars, workshops, free tax preparation sites, EITC reclamation, training, and more.

Mayor Diaz has contributed greatly towards improving Miami's public schools through mentoring programs, funding and sponsorship initiatives, and a progressive Education Compact with Miami-Dade Public Schools that will ensure that current and future generations of Miamians have access to quality public education.

Miami's world-class reputation is now attracting new residents from all over the world. An impressive 10% population growth over the past three years is furthered by estimates suggesting an increase by 30% by the end of this decade. This is a startling contrast to the combined 7 percent growth experienced during the 70s, 80s and 90s. Miami also boasts perhaps the most diverse population of any city in the United States, with over 60% of its residents of foreign origin.

In September of 2006, the Mayor was able to attract other mayors from throughout the hemisphere to host the first ever Mayor's Hemispheric Forum, a gathering of leaders from North, Central, South America and the Caribbean aimed at strengthening ties between Miami City Hall and mayors from across the hemisphere. The forum also served as an opportunity for the region's big-city stewards to offer insights and success stories that might be helpful to their counterparts.

Mayor Diaz has received numerous international recognition for his work, including Hispanic Magazine, American Economia, and the Urban Land Institute each naming Miami among the top cities in the hemisphere. And, the influential British magazine Wallpaper named Miami the "Best City in the World."

Mayor Diaz has been recognized with the 2006 Government Award by Hispanic Magazine, the 2004 Urban Innovator of the Year by the Manhattan Institute, 2004 Business Leader of the Year Award by SouthFloridaCEO Magazine, and was named an "Outstanding American by Choice" by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service.

He serves on the advisory board for the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation, the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Urban Research, the Mayors' Institute on City Design, and was chosen as a judge for the Rudy Bruner Award for excellence in urban design.

Born on November 5, 1954, in Havana, Cuba, Diaz immigrated to the United States with his mother, Elisa, in 1961. Growing up in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, Diaz attended Belen Jesuit Prep School, Miami-Dade College, Florida International University and the University of Miami's School of Law.

Diaz is a partner in the law firm of Diaz & O'Naghten, L.L.P. He is married to Robin Smith and has four children; Manny, Natalie, Bobby, and Elisa. He also has three grandsons, Colin, Gavin and Manny.

TAM DOAN has been the Project Manager for the Stored Value Card Project since November 2005. She works closely with worker center partners to coordinate an innovative project aimed at increasing the financial stability and asset-building capacity of low wage workers while building the power and sustainability of their grassroots organizations. She is principally interested in collective, participatory market interventions. Prior to working at the Center, she worked on housing finance with the Affordable Housing Institute, occupational health and safety with New Ecology, and immigrant community economic development with Viet-AID. She holds a Masters in City Planning from the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and BA in Physics from Swarthmore College.

MARY DUPONT, is the Executive Director of the Nehemiah Gateway CDC in Wilmington Delaware, has twenty-five years of experience in community organizing, non-profit program and organizational development and management. At Nehemiah Gateway, she started a statewide EITC Campaign six years ago which served almost 15,000 low-income taxpayers this year in 22 locations. Of these, almost 700 were micro businesses. She has consulted with the Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Grameen Foundation, and others on program design, evaluation, and industry development. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Social Administration from Temple University.

JOHN DUPREE, JR. is the volunteer Treasurer/Manager of the Shiloh of Alexandria Federal Credit Union, a faith based credit union located in Alexandria, VA, that was chartered in 1993. Shiloh was designated a Low Income Credit Union in 1994 and certified as a Community Development Institution (CDFI) by the Department of the Treasury in 2001. John is employed by the Environmental Protection Agency and holds BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the US Naval Academy and Catholic University.

DAVID ERICKSON manages the Center for Community Development Investments at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) and is the editor of the journal Community Development Investment Review. David holds a PhD in U.S. History from UC Berkeley with a focus on economic history and public policy. He has more than five years of experience working in the affordable housing finance field for nonprofit, government, and private-sector employers. He previously received a Masters in Public Policy from UC Berkeley and has a bachelor's degree in History from Dartmouth College. He has written a book on the history of affordable housing policy that is forthcoming from Urban Institute Press.

KEITH ERNST serves as Senior Policy Counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. His responsibilities with the Center include management of research projects, policy analysis, and direct technical assistance to policymakers. In this role, he has testified before Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and state institutions on developments in the subprime mortgage market. He has also served as Assistant General Counsel to Self-Help, providing legal compliance advice and pre-purchase analysis of various loan portfolios to the organization's secondary market operation. He holds both a law degree and graduate degree in public policy studies from Duke University (class of 1996). The Center for Responsible Lending is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization that promotes responsible lending practices and access to fair terms of credit for low-wealth families. Self-Help is a North Carolina-based nonprofit community development lender that includes a credit union and a loan fund. Since 1980, Self-Help has provided more than $5.5 billion in financing to enable more than 55,000 homebuyers, small business owners, and non-profit organizations to build wealth and increase community resources.

BONNIE ESPOSITO, Executive Director, AccountAbility Minnesota. For over 25 years, Ms. Esposito has been designing and implementing community-based volunteer and community service programs through state, municipal, business association, community action agencies and corporations in various sized cities in Minnesota, Michigan, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, and Wisconsin. Ms. Esposito has worked as a National consultant and trainer, Executive Director of non-profit agencies, a small business owner, and manager of several municipal programs. Ms. Esposito was hired in 2002 as Executive Director of AccountAbility Minnesota, the largest voluntary income tax assistance program in the state of Minnesota. She also presently serves on the Steering Committee for the National Community Tax Coalition and the Leadership Group for Minnesota Saves.

PABLO J. FARÌAS is Vice-President for the Asset Building and Community Development Program of the Ford Foundation, one of the three programmatic areas for the Foundation. With a staff of 28 Program Officers in New York and 12 offices around the world, this program focuses on reducing poverty by expanding the asset base of marginalized communities, families and individuals and developing strategies to expand participation in development opportunities and the achievement of sustainable livelihoods, economic security and strong communities.

Pablo joined the Ford Foundation in 1998 and served until 2003 as Representative of the Foundation for Mexico and Central America. He also served as Deputy to the Vice-President in the Assets Program, supporting the design of program strategies and the development of analysis and learning activities.

Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, Pablo was the founding Director General of the College of the Southern Border (ECOSUR) in Chiapas, Mexico, a research institute focused on the challenges of poverty alleviation and sustainable development in the tropical rural areas of Southern Mexico. As founding director, Pablo oversaw the development of the institutional research, postgraduate education and outreach programs and the establishment of institutional facilities in the states along Mexico's southern border. Pablo began his career in social medicine and mental health working in the refugee camps along the Mexico-Guatemala border. Together with a group of community health advocates, he established the Comitan Center for Health Research, an organization focused on reproductive health, community mental health resources and development in rural areas.

A native of Monterrey, Mexico, he studied medicine at the University of Monterrey and trained in Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was also a fellow in Medical Anthropology. He lives with his wife and three children in New York City.

TIMOTHY FLACKE is Director of Business Development for D2D ("Doorways to Dreams") Fund, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding access to financial services, especially asset building opportunities, for lower-income families by creating, testing and deploying innovative financial products and services.. Prior to helping launch D2D, Tim worked as an independent consultant, author and grant writer in the field of asset development. In this capacity he co-authored The Individual Development Account Program Design Handbook, successful grant applications under the federal Assets for Independence Act (AFIA) program, and Dollar $ense, a financial education curriculum for IDA programs. Before entering the asset development field, Tim managed employee benefits, risk management and compensation plans for Filene's Basement, Inc., a $600MM off-price apparel retail chain. He holds a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Boston College.

ANDREA FERSTAN is a Community Impact Manager with Greater Twin Cities United Way, specializing in the area of Financial Stability. She manages a community-wide partnership to increase utilization of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other credits, helps coordinate FAIM in the nine county metropolitan area and helps lead a statewide capacity building effort. She also oversees initiatives aimed at increasing access and utilization of mainstream financial products and services that can help people achieve financial fitness. Ms. Ferstan has an MSW in Policy, Planning and Administration and over 15 years of experience developing and implementing a wide range of programs for youth and adults.

VIKKI FRANK leads Credit Builders Alliance - an innovative social enterprise nonprofit creating new solutions for underbanked families in the U.S. to build credit and assets. She comes to CBA from the Department of Treasury's CDFI Fund where she helped underwrite federal funding for Community Development Financial Institutions and strengthen Native CDFIs through training and technical assistance. Prior to the CDFI Fund, Vikki's work with ISED Solutions, The Crafts Center and the Latino Economic Development Corporation focused on building the capacity of nonprofits to advance financial education and asset building in underserved communities worldwide. She has conducted site visits and trainings for over 200 community-based organizations in the Americas and Africa and is recognized nationally for her expertise in adapting mainstream asset-building strategies to specific markets. Vikki has been an active member of the Assets Alliance and also co-investigator with the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California to expand university participation in asset building and IDAs. Vikki Frank holds an undergraduate degree from McGill University and a policy degree from Columbia University.

LOUIS FREEMAN, Business and Relationship Development Analyst for Federal Home Loan Bank Atlanta. Mr. Freeman is responsible for developing and managing key business relationships in order to expand the use of the Bank's products and services throughout the Southeast. He works closely with Bank members and community organizations to help them understand and utilize the Bank's housing and economic development programs. Mr. Freeman brings over 15 years of community development and real estate finance experience to structure and close affordable housing development transactions. Louis has a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering from Clemson University and a master's degree with a concentration in finance. He also has a Housing Development Finance Professional Certification from the National Development Council.

SHAWN FREMSTAD is a co-founder of Inclusion and an adviser to several national nonprofits on social and economic policy issues. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Workforce Alliance. He worked for many years at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, DC, and before that, as an attorney and policy specialist for legal aid programs in Minnesota. Shawn is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School and has studied art and design at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

EVELYN FRIEDMAN serves the City of Boston as Cabinet Chief of Housing and Director of the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND). As a member of Mayor Menino's Cabinet, she advises him on housing policy, legislation, and community relations. As DND Director, Evelyn manages a 200-person department with $100 million budget, including the city's federal grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide funding for housing, economic development, and human service programs. In addition, she oversees the management of the five program divisions within DND, including: Homebuyer Services, Homeowner Services, Neighborhood Housing Development, Office of Business Development, and Real Estate Management and Sales.

Previously, Evelyn Friedman spent eighteen years as the executive director of Nuestra Comunidad Development Corporation, an organization with a corporate budget of over $6.5 million and a staff of 45 employees. Under Friedman's leadership, Nuestra has grown to manage more than 700 units of rental housing and 65,000 square feet of commercial space. Nuestra also conducts community-organizing activities and provides youth services to Roxbury and North Dorchester. Ms. Friedman has also served on a number of boards, including: Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation, Boston Community Capital, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Shirley Eustis House, Third Sector New England, Neighborhood Capital Corporation, and The Boston Private Industry Council. Ms. Friedman is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Boston College.

ROBERT FRIEDMAN is general counsel, founder and chair of CFED's board.

Since 1979, CFED has worked to foster widely shared and sustainable economic well-being by promoting asset-building and economic opportunity strategies that bring together community practice, public policy and private markets in new and effective ways. Mr. Friedman and CFED have helped lead the U.S. development of innovative economic development strategies including microenterprise, flexible business networks, individual development accounts, and economic health assessments. Mr. Friedman's current work focuses on the Savings for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Policy and Practice Initiative to assess the potential of long-term savings and investment accounts established at birth.

Among Mr. Friedman's other major publications are:

• The Return of the Dream: An Analysis of the Probable Economic Return of a National Investment in Individual
  Development Accounts (1995)
  
• The Development Report Card for the States (co-author, 1986-1995)
  
• The Safety Net As Ladder: Transfer Payments and Economic Development (1988)
  
• Expanding the Opportunity to Produce: Revitalizing the American Economy Through New Enterprise Development (Co-editor, 1981)

Mr. Friedman was founding chair of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity; and currently serves on the boards of SF EARN, the Family Independence Initiative, Doorways to Dreams, the Koshland Committee of the San Francisco Foundation, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Friedman Family Foundation and is a former board member of Levi Strauss & Co and Ecotrust. Mr. Friedman is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.

BRIAN A. GALLAGHER, President and CEO, United Way. A career veteran of the United Way system, Brian Gallagher became president and chief executive office of UWA in 2002 and immediately took on the challenge of leading the transformation of the organization to focus on community impact –identifying the root causes of the most serious problems in communities and bringing people and resources to tackle the issues that matter most. Brian oversees United Way's nationwide network of nearly 1300 community-based organizations that cover 98% of the country, through that system $4 billion is allocated in the U.S. annually to meet local needs in the areas education, health and family financial stability. Before becoming the leader of the United Way system, Brian worked at United Ways in Columbus, OH; Atlanta, GA; Reading, PA; Providence, RI; and Winston-Salem, NC. Through his many leadership roles including his current position as board chair of the Independent Sector, Brian is taking on critical sector issues such as trust, accountability and effectiveness.

ALAN GENTLE is Director of the Roxbury Resource Center, a satellite career center of Boston's Office of Jobs and Community Services, and coordinator of the largest VITA site in Boston's Earned Income Tax Credit Coalition. While the Center's core services are employment and training, in the five year history as member of Boston EITC Coalition, it is at the forefront of the Coalition's wealth building initiatives. The RRC is one of several VITA sites partnering with D2D Fund (Doorways-to-Dream, Inc.) "refund to asset" Series I US Savings Bond project. In TS07, Alan helped to create and launch the Coalition's Youth Tax Preparation Program that introduces 10th - 12th grade high school students to the VITA program, the initiative teach critical thinking skills, cultivates community service and enhance the entrepreneurial spirit.

CHRIS GIANGRECO, PHD, Policy Coordinator, Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights. Chris serves as the lead in coordinating asset-building policy at Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights in Chicago, Illinois. His work includes supporting Heartland Alliance's role as co-chair of the Illinois Asset Building Group and promoting the Children's Savings Account initiative in Illinois. He also works to connect Heartland's policy efforts with asset-building programming. He has experience in coalition-building, developing and advancing policy proposals, and research and evaluation in a variety of areas - health, transportation, housing, and environmental policy. Chris received his PhD through the sociology program at Loyola University Chicago with a focus on policy implementation.

INGER GIUFFRIDA is a training and technical assistance consultant focusing on financial literacy education and asset building strategies in rural and urban communities for diverse populations.

Ms. Giuffrida has been working primarily as a practitioner in the microenterprise and asset development fields internationally and domestically for eighteen years. She developed and implemented comprehensive microenterprise development programs for Grand Rapids Opportunities for Women (GROW) first as program director and then as the organization's executive director and at Alternatives Federal Credit Union. She created and launched financial literacy education programs for both of those organizations. At GROW she developed an IDA program and supported the IDA program at Alternatives. As Program Director for the Individual Assets Department at the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), she conceptualized, developed, field tested and delivered the IDA Training Institute, conducted the research for and authored Individual Development Accounts for Youth: Lessons from an Emerging Field, which included primary data collection from focus groups, and managed all of the field services work including the relaunch of the IDAnetwork and the national IDA VISTA project. She also managed the first international IDA Learning Conference (now the Asset Building Conference) in 2002.

She created and co-wrote four nationally distributed financial education curricula: Finding Paths to Prosperity (CFED and NEFE), Saving Smart, Spending Smart (Share Our Strength), Your Values, Your Choices, Your Money (Thrivent Financial for Lutherans), More than Money Matters (Thrivent Financial for Lutherans). She was also the creator and co-writer on the Youth Financial Empowerment Curriculum for the New York City Administration for Children's Services; this curriculum is specifically designed for young people transitioning out of foster care. She also has also developed and delivered financial education trainer of trainers to hundreds of practitioners in the asset building field and created two financial education camps for youth.

She holds an MBA from Western Michigan University and a BS in Business Finance from Miami University. She currently serves on the Board of the Oklahoma Jumpstart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, is a steering committee member of the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition, is a member of the Assets Alliance, and chairs Touch a Truck Day, a special event and fundraiser for the Children's Section of the Norman Public Library, an event she founded. She has served on numerous community boards and volunteered in every community in which she has lived.

FRED GOLDBERG is a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP where he manages the tax policy practice. He previously served as Assistant Secretary on Tax Policy to the Department of the Treasury, and as Commissioner and Chief Counsel at the Internal Revenue Service.Mr. Goldberg has authored several publications on tax policy reform and asset building. These works include "Reforming Social Security: How To Implement a Practical and Workable System of Personal Retirement Accounts" (2000); "From FDR to W: The IRS As Financial Intermediary" (2002); "The Universal Piggy Bank: Designing and Implementing A System of Savings Accounts for Children" (2000); and "Filling the Void: Can the IRS Restructuring Bring Purpose and Meaning to the Random World of Tax Litigation?" (1999). Mr. Goldberg previously served as Executive Director of the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform. He is currently a trustee at the American Tax Policy Institute and the D2D Fund, Inc.

HEIDI GOLDBERG is the Program Director for Early Childhood and Family Economic Success at the National League of Cities' Institute for Youth, Education, and Families. In this position, Heidi leads the Institute's efforts to strengthen the capacity of municipal leaders to help working families move toward economic self-sufficiency and to develop and implement programs to help young children succeed through early literacy and school readiness initiatives. She previously served as a senior program associate supporting the Institute's Family Economic Success portfolio. Prior to coming to NLC, Heidi was the Director of Local Programs and Policy for Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) where she coordinated the organization's local projects, including research and advocacy on workforce development programs in D.C. Heidi also spent four years as a policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities where she specialized in state and federal welfare policy. Between 1991 and 1996, Heidi managed a residence for formerly homeless women at Rosie's Place in Boston. Heidi holds a B.A. from Vassar College and a Master of Public Policy and Master of Social Work - both from the University of Michigan.

SARAH E. GORDON is the Nonprofit Relationship Manager at the Center for Financial Services Innovation. In this position, Ms. Gordon establishes relationships with the nonprofit community, particularly organizations working with low and moderate income families on financial development and asset-building strategies. Through relationships with financial services innovators, policy-makers, consumer advocates and others, Ms. Gordon creates a business and a regulatory environment, which supports development of new products and services for the underbanked. Ms. Gordon brings nonprofit organizations into CFSI's existing networking program and establishes new ways to reach, learn from, educate, and innovate with this community. She also manages CFSI's new grant pool for nonprofit innovations and brokers relationships between the for-profit financial services sector and nonprofits.

Prior to joining CFSI, Ms. Gordon was the Associate Director at Jane Addams Resource Corporation (JARC). As part of the agency's management team, Ms. Gordon directed development activities and cultivated existing and potential donors. She wrote grant proposals and secured funding from government, corporate, foundation, and individual sources. Ms. Gordon also served as the Director for the Economic & Human Development Program and the Center for Working Families. In this role, she managed the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs that help low income individuals improve their educational and employment outcomes and achieve financial stability. She identified bank and credit union partners to support the programs and to provide affordable financial products for participants.

Sarah E. Gordon graduated Cum Laude from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Sociology and Urban Studies and a minor in African-American Studies. She also completed two years of graduate study in Sociology at Northwestern University.

JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Economics Department's Center for Race and Wealth at Howard University, and a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada (academic year 2008-09). Starting September 2009 she will accept the position of Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development at John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland (UMd), College Park. Dr. Gordon Nembhard is a political economist specializing in economic development policy, Black political economy, and popular economic literacy. Her research focuses on community- and asset- based economic development and democratic community economics, cooperative economics and worker ownership, alternative urban economic and educational development strategies, and racial wealth inequality and wealth accumulation in communities of color.

Dr. Gordon Nembhard's recent publications include Wealth Accumulation and Communities of Color in the US: Current Issues (University of Michigan Press 2006, co-edited with Ngina Chiteji); "Alternative Economics, a Missing Component in the African American Studies Curriculum" (in a special issue co-edited by Gordon Nembhard and Mathew Forstater of the Journal of Black Studies, May 2008); "Growing Transformative Businesses: Community-Based Economic Development" (in the Solidarity Economy proceedings published by ChangeMaker Publications 2008). In addition, she is the author of ACooperatives and Wealth Accumulation@in the American Economic Review; ANon Traditional Analyses of Cooperative Economic Impacts,@ in the Review of International Co-operation, ACooperative Ownership in the Struggle for African American Economic Empowerment@ in Humanity & Society, and "Educating Black Youth for Economic Empowerment: Democratic Economic Participation and School Reform Practices and Policies," in Handbook of African American Education edited by Linda Tillman (Sage 2008). Dr. Gordon Nembhard is also completing a manuscript on the history of African American cooperative businesses.

Gordon Nembhard is the recipient of a Henry C. Welcome Fellowship Grant from the Maryland Higher Education Commission (2001-2004), and a USDA grant on the economic impact of cooperatives through the University of Wisconsin's Center for Cooperatives to study wealth accumulation through cooperative ownership. She has been a member of the Black Enterprise Board of Economists since October 1999. Dr. Gordon Nembhard was a Visiting Scholar and Senior Urban Fellow at Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform from June 1998-June 2000. She is Treasurer of the National Economic Association (NEA). Jessica Gordon Nembhard earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1992 and 1989, respectively). She earned her B.A. degree, magna cum laude, in Literature and African American Studies from Yale University (1978); and an M.A.T. in Elementary Curriculum and Teaching from Howard University (1982). She is the proud mother of two children and one grandson.

KATHRYN GWATKIN GOULDING is a senior program manager at CFED. She directs CFED's Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I'M HOME) initiative, which seeks to offer owners of manufactured housing the same type of benefits enjoyed by owners of site-built housing, and works on an array of other projects focused on asset building. Prior to joining CFED, Ms.Goulding was a Program Associate in the Economic Development unit of the Ford Foundation. Her work there focused on grants and program related investments in the homeownership and international development finance sectors. She has also worked internationally in the field of microfinance, as part of ACCION International's technical assistance team based at BancoSol, in La Paz, Bolivia. Ms. Goulding holds a B.A. in political science from Amherst College and an M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

WILLIAM GUEVARA is the Director of Institution Development for First Nations Oweesta Corporation (Oweesta). He is an integral part of Oweesta's Training, Technical Assistance and Consulting Program. He provides Native Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) development training and technical assistance, including all aspects of our market research services, to Native communities. He manages the technical assistance component of the Native Communities Financing Initiative for emerging Native CDFIs, including the new Native Credit Union program. With over 30 years experience as a Real Estate/Mortgage Broker and a General Contractor, William has extensive experience in the housing development field in addition to his significant Native CDFI experience. He is an accomplished presenter, trainer, researcher and technical assistance provider and is the former executive director of an Indian Housing Authority, seeing the organization through its early stages of Native CDFI development..

GINA GUILLEMETTE serves as Director of the Policy and Advocacy division of Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, a service-based human rights organization located in Chicago. Gina leads agency efforts to identify systemic barriers experienced by vulnerable populations and to advance effective solutions through administrative and legislative change. She works with elected officials, policymakers and key stakeholders to advance the policy priorities of Heartland Alliance. Gina specializes in policy solutions related to poverty alleviation, income supports and economic security, and asset building as well as the intersection between program implementation and public policy. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for Economic Progress and is co-coordinator of the Illinois Asset Building Group. Gina received a Master of Social Work degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri with a concentration in social and economic development.

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DOUG HALL is the Acting Managing Director at CT Voices for Children. He also contributes to tax and budget and family economic security matters as a data analyst and researcher. Doug has recently co-authored reports exploring Connecticut's growing income gaps, the distribution of family assets, and the varying impact by income of Connecticut's state and local taxes. He has also been lead author of CT Voices' annual report, "The State of Working Connecticut", which documents the challenges faced by Connecticut's working families. Doug spends considerable time immersed in piles of Census data and creating maps in GIS applications. Doug has a doctorate in Political Studies from Queen's University, Ontario, where he studied state level economic development policies. He also holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy and Administration from McMaster and Guelph Universities, and a Bachelor of Arts from York University.

JOHNETTE T. HARTNETT, ED.D., is the Director of Research and Strategic Partnership Development for the National Disability Institute (NDI). She is also a senior researcher with the Law, Health Policy, & Disability Center (LHPDC) at the University of Iowa, College of Law. Dr. Hartnett provides national leadership in the development of traditional and non-traditional partnerships across the public and private sector on a variety of public policy issues relative to the employment, asset development, and long-term service and support needs of Americans with disabilities.

Dr. Hartnett is national director and co-founder of the Real Economic Impact Tour that provided free tax preparation and other asset building strategies to over 61,000 taxpayers with disabilities. Since 2005 the number of taxpayers with disabilities participating in the Tour has increased 477% and received over $55 million in returns.

Dr. Hartnett is principal investigator of the Asset Accumulation and Tax Policy Project (AATPP) for persons with disabilities, a National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research funded grant at the LHPDC. This inaugural research has examined the challenges of tax and other public policies to the advancement of economic independence, social empowerment, and community integration for individuals with disabilities.

Dr. Hartnett is co-chair of the National Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities Ad Hoc Asset Development and Tax and Finance Task Force that works on public policy issues that promote full access to the financial mainstream for persons with disabilities and their families.

Dr. Hartnett obtained her Ed.D.in Policy and Educational Leadership and her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Vermont. She graduated Summa Cum Laude, from Trinity College, in Vermont, majoring in psychology and gerontology. Prior to her role at the National Disability Institute, Dr. Hartnett was Vice President of the NCB Development Corporation, and Assistant Research Professor, in the Department of Education and the Center on Disability and Community Inclusion, at the University of Vermont. She was a Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Congressional Fellow in the 107th Congress where she worked for Senator Rockefeller on behalf of individuals with disabilities in the reauthorization of welfare.

Dr. Hartnett's research and publications have been in the areas of special education finance, welfare reform, asset development and long-term services and supports for individuals with disabilities. In addition, Dr. Hartnett has authored a series of books on coping with loss. Dr. Hartnett is dedicated to working on policy and research issues that forward the quality of life and the economic well-being of Americans with disabilities.

CATHY HINKO is the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, a regional advocacy organization for fair and affordable housing located in Louisville, KY. Cathy is the former Executive Director of the Housing Authority of Jefferson County which operated award-winning programs providing almost 9,000 households with assisted housing; she was with HAJC from 1988 to 2003. Cathy created the partnership for the first program in the nation to allow households to use a Section 8 voucher payment to help purchase a home. Cathy received her J.D. from Vanderbilt University. She was a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow with Legal Services in Jackson, Tennessee and came to Louisville to practice housing law with the Legal Aid Society in 1983.

JOHN HOFFMIRE is the Director of the Center on Business and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business and Faculty Associate at the Puelicher Center for Banking Education. Before starting the Center on Business and Poverty in 2004, John had a twenty-year career in equity investing, venture capital, consulting and investment banking. His work has had a particular focus on employee stock ownership plans. As founder and CEO of his own investment banking firm, he helped employees buy and manage approximately $2.2 billion worth of ESOP stock. He sold his firm to American Capital, which then went public. John left American Capital as Senior Investment Officer when the company reached $1 billion in assets. After leaving American Capital, John was vice president at Ampersand Ventures, formerly Paine Webber's private equity group. After he finished his Ph.D. at Stanford University, he was a consultant at Bain & Company. John is also Chairman of Progress Through Business, an organization that he founded with others interested in economic development tools that can used by companies to assist low-income individuals and communities.

JEAN HUNT is the Director of the Division for Working Families at the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition, and has led the Campaign for Working Families for the past six years. The Campaign is an initiative designed to increase resources available to low-wage working families in the Philadelphia region. In six years, the Campaign has completed 68,,000 tax returns for its customers, bringing them $106 million in state and federal credits and refunds, and saving them approximately $17 million in fees and charges. Jean's previous professional experience includes: Program Director for Children, Youth and Families at the William Penn Foundation; Executive Director of the Mayor's Children and Families Cabinet, City of Philadelphia, and Assistant Managing Director in the Philadelphia Department of Recreation. As an R.N., she served as the Executive Director of the Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women; Director of Outpatient Services at the Booth Maternity Center and worked as an R.N. in a variety of clinical settings including the emergency room, outpatient clinics and home nursing. She has worked as a community organizer and is active in a variety of community organizations. Ms. Hunt is married to Mas Nakawatase, and they have two grown children, Michiko and Kenzo.

MARK IWRY, a former tax counsel for the Treasury Department, is an expert on employee benefits; executive compensation; health care; pensions; retirement; and savings. At Treasury, he oversaw national policy on tax-qualified pension and 401(k) plans, as well as other employee benefits. He is also a Georgetown University research professor.

ANNETTA JENKINS, Executive Director, South Florida, LISC. Annetta's defining characteristic is her lifelong commitment to serving her community. She has focused more than 25 years of experience in real estate, finance, planning, law and management into her current career in community development. At South Florida LISC, she is responsible for external relations, strategic planning, fund development, program supervision and the management of a sophisticated public policy agenda. She oversees the program development for 17 community development corporations (CDCs), numerous public-private partnerships and 18 comprehensive community initiatives. She leads a team of professionals, 15 AmeriCorps members and several financial and management consultants.

In her 12 years at South Florida LISC, Annetta has led a full-menu of community betterment activity that has resulted in more than $1 billion of leveraged investment in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties in the past nine years. She developed the LISC Signature Projects Portfolio, a pipeline of mixed-use projects that has an estimated value of $500 million. She led the team that developed Atlantic Grove, an $18 million project that is the first major development on West Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach in 40 years. She is also spearheading the Overtown Transformation Initiative, helping bring more than 1,000 houses to the historically African-American community in Miami.

Annetta holds a bachelor's of arts degree in economics from Fisk University and a Juris Doctor degree in law from Nova Southeastern University. She received an Executive Certificate from the Columbia University Business School's Institute for Nonprofit Management and has numerous certificates in real estate, real estate finance, business planning, organizational development, homeownership educations, credit counseling, marketing and leadership.

CHRISTINE JOHNSON is a consultant with the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a national foundation whose mission is to bring together the people, systems and resources necessary to assist youth in foster care to make successful transitions to adulthood through: making grants, providing technical assistance, and advocating for improved policies and practices. The Initiative does this through five strategies, including an IDA component. Christine supports the work of grantees in Connecticut and Colorado. She also serves as the liaison to national partners such as the American Public Human Services Association and the National Governor's Association. Christine's career spans 15 years working for nonprofit organizations, juvenile justice and child welfare systems in Colorado and Vermont. A native of Vermont, she is the proud mother of twin 3 year old girls.

JAMES H. JOHNSON JR. is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of entrepreneurship and director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center. His research interests include community and economic development, the effects of demographic changes on the U.S. workplace, interethnic minority conflict in advanced industrial societies, urban poverty and public policy in urban America, and workforce diversity issues. With support from the Russell Sage Foundation, he is researching the economic impact of Sept. 11 on U.S. metropolitan communities. Dr. Johnson's research focuses on the causes and consequences of growing inequality in American society, particularly as it affects socially and economically disadvantaged youth; entrepreneurial approaches to poverty alleviation, job creation, and community development; interethnic minority conflict in advanced industrial societies; and business demography and workforce diversity issues. Fast Company profiled Dr. Johnson and his work in "Hopes and Dreams." He has published more than 100 scholarly research articles and three research monographs and has co-edited four theme issues of scholarly journals on these and related topics. His latest book is "Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles". He received his PhD from Michigan State University, his MS from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and his BS from North Carolina Central University.

LISSA JOHNSON is Director of Administration for the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. She also directs research projects in the areas of asset-building and civic service.

Ms. Johnson is currently managing a study of a school-based children's savings program which is part of a larger nationwide study of children's savings accounts called Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) Policy and Practice Initiative. For the past eight years, Ms. Johnson has managed the American Dream Policy Demonstration (ADD) research, the first nationwide study of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). She has been responsible for overseeing the completion of eight research methods implemented across 13 program sites. As part of the ADD research, Ms. Johnson led the development of a management information system (MIS) that provides program administration, account management, and data monitoring for organizations implementing IDA programs. In the area of civic service, Ms. Johnson directed a multi-country research project on youth volunteerism and civic service in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ms. Johnson received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, attending one year in Exeter, England. She received her Master of Social Work degree from the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in the state of Missouri.

DOMINIQUE R. JONES is Assistant Commissioner of the Office of Youth Development (OYD) and New York City Children's Services. In this role she has led in the reorganization and positioning of OYD as key purveyor of technical assistance to New York City's 34 foster care providers in integrating youth development principles in their work with youth in foster care. Critical to this effort has been the implementation of the goals of the Preparing Youth for Adulthood, an initiative that promotes integrated best child welfare practice with young people transitioning from care.

Prior to her appointment, Ms. Jones served as the Director of Development and Special Projects in Children's Services Commissioner's Office, helping to secure and manage approximately $2 million in private funding from New Yorkers For Children. She provided leadership that led to the development of the Youth Financial Empowerment (YFE), a five-year initiative that brings together the New York City Mayor's Center for Economic Opportunity, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, United Way of New York City, Citibank, and New Yorkers For Children to provide financial education and individual development accounts to youth transitioning out of foster care.

Before joining Children's Services in 2005, Dominique was a project manager and program officer at Neighborhood Restore and New York City Local Initiatives Support Corporation, respectively, where her responsibilities included the stabilization, pre-development, and financing of affordable housing throughout New York City. In addition to her work in community and economic development, Dominique served as Deputy Director of Budget for C. Virginia Fields, the former Manhattan Borough President, and a Planner with the Center for Court Innovation.

Dominique holds a MS degree from the Milano Graduate School of Management & Urban Policy of The New School and a BA degree in political science from Spelman College.

DONALD JONES is the Director of Resource Development at the Oakland Livingston Human Service Agency (OLHSA) a Community Action Agency located in Pontiac, Michigan. His responsibilities include foundation, corporate, government and individual fundraising to support the agency programs. In addition he oversees asset development programs including Individual Development Account (IDA), Earned Income Tax Credit tax preparation programs, financial education programs and a national experimental initiative to set up college savings accounts for Head Start children, SEED.

Mr. Jones is also the president and chief operating officer of OLHSA's Community Development Corporation (CDC) Venture, Inc. Venture in cooperation with OLHSA builds new homes, renovates existing homes and provides housing counseling and related support services. Venture also provides quality rental housing using Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC).

His previous experience included fundraising at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the College for Creative Studies, Detroit.

Mr. Jones currently serves on the boards of the Community Economic Development Association of Michigan (CEDAM), The Heat and Warmth Fund (THAW).

KEVIN JORDAN is the Program Director for the Family Income and Wealth Building initiative at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), where he helps local LISC offices initiate programs that support income and asset building for low-to- moderate income families. Kevin has been employed with LISC since January 2008. Prior to LISC, Kevin served at the Bon Secours Baltimore Health System for over 10 years, where he ended his tenure as the Director for the Working Families Department. In that capacity he led the development of Our Money Place, the hybrid financial service center that serves the residents of West Baltimore and Bon Secours' Center for Working Families. He received his B.A. from LeMoyne College and a Master's Degree in Community Planning from the University of Maryland at College Park.

LISA N. KANEMOTO, Community Affairs Specialist, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, San Francisco Region. Lisa has been with the FDIC since 1998, serving as the Executive Project Manager in the Office of the Chairman in Washington, D.C. prior to becoming a Community Affairs Specialist in the San Francisco region in January 2001. She is part of a 5-member regional Community Affairs team in the Corporation's Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection, which is responsible for community outreach in twelve Western states and territories, including Hawaii and Guam. The Community Affairs program covers a wide range of consumer and community issues, including financial education, predatory lending, asset development strategies, and reaching unbanked and immigrant markets.

Lisa's responsibilities include promoting compliance and understanding or the Community Reinvestment Act and the fair lending process through public speaking engagements and educational seminars for financial institutions, community groups and government entities. The FDIC assists in fostering economic development in communities throughout the country. Over the past three years, outreach efforts have focused on economic inclusion and asset building in low-income communities, as well as the national financial education initiative, Money Smart.

Prior to her present position, Lisa worked at both the federal and state levels on the staffs of U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, former Hawaii State House Finance Chairman and Kauai Mayor Tony Kunimura, and former Hawaii Governor John Waihee. She was also the Executive Director of TEMARI Center for Asian and Pacific Arts, a non-profit organization in Hawaii devoted to the perpetuation of native Hawaiian and Asian folk arts and crafts through exhibits, visiting artist classes and education. Her work at the FDIC has been acknowledged by numerous mission achievement awards and the FDIC Chairman's 2005 Team Excellence Award for her role in the nationally acclaimed New Alliance Task Force (NATF) initiative.

RICHARD KEELING began his career with the Internal Revenue Service in 1982 and worked several years in the compliance division of the government as an auditor, instructor and manager. In 2001, Richard was selected to his current position as a Senior Tax Analyst in Stakeholder Partnerships, Education and Communication (SPEC) of the Wage & Investment Division. His primary responsibility is working with the "Taxpayers with Disabilities" program. This program strives to provide more widespread access to tax information and free tax preparation to taxpayers with disabilities.

SANDRA KERR is Executive Vice President & Director, Policy for Opportunity Finance Network (OFN). OFN is s national network of more than 160 financial institutions that creates growth that is good for communities, investors, individuals, and the economy. Its members include CDFIs and other opportunity finance institutions that work just outside the margins of conventional finance to bring those markets into the economic mainstream and to help the economic mainstream flow into those markets. Over the past 30 years, the Opportunity Finance industry has provided more than $23 billion in financing that would not otherwise have happened in markets that conventional finance would not otherwise reach. Ms. Kerr leads OFN's policy efforts on issues relating to economic development including CDFI Fund and appropriations, GSE reform (Capital Magnet Fund), predatory lending, Community Reinvestment Act, and New Markets Tax Credit. She is responsible for OFN's policy book, The Next American Opportunity: Good Policies for a Great America. Prior to joining OFN, Ms. Kerr was Editor, The Journal of Gift Planning, as well as Director, Government Education Services for the National Committee on Planned Giving, an association whose 12,000+ members work in developing, marketing, and administering charitable planned gifts. Ms. Kerr has worked in government relations for more than 20 years in a variety of capacities. She is the author/editor of numerous articles and publications including, Valuation Standards for Charitable Gift Planning. She has received several awards for her community work, as well as her writing, editing, and publishing including the Indiana Society of Association Executives award for best magazine in the state. Ms. Kerr graduated from Ball State University with a B.S. in Journalism and is a frequent speaker at conferences and institutes regarding opportunity finance.

ADRIANNA KEZAR, Associate Professor for Higher Education, University of Southern California. Kezar holds a Ph.D. 1996 and M.A. 1992 in higher education administration from the University of Michigan and a B.A. 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty at USC in 2003.

She was formerly an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and George Washington University. Kezar was editor of the ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Series from 1996-2004. Previously, she was an administrative associate for the Vice President for Student Affairs (1992-1995) and Coordinator for the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (1995-96), both at the University of Michigan.

Her research focuses on change, leadership, public purposes of higher education, organizational theory, governance, access, and diversity/equity issues in higher education. She has published over 75 articles and books and is featured in the major journals for higher education including The Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, and Journal of College Student Development. Her most recent book is Rethinking the "L" Word in Higher Education: The Revolution of Research on Leadership (2006). In 2005, she had two new books: Higher Education for the Public Good and Creating Organizational Learning in Higher Education both with Jossey Bass Press and a national report published by the American Council on Education: Leadership Strategies for Advancing Campus Diversity. She is currently working on a grant from the Lumina foundation related to a federal financial program called Individual Development Accounts.

Kezar has participated actively in national service, including being on the editorial boards for The Journal of Higher education, The Journal of College Student Development, Change, and The ERIC Review and serving as a reviewer for 11 journals in and outside higher education. She has served on the AERA-Division J Council and Association for the Study of Higher Education Publication Committee and Dissertation of the Year Committee. Kezar also serves(d) as a board member for the American Association for Higher Education, Association of American Colleges and Universities' Peer Review and Knowledge Network; National TRIO Clearinghouse; and the American Council on Education's CIRP Research Cooperative. She volunteers for several national organizations including the HERS/Bryn Mawr Summer Institute, Pathways to College Network, and the Kellogg Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good. She has received national awards for her editorial leadership of the ASHE-ERIC report series from ASHE, for developing a leadership development program for women in higher education from ACE, and for her commitment to service learning from the National Society for Experiential Learning.

KILOLO KIJAKAZI joined the Ford Foundation in September of 2003 as a program officer for the Economic Development Unit in the Asset Building and Community Development Program. She has assumed responsibility for taking to scale the work on facilitating savings and investments for low-income families and individuals. She is examining strategies for creating universal and sustainable policy around a life cycle of saving and investments that includes children's savings accounts, individual development accounts, Social Security, and pensions. She is also undertaking the task of ensuring that these asset building strategies are culturally relevant to the communities they impact.

Before coming to Ford, Kilolo was a senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities where she specialized in Social Security. While there she wrote and presented research and policy papers, provided testimony before Congress, and served as a panelist at the White House Conference on Social Security under the Clinton Administration. Some of her papers were published by the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Gerontological Society.

Prior to that, she worked as a program analyst for the US Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. In this position she designed and monitored evaluations of the Food Stamp Program and demonstrations of non-custodial parents programs. She also worked at the National Urban League Washington Operations office as a policy analyst and addressed issues such as welfare reform, employment, and education.

Kilolo received a doctorate in public policy from the George Washington University and her dissertation was published in 1997 as a book titled African-American Economic Development and Small Business Ownership. She also holds an MSW with a specialty in community development from Howard University.

JOYCE KLEIN is a Senior Consultant to the FIELD program of the Aspen Institute. Ms. Klein has over 15 years of experience in studying and supporting microenterprise and entrepreneurial development programs in the United States. Ms. Klein's work for FIELD has included research into the issues of scale and sustainability within the microenterprise field. She also managed FIELD's Welfare-to-Work Learning Evaluation, a five-year effort to evaluate ten demonstration programs funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to provide microenterprise services to TANF recipients, and provides assistance to the MicroTest project. As an independent consultant, Ms. Klein has also provided assistance to the CDFI Fund and the Corporation for Enterprise Development. Ms. Klein holds a masters degree in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. in economics from Boston College.

PAUL KNOX directs asset building activities at the Washington State Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development (CTED). Paul oversees the state's Individual Development Account, EITC outreach and local asset building programs. He was the lead founder of the Washington Asset Building Coalition, dedicated to expanding and improving savings, financial literacy and asset development for low and moderate income state residents.

Paul started up and directed CTED's WorkFirst Division from 1997–2004. In that role, he managed development and implementation of Community Jobs, the nation's largest paid transitional work program for hard-to-employ welfare recipients. He formerly directed Manufacturing Initiatives, working to improve the competitiveness of key manufacturing industry sectors in Washington State. These activities started up 14 business networks helping hundreds of businesses cut costs, increase sales and quality and create jobs. His achievements include founding Washington Manufacturing Services and the Washington Aerospace Alliance and being awarded the Governor's Award for Distinguished Management.

Mr. Knox earned his B.A. in Economics at Tufts University and has completed his course work for a M.A. in Applied Behavioral Sciences at the Leadership Institute of Seattle.

MELISSA KOIDE is Deputy Director of the Financial Services and Education Project at the New America Foundation. New America is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institute, located in Washington, DC. The Financial Services and Education Project provides national leadership on public policies related to expanding wealth-building financial services, especially for low and middle income families; improving financial education; forging a new responsibility framework for consumer financial services in the 21st century; and helping Americans to better manage their debt.

Over the past year, Ms. Koide has focused on developing federal policies to utilize new financial services innovations to provide low and middle income consumers with high-value, low-cost financial products. Her efforts have engaged the financial services industry, policymakers, and academics. She has published on these efforts in the American Banker, and she has spoken widely about these policy initiatives and other topics.

Before joining New America, Ms. Koide worked for the U.S. Treasury Department, the Brookings Institution, CFED, and the Mayor's Office in Louisville, Kentucky. Ms. Koide's prior experience includes helping to create a new federal tax credit bill to support asset accumulation by low-income consumers; engaging the financial services industry in innovative asset-building policies and initiatives; and providing strategic advice for a $2 million, employer-based matched savings program. Ms. Koide holds a master's degree in public policy from Georgetown University and bachelors' degrees in economics and policy analysis from the University of Louisville.

DAN KORNELIS is the Housing and Community Director for the Forsyth County Department of Housing in North Carolina, a realtor, and an experienced community development trainer and consultant in housing, IDAs and other asset-building programs. In 1999, the County Housing Department began an IDA program that currently has more than 300 homebuyer graduates and 250 open active accounts. The Department also has aggressively sought grants from the state and federal government along with private foundations and businesses and has received grants totaling over $20,000,000 in state, federal, and private funds for housing and economic development programs for the County within the last 15 years. Dan received a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Dakota and a Masters in Community and Regional Planning with a Concentration in Housing, Demographics and Community Development from North Dakota State University.

MERLE LAWRENCE joined Levi Strauss & Co. in December 1991, bringing over 15 years of experience in strategic planning, program management, and research and evaluation in local, statewide and national non-profit organizations. She is currently the Senior Manager-US in Worldwide Community & Corporate Citizenship Department and the Levi Strauss Foundation, responsible for developing and managing strategic grantmaking and branded philanthropy programs. She earned her BA in Liberal Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs and her MSW at San Francisco State University.

ELLEN LAZAR is senior vice president of Housing and Community Initiatives at the Fannie Mae Foundation. In this capacity, she directs many of the Foundation's grantmaking initiatives and manages the Foundation's five regional offices. Ms. Lazar also leads the Foundation's programs to provide financial literacy and home-buyer education to underserved communities, and she guides the Foundation's community development efforts in Washington, D.C.

Before joining the Foundation, Ms. Lazar was executive director of Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (NRC). Under her leadership, NRC launched several national programs and developed a long-term strategy to raise the visibility of the NeighborWorks® network of community-based organizations across the nation.

Before joining NRC, Ms. Lazar was director of the U.S. Treasury Department's Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund. As director of the Fund, Ms. Lazar expanded the Fund's scope, launched initiatives to increase the capacity of CDFIs, and strengthened the Fund's congressional support. Previously, Ms. Lazar was executive director of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, a national membership organization that promotes private investment in affordable housing. She also served as vice president and general counsel of The Enterprise Foundation. Before that, she was assistant general counsel to the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships and served in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Ms. Lazar serves on the boards of a variety of nonprofit organizations, including Nonprofit Finance Fund, Community Wealth Ventures, and the National Fund for Enterprise Development. Ms. Lazar is a graduate of Queens College of the City University of New York, and of the Indiana University School of Law at Bloomington.

DANIEL LETENDRE is the Director of Lending and Investing at Merrill Lynch Community Development Company. Here he manages a team of finance professionals that provide capital, liquidity and technical assistance to community development financial intermediaries that expand access to capital in underserved markets. His team has extended over $1 billion in loans and investments to finance housing, small businesses and community facilities providing health care, education, childcare and other needed social services in low- and moderate- income communities Prior to working at Merrill Lynch, Letendre was a Vice President at JPMorgan Chase's Community Development Corporation. There he directed the banks lending and investing activities with Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), expanding the CDFI's access to capital for businesses and projects located in low-income communities.

During his 13 year career with the Community Development Corporation, Mr. Letendre functioned in various lending capacities, focusing on commercial real estate, multifamily housing and small businesses in low- and moderate-income communities. He managed the product development team of the bank's affordable mortgage business as well as the research, analysis and reporting function of the Community Reinvestment Act compliance Unit. Before working at Chase, Mr. Letendre was a management consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton in their Financial Institutions Practice and a research analyst with Paine Webber, focusing on financial institutions in developing countries in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Mr. Letendre received a MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS from Manhattan College.

ANDREA LEVERE is president of CFED in Washington, D.C. and has overall management responsibilities for the consistent pursuit of CFED's mission, for its long-term strategies and its day-to-day operations. Under Ms. Levere's energetic direction, CFED has thrived in its mission to expand economic opportunity for low-income people and disadvantaged communities.

At the helm of CFED, Ms. Levere has developed an unprecedented partnership with the Federal Reserve System to address the inability of many Americans to build personal savings and assets. Together CFED and the Federal Reserve System have held a series of forums highlighting innovations in asset-building policy, products and programs and continue to identify long-term initiatives with national impact.

Ms. Levere has also launched CFED's new initiative to address the challenges faced by the 10 million American families who live in manufactured homes. She also oversees CFED's largest program, a 10-year initiative to test and promote children's savings accounts called SEED (Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment).

Ms. Levere has added staff and resources to CFEDs policy and communications efforts, leading to a number of policy victories in state legislatures and growing attention to the issue of asset-building in the national media. Her leadership has been recognized by donors who have contributed more than $2 million toward CFED's endowment fund and are making multi-year commitments to CFED's policy change efforts.

She received a bachelor's degree in 1977 from Brown University and a master's degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Management in 1983. She was awarded the Alumni Recognition Award from the Yale School of Management in 2001 for exemplary commitment to the field of economic development and the mission of the Yale School of Management.

JOHN LOGUE is the director of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC). The OEOC provides information and technical assistance to Ohio employees seeking to purchase their firms and to business owners interested in selling to their employees, does training in existing employee-owned firms, staffs Ohio's Employee-owned Network, administers a small revolving loan fund, and does research. The OEOC, located at Kent State University, is supported by contracts from the Ohio Departments of Development and of Job and Family Services, by grants from private foundations, by membership dues from employee-owned companies and from professional members, by program income and by fee-for-service work. It has a staff of 10.

Since it was established in 1987, OEOC staff members have worked with about 550 employee groups, retiring owners, and companies to investigate whether employee ownership makes sense in their cases; these firms employed about 120,000 in Ohio. Of these, 84 companies have become partly or wholly employee owned, creating about 14,500 new Ohio employee owners. Through 2003, the 49 of these firms for which data were available had created $349 million in equity for their then-current employee owners.

Logue holds a BA from the University of Texas and a PhD from Princeton University and also teaches political science at Kent State University. He has written, co-authored or edited eight books and some 60 articles dealing with Scandinavian politics and policy and the American labor movement as well as employee ownership. His most recent books on employee ownership, coauthored with Jacquelyn Yates, are The Real World of Employee Owners (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Productivity in Cooperatives and Worker-owned Enterprises: Ownership and Participation Make a Difference (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2005). He was a winner of the Ford Foundation/Advocacy Institute "Leadership for a Changing World" award in 2003.

CÄZILIA LOIBL, PH.D., CFP®, is an Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist at the Department of Consumer Sciences, College of Education and Human Ecology, at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the barriers to IDA program participation, predictors of saving and retention in the program, and long-term effects of program participation. Dr. Loibl received her Doctorate in Household and Nutrition Sciences from the Technische Universität München, Germany. She conducted post-doctoral studies at the Iowa State University and, before joining OSU, implemented community-based financial literacy programs for University of Missouri Extension. She received her Certified Financial Planner™ designation in 2005.

ERIKA V. LOPERBEY joined Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Delaware Valley (CCCS) with more than 10 years of experience in the areas of education, training, workforce development, human resources and program development. In her role, Loperbey is responsible for the management of the Education, Program Development, and Program Quality departments. Prior to joining CCCS, Mrs. Loperbey worked for PathWaysPA as manager of self-sufficiency project development, and as a senior training coordinator. In this role, she coordinated and presented seminars and workshops on The Pennsylvania Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Project (PAFESS). She also developed PathWaysPa's internal training and staff orientation department. Ms. Loperbey holds an undergraduate degree from West Chester University and will be completing her Masters in Education (Adult and Organizational Development) in May 2009. Loperbey has also earned a Certificate in Training and Organizational Development from Temple University. She has earned her Professional in Human Resources (PHR) certification and is a member of Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM).

JEFFREY LUBELL became executive director of the Center for Housing Policy in 2006 and is a recognized expert in housing and community development policy. Prior to becoming head of the Center, Lubell worked as an independent consultant specializing in analyzing and developing recommendations for strengthening national, state and local housing and community development policy. From 2000 to 2003, he served as director of the policy development division of the Office of Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He also worked from 1998 to 2000 as a housing policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit organization that is one of the leading independent authorities on programs affecting low-income families. Lubell is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College.

BEN MANGAN is the President, CEO and Co-founder of EARN, a San Francisco based non profit dedicated to helping low-wage workers break the cycle of poverty, and create new cycles of prosperity through asset building. EARN's 2000+ Savers have put aside over $2.4 million of their own money, and invested in homes, educations and small businesses. EARN also operates the Asset Policy Initiative of California (APIC), which drives asset policy change for the state of California. EARN is a past winner of the Fast Company Magazine/Monitor Group Social Capitalist of the Year Award, and has appeared in BusinessWeek, and on NPR's Morning Edition. Ben has more than 15 years of experience in public policy and management, in the areas of education, affordable housing, business development and strategy. Ben was the Midwest Practice Leader for Ernst & Young's Public Private Development Group in Chicago, and has also led efforts in the fields of education and technology. He serves on the board of directors for Habitat for Humanity San Francisco, and the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from Vassar College and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

DAVID MARZAHL is the Executive Director of the Center for Economic Progress in Chicago, Illinois. The Center is an entrepreneurial social change organization dedicated to promoting financial empowerment and encouraging economic prosperity among low and moderate income families and individuals. The Center operates at the local, state and national levels, providing tax services, financial education, advocacy and policy leadership, technical assistance and capacity building services. Marzahl is a leading voice and strategist on progressive tax and asset-building policies at the federal and state levels and works closely with the 500 affiliate organizations of the National Community Tax Coalition, a project of the Center. Prior to joining the Center in 1998, David was the founding director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights, a statewide coalition promoting the rights & responsibilities of immigrants and refugees. He has worked in Chicago's non-profit community since 1981, as a community organizer, outreach worker and leader overcoming barriers and boundaries in the pursuit of social and economic justice. David has a Master's Degree in Political Economy from Northwestern University.

JUSTIN MAXSON is the president of the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED). MACED works with people in eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia to create economic opportunity, strengthen democracy and support the sustainable use of natural resources. Justin first came to MACED in 1995 as director of community development for the Letcher County Action Team, a grassroots sustainable development organization in eastern Kentucky. Justin's work focused on creating community based economic development initiatives, supporting development of local leaders and promoting community-based problem solving. He also served on the local industrial development authority for two-years. From 1998 to early 2002, Justin was executive director of the Progressive Technology Project, a national grant making and technical assistance organization working to strengthen grassroots social change efforts through the strategic use of technology. Justin returned to MACED in February of 2002 as vice-president and was named president in November 2002. His recent work at MACED includes an initiative to shift state economic development spending in Kentucky to support high-road economic development strategies and the creation of a payday loan alternative product offered through regional businesses designed to link low-income borrowers to traditional financial services. Justin brings 15 years of nonprofit experience focused on program development, organizational development, economic development and community organizing. He has a master's in anthropology from Boston University.

DR. GEORGE MCCARTHY is a Senior Program Officer in Development Finance and Economic Security at the Ford Foundation. Dr. McCarthy administers a program that focuses on using homeownership to build assets for low-income families and their communities. This work centers on improving housing and housing finance markets to increase the chances that existing low-income homeowners succeed in building wealth. Before joining Ford, Dr. McCarthy worked as a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. McCarthy has worked as Assistant Professor of Economics at Bard College, Resident Scholar at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute, Visiting Scholar and Member of the High Table at King's College of Cambridge University, Visiting Scholar at the University of Naples, and Research Associate at the Centre for Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dr. McCarthy received a BA in Economics and Mathematics at the University of Montana; an MA in Economics at Duke University; and, a Ph. D. in Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

MARGARET A. MCKENNA is president of the Wal-Mart Foundation. Margaret joined Wal-Mart after a long career in the public and non-profit sectors, most recently as the president of Lesley University. In her previous position, Margaret led the transformation of the institution from a small college with 2,000 students to a 12,000-student university with a national presence. Under her leadership, the university's endowment increased from $2 million to more than $90 million, the number of academic facilities doubled, and undergraduate education was transformed with the addition of the Art Institute of Boston and initiation of coeducation. Prior to her role at Lesley, Margaret served as Vice President of Radcliffe, Deputy Counsel in the White House and a Civil Rights lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice. She has served on multiple Boards of Directors for both non-profit and for-profit organizations, and is currently a board member for: the Cisco Learning Institute, Massachusetts Workforce Investment, Teacher Education Accreditation Council, Council on Higher Education Administration, Boston Chamber of Commerce and Dominion Resources, Inc., among others. Margaret is the author of several publications, the most recent in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and honors from civic, educational and civil rights organizations, and holds seven Honorary Degrees.

DR. SIGNE-MARY MCKERNAN is an economist with over 15 years experience researching access to assets and credit for the poor, and the impact of welfare programs on the poor. Prior to joining the Urban Institute in 1999, she worked at the Federal Trade Commission for three years, where she was the lead economist on credit issues. She has also been a visiting professor at Georgetown University (teaching econometrics) and is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She has extensive experience using rigorous econometric methods and large databases, such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Her research has been published in books, policy briefs, reports, and over 14 journal articles and working papers, and been presented at over 45 professional conferences and seminars. Dr. McKernan's new co-edited book with Michel Sherraden - Asset Building and Low-Income Families - will be released at this year's Assets Learning conference. The book provides a comprehensive assessment and critique of the knowledge base and policy potential of asset building for the poor. Dr. McKernan leads the Urban Institute's Opportunity and Ownership Project. She received her B.A. in mathematical economics and Scandinavian literature from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in economics from Brown University.

IRIS MEDINA is the SEED Initiative Coordinator at the San Juan, Puerto Rico site. In the last two and a half years she has built a strong bond with the community where the initiative takes place, which is a rural area about forty minutes away from the metro area. Iris has a strong sense of social responsibility and this is the essence of her commitment to the kids and the project. She was a political science major in college with a focus on international political economy and history. Iris has also been committed to the fight against AIDS and has been involved in voluntary and independent work for different AIDS Non-Profit Organizations since the late 80's. She has also worked with children and handicapped people as part of her experience as a volunteer. During the 90's, Iris was part of the start-up team of one of the first dot-com businesses to offer products and all types of services "through the Web" in Puerto Rico. She has also worked for the hotel and tourism industry in San Juan as a coordinator for the Marriott Corporation and as a liaison between the US and PR offices. A self-taught enthusiast, Iris learned English, Computers, Graphic Arts, among other subjects. Prior to joining Fundación Chana y Samuel Levis and its partners, CFED and CNE as the SEED Coordinator, she worked independently for Corporations like the BBVA Bank, PR Banker's Association and others, creating, editing and translating educational and training material for its members and/or employees; she also served as a consultant to small businesses and micro-entrepreneurs on the development of their corporate identity, marketing and sales plans and customer service processes.

Ms. Medina has studies from the University of Puerto Rico and Fordham University-Lincoln Center Campus in NYC and holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of Puerto Rico.

Ms. Medina has recently finished a Certificate in Public Policy Implementation (2008), from the University of Puerto Rico. She is part of the first group of professionals to be certified as such.

ELSIE MEEKS is the Executive Director of First Nations Oweesta Corporation. First Nations Oweesta Corporation is a subsidiary corporation of First Nations Development Institute. FNOC provides technical assistance and training to help start community development financial institutions. It also provides investment capital to community development financial institutions. In addition, FNOC focuses on financial literacy. FNOC, along with Fannie Mae Foundation, has developed a curriculum, Building Native Communities: Financial Skills for Families. Elsie is currently chairperson and was active for 15 years in the development and management of The Lakota Fund, a small business and microenterprise development loan fund on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Elsie is currently serving as a board member of National Community Capital Association. Elsie also serves as a board member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe Partnership for Housing and is Chairperson of the Lakota Fund. She was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle to serve on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1999. Elsie has recently been appointed to the Federal Reserves Board's Consumer Advisory Council. Elsie is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe and the first Native American to serve on the Commission. Elsie presently chairs the Native Financial Education Coalition, spearheaded by FNOC and was recently appointed to the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council.

GENEVIEVE MELFORD is a Senior Program Manager in Applied Research and Innovation at CFED. Her areas of focus include state and local economic development; asset building and financial security; manufactured housing; research on the links between small and medium enterprise development and poverty reduction; and the financial needs of low-income people and communities. Prior to joining CFED, while in graduate school, Ms. Melford helped develop a performance measurement system for a statewide economic development plan for the Oregon Business Council and conducted field research on opportunities for commercial investment in the Indian microfinance sector for the Washington D.C.– based Microfinance Information eXchange (The MIX). Prior to graduate school, she worked as a labor consultant in New York City, performing research and analysis for a range of labor union clients in support of organizing, bargaining, and lobbying campaigns. Ms. Melford holds an M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. in economics from Wesleyan University.

LISA MENSAH, IFS Executive Director at The Aspen Institute, is an expert in using financial tools to improve the economic security of the working poor. At IFS, Ms. Mensah leads an advisory board of corporate executives and experts to explore financial products that build wealth from birth to retirement for America's working families. Ms. Mensah began her career in commercial banking at Citibank prior to working 13 years with the Ford Foundation. Serving as Deputy Director of Economic Development for the organization, Ms. Mensah led the Foundation's work in microfinance and women's economic development. She became the leading national funder of individual development accounts (IDAs) - an innovative savings account structured with matching incentives and personal financial training used to finance homeownership, entrepreneurship and education. Under Ms. Mensah's leadership, IDAs grew from an experiment at a handful of sites to become a tool used by hundreds of community organizations in all 50 states. Ms. Mensah holds an M.A. from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. from Harvard University.

TATJANA MESCHEDE, PH.D., Senior Research Associate and Project Director, at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, manages the MacArthur Foundation funded project "Family Financial Well-Being in the 21st

Century: Strategic Positioning of Data Tools for Policy Impact." Based on her extensive experience in data management and analyses, she supervises all data analytic aspects of the project and composes research reports in conjunction with the project's partners.

Dr. Meschede has extensive experience in research on homelessness collaborating with Massachusetts' state departments and local communities, and is the author of numerous reports and publications, such as Bridges and Barriers to Housing for Chronically Homeless Street Dwellers, and a report on Quincy's Housing First projects. She has broad experience as project manager and principal investigator for research on homelessness and housing, food insecurity and nutrition, the technology divide, and access to the labor market for persons with barriers. Dr.

Meschede worked in Israel and Europe, and is on the faculty of the Masters in Public Affairs Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches quantitative and qualitative research methods and statistics. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from the McCormack Graduate School in Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2004.

MARGARET MILEY has a background in economics and business. In 1991, while running a small business by day and training Central American refugees at night, she decided to combine her skills in the area of community development, where she has been ever since. She has run nonprofit Economic Development Programs of many sorts; community leadership, business training & lending, a business incubator, and worker-owned companies. In 1999, Miley saw the promise of asset development when she joined Acre Family Daycare in Lowell, that started the first Individual Development Account Program in Massachusetts. She helped form the Midas Collaborative, and now leads the 30-member statewide nonprofit. She sits on the Massachusetts Asset Development Commission, and is the author of "Expanding Skills in Low Income Communities: A Framework of Building an Effective Financial Education Program" MCBC 6/08.

MAURICE LIM MILLER is the Founder of The Family Independence Initiative, a unique anti-poverty approach that has had significant impact by shifting the responsibility for impacting poverty to the target families and their natural cultural communities. It challenges families to take this opportunity to change their lives and in return offers families monetary awards for their efforts in helping themselves and others. Working only with peer groups, the success of a few creates a ripple effect in the broader community. Previous to this initiative, Maurice was the executive director of Asian Neighborhood Design (A.N.D.), a multi-service community development agency in San Francisco and Oakland California. During his 22 year tenure the agency grew to a budget of $10 million annually with a staff of over 120. Based on his work to promote racial understanding and economic opportunities in low income communities, Maurice was honored by former President Clinton with an invitation to the President's 1999 State of the Union address. Maurice has authored several articles and policy papers related to anti-poverty work as well as lectured and presented nationally. He is a Trustee of the California Endowment and the Hitachi Foundation.

GREGORY MILLS is a Principal Associate at Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 1987. Starting in 1999, he directed Abt's recently completed national evaluation of the AFI program, the findings from which he will be describing today. His current and recent work has focused on low-income programs that promote first-time homeownership and other forms of asset building through financial education, counseling, and financial incentives such as IDA matching funds. His ongoing projects include impact evaluations of pre-purchase homeownership counseling and credit counseling. Dr. Mills previously held positions at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Urban Institute, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Affairs, and Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

THOMAS W. MITCHELL is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He has done extensive work and research on how land tenure regimes impact poor and minority communities. His articles include Destabilizing the Normalization of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role for Legal Empiricism, 2005 Wis. L. Rev. 557 (2005), From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Northwestern University Law Review 505 (2001) and The Land Crisis in Zimbabwe: Getting Beyond the Myopic Focus Upon Black & White, 11 Indiana International & Comparative Law Review 587 (2001).

With his research team that includes two real estate economists and a graduate student expert in geographic information systems technology, he is currently working on a Ford Foundation-funded book project that will address the economic, civic and social impacts of black land loss in the rural South. At Wisconsin, he directs the Community Development Externship program. This program places law students with public interest law firms and community-based organizations located in poor, urban and rural communities in the U.S. and the Caribbean to do legal work that assists these communities with asset-based community development initiatives. Recent externs have worked on projects that have addressed discriminatory zoning laws, affordable housing issues, prisoner reentry initiatives, and environmental justice. Externs have recently been placed at sites that include California Rural Legal Services in the Central Valley of California; Bethel New Life in the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago; and the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques in Puerto Rico.

Professor Mitchell serves on the American Bar Association's Property Preservation Task Force and also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of Farmers' Legal Action Group, the leading public interest law firm in the United States that represents the interests of family farmers. Prior to entering academia, Professor Mitchell obtained an LL.M. upon completion of the William H. Hastie Fellowship program at the University of Wisconsin Law School; worked as a litigation associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.; and served as a law clerk for Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District Court of the D.C. Circuit.

GUY MOLYNEUX is a partner and senior vice president with Peter D. Hart Research Associates. He has carried out survey and focus group research projects for a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, labor unions, political candidates, and media organizations. His clients have included the Children's Defense Fund, the AFL-CIO, NBC News, the Council for Excellence in Government, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the Open Society Institute (OSI). Mr. Molyneux previously served as director of polling for Cable News Network (CNN) and as executive director of the Commonwealth Institute. He has written about politics and public opinion for The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Dissent, The American Prospect, and the Los Angeles Times' Sunday "Opinion" section. He has commented on politics for National Public Radio, NBC News, C-SPAN, CNBC, and CNN. Mr. Molyneux is a graduate of Harvard College and has undertaken graduate study in public opinion research and electoral politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

KAREN MURRELL is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she is exploring policy innovations that improve financial services and financial education. In this capacity, she works to improve the quality, quantity, and effectiveness of financial education through policy innovations. Ms. Murrell is also founder and president of Higher Heights Consulting and Training, a privately-held firm that works with the financial services industry to develop programs and products that improve the financial well being of lower income consumers. During her career, Ms. Murrell has developed a variety of innovative alliances to develop strategic programs that help consumers increase their financial knowledge and empower them to build assets. Ms. Murrell is co-author of You and Your Money: A No Stress Guide to Becoming Financially Fit. Published by Financial Times Press, this book examines how societal change is rapidly impacting personal finances and identifies character traits of financially savvy people. She serves on the board of the DC Public Library Foundation and on the Board of Advisors for Topics Education. She received a master's degree in Marketing from the University of Maryland and a bachelor's degree in Communications from Temple University.

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TOROD NEPTUNE is a Senior Vice President for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, where he directs high-profile public affairs, public policy, regulatory and crisis communications strategies for a broad range of private and governmental organizations. Before joining Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Mr. Neptune was the chief communications strategist for the U.S. House of Representatives, responsible for developing the first post-Sept. 11 and anthrax crisis communications programs in the U.S. Congress. He also lead the House's organizational communications program, with oversight for the primary communications processes, channels and tools used to communicate to the more than 11,000-employee House staff.

Prior to working on Capitol Hill, Torod was senior vice president for corporate communications and public affairs with Bank of America Corp., responsible for providing strategic counsel and management of corporate communications and public affairs resources, including directing the teams responsible for internal and external communications, charitable giving, government relations, issues management, and public policy for the company's Worldwide Consumer

Products Division. He was also responsible for overseeing headquarters communications and geographic public relations for the company during its brand transition from NationsBank Corp. to Bank of America Corp. - the largest corporate brand transition in U.S. business history. Neptune also served on the Chief Public Affairs Officers' Council of the Financial Services Roundtable, directing industry issues management and public policy positioning efforts for high-profile legislative and regulatory issues.

Before Bank of America Corp., Neptune was group director with Washington, D.C., public affairs firm Powell Tate/Weber Shandwick, where he provided public affairs counsel to Fortune 500 companies and industry coalitions undergoing profound change under intense public and regulatory scrutiny. He also lead issues management campaigns for some of the world's leading brands including DuPont, Nike, General Mills, Delta Air Lines, MCI, KPMG and Nasdaq.

A former reporter, Neptune has a bachelor's degree in international relations and journalism from The University of South Carolina. A member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), he also serves on the board of directors of the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), HOPE worldwide, and the U.S. Congressional Philharmonic Society.

ZOË NEUBERGER is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She works on nutrition assistance programs and asset limits in means-tested programs. Previously she worked as an analyst at the White House Office of Management and Budget, where she was responsible for oversight of over $30 billion in federal spending, including spending on IDAs. She holds a law degree from Yale University and a Master in Public Policy degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

ROBIN NEWBERGER is a business economist in the Consumer Issues Research Unit of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Ms. Newberger's areas of research include banking access and financial services for low- and moderate-income consumers; asset-building and savings programs for lower-income consumers; and the growth and sustainability of community development finance institutions. Ms. Newberger also has extensive experience interviewing and analyzing the work of community organizations. She is the author or co-author of several articles and papers published by the Chicago Fed, including, "Insurance and Wealth Building among Lower Income Households," (2008), "Approaches to CDFI Sustainability,"(2008), "Financial Access for Immigrants: Lessons from Diverse Perspectives" (2006), and "Islamic Finance in the United States: A Small but Growing Industry" (2005). Prior to working for the Chicago Fed, Ms. Newberger lived in Quito, Ecuador and wrote for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Ms. Newberger received a B.A. in philosophy from Columbia University and a Masters of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Ms. Newberger holds a Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

LEN NICHOLS, a health economist and policy analyst, directs the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation. Len came to New America to work more explicitly toward solutions rather than just describe the complex problems of our health care system. He will continue to study ways to combine cost containment with coverage expansion, ever-focused on the ultimate goal of health insurance coverage for all Americans with shared financial burdens that are sustainable. Len will also add a moral voice to the health policy debate, to remind policy makers why this issue is so important to real people and to our country. He has testified frequently before Congress and state legislators and has published widely in a variety of health-related journals on health insurance coverage, financing, and delivery system issues. Most recently, Len has worked with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) on his health reform legislation (S. 334) now co-sponsored by Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT), and with the governors or legislators in California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, Washington, Arkansas, Ohio, and Utah to shape coverage expansion and cost-growth containment strategies.

Before joining New America, Dr. Nichols was the Vice President of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Principal Research Associate at the Urban Institute, and the Senior Advisor for Health Policy at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton reform efforts of 1993–94. Previously, Dr. Nichols was Chair of the Economics Department at Wellesley College, where he taught for ten years. He also served as a member of the Competitive Pricing Advisory Commission (CPAC) and the 2001 Technical Review Panel for the Medicare Trustees Reports. He was on the advisory panel to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Covering America project and has been a consultant to the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Pan American Health Organization. Dr. Nichols received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois.

JONATHAN NJUS, the Co-Director of the National Community Tax Coalition and Director of Advocacy for the Center for Economic Progress, comes to the Center and NCTC with a commitment to social justice and a strong knowledge of our area of work and organizational focus. Most recently, he has been working as a consultant to non-governmental organizations in Hungary, where he and his wife have lived for the past year and a half. Previously he was director of Housing Advocacy at the Archdiocese of Chicago, pushing to create more affordable housing throughout the city. He also worked with the National Council of La Raza in Washington, DC during the late 90s, combating planned cuts in the EITC and researching and writing on issues of taxation and economic security with regard to Hispanic Americans. He has a Master's degree in public policy from the University of Chicago and grew up in Michigan.

ROURKE O'BRIEN is a Policy Analyst in the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation where he focuses on policies to help low and moderate income families save, accumulate assets and build wealth. His research and policy work includes issues related to reforming asset limits in public assistance programs, expanding the utility of 529 higher education savings accounts, and exploring the potential of conditional cash transfers as tool for wealth building. Mr. O'Brien holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Social Studies from Harvard University. A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, he is currently a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others.

MIGUEL OROZCO, President, Nueva Vista Media, a company that creates media strategies and outreach initiatives for Latinos. Miguel has a B.A. in Economics, a Master's degree in Public Policy, and has worked as a U.S. Senate staffer and a Policy Analyst for the U.S. Department of Labor.

PETER R. ORSZAG is the seventh Director of the Congressional Budget Office. His four-year term began on January 18, 2007. Before joining CBO, Dr. Orszag was the Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. While at Brookings, he also served as Director of The Hamilton Project; Director of the Retirement Security Project; and Codirector of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture with the Urban Institute.

In previous government service, Dr. Orszag served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Senior Economic Adviser at the National Economic Council during 1997 and 1998. Earlier, he served as a staff economist and then Senior Adviser and Senior Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Dr. Orszag graduated summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University and obtained an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics, which he attended as a Marshall scholar. He has coauthored or coedited a number of books, including Protecting the Homeland 2006/7 (2006), Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America (2006), Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (2004), and American Economic Policy in the 1990s (2002).

Dr. Orszag is an avid runner and the proud father of two children, Leila and Joshua.

KATE OUVERSON is State Wide Coordinator, Family Assets for Independence in Minnesota, and Emergency Services Director, West Central Minnesota Communities Action, Inc. She has been on staff at West Central Minnesota Communities Action, Inc for twenty two years. She has been involved in the Family Assets for Independence in Minnesota (FAIM) asset building effort for nine years and for the past five years has been responsible for overseeing the state wide collaborative that offers Individual Development accounts to families in Minnesota. In that capacity she is responsible for training new staff, facilitating bi-monthly meetings of program staff, coordinating payouts of funds as account holders acquire their intended asset, organizing the annual state wide Financial Fitness Conference that emphasizes asset building and healthy financial practices. She is also a part of the team developing an evaluation system for the FAIM program in Minnesota. Kate is also a part of the effort to grow the asset building program in Minnesota.

CHARLES M. 'CHUCK' PARRISH, formally co-founder and executive vice president of Openwave Systems, Inc. in Redwood City, California, is now a private investor and advisor to several technology companies. Before founding Openwave, Mr. Parrish was vice president of marketing and general manager of wireless data services for GTE Mobile Communications. Prior to that, he was senior vice president, operations at Contel Cellular, Inc. and co-founder and CEO of AmeriCom Corporation in Atlanta.

Mr. Parrish served as chief of staff in the US Department of Interior during the Carter Administration, Carter/Mondale Texas campaign manager during the 1976 general election and national field director during the 1979-1980 Carter/Mondale primary campaign. Mr. Parrish served as a division director in the Georgia Department of Natural Resources during the terms of Governors Jimmy Carter and George Busbee.

Mr. Parrish served on the Clark for president National finance committee and the Kerry for President National Finance Committee. He is a member of the board of the Corporation for Enterprise Development in Washington, DC and the Peninsula Youth Sailing Foundation in Palo Alto, California.

Mr. Parrish and his wife, Nancy, have two children and divide their time between San Francisco, California and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

KIMBERLY PATE is vice president for strategic partnerships and Administration for CFED. Ms. Pate is responsible for identifying, developing and managing strategic partnerships for CFED across all its work. She directs CFED's business development activities, ranging from foundation-funded initiatives, fee-for-service contracts, earned income opportunities, and business partnerships. Ms. Pate leads CFED's work in support of the nationwide field of Individual Development Account (IDA) programs and local, tribal, state and regional entrepreneurship development and capital access systems. She is an attorney who has specialized in representing the interests of low-income women and families. Ms. Pate is an experienced public speaker and trainer on issues affecting economic opportunity including asset building, enterprise development and workforce development. Her work at CFED enables her to conceptualize and provide leadership to initiatives for low-income people with the goal of improving their economic futures and promoting lasting change. Prior to joining CFED, Ms. Pate was the deputy director, National Projects for Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) in Washington, DC, a multiple-strategy women's employment organization that is recognized nationally for its skills training models, technical assistance, and advocacy for women workers. She holds a Law Degree from University of California at Los Angeles School of Law and a B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University.

ANDREW D. PLEPLER is Bank of America's Global Community Impact Executive and President of the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Inc., one of the largest corporate charitable organizations in the United States. His responsibilities include managing the company's philanthropic strategy and coordinating its national focus with local market philanthropic efforts across the franchise. The Neighborhood Excellence Initiative™ is the bank's signature philanthropic initiative and recognizes nurtures and builds leadership throughout our communities.

In addition, Plepler oversees the bank's activities pursuant to the Community Reinvestment Act. In that capacity he coordinates the bank's commitment to most effectively serve low and moderate income communities.

Plepler develops relationships with national nonprofit organizations and community leaders to strengthen corporate giving and enhance the bank's community impact through philanthropy, community development and volunteerism.

Prior to joining Bank of America, Plepler served as senior vice president of Housing and Community Initiatives with the Fannie Mae Foundation. He oversaw three of the foundation's primary grant-making departments, as well as its regional offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Pasadena, and Philadelphia.

Before joining the Fannie Mae Foundation, Plepler was a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in the Tax Division and served on Capitol Hill as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Plepler earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in government from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and a Jurist Doctorate from the University of Miami School of Law in Coral Gables, FL.

Plepler founded and continues to serve on the board of the Washington, DC-based Urban Alliance Foundation, a nonprofit jobs and mentoring program that works with economically disadvantaged high school students. Plepler, his wife and three children reside in Charlotte, NC.

KARL S PNAZEK has been President and CEO of CAP Services since 1976. During his tenure, CAP has assisted more than 900 households purchase their first home, weatherized more than 9,000 units, rehabilitated more than 5,000 homes, developed more than 400 units of affordable rental housing, five business incubator complexes and 275,000 square feet of commercial and industrial space, facilitated the start-up of more than 220 new businesses and developed six lease-purchase economic development projects. He was oversaw the development of CAP's lending arm, Community Assets for People, LLC, a US Treasury-certified Community Development Financial Institution.

Pnazek has been a member of the Chicago Federal Home Loan Bank, Chairman of the Bank's Community Development Advisory Committee, a member of the Governor's Task Force for Housing Preservation and a member of the LIHTC Scoring Review Committee for the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority. He currently serves on the boards of St. Michael's Hospital, Forward Community Investments and the Wisconsin Community Development Legacy Fund.

He is the recipient of the 2002 Charles Hill Award for Housing Excellence from the Wisconsin Housing Collaborative and the 2006 Community Builder Award from Forward Community Investments.

ROBERTO G. QUERCIA is the Director of the Center for Community Capital, Professor of City and Regional Planning, and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published numerous articles, primarily on the topics of low-income homeownership, affordable lending and the assessment of lending risks, predatory lending, and homeownership education and counseling. Dr. Quercia has also conducted research on neighborhood dynamics and poverty. He had done sponsored research for government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office, municipalities, community organizations, and private entities such as the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Housing Policy Debate and Housing Studies. Dr. Quercia has held appointments at the University of Texas Arlington, the University of California at Berkeley, the Wharton Real Estate Center (University of Pennsylvania), and the Urban Institute.

JOSE QUINONEZ is the founding Executive Director for the Mission Asset Fund (MAF), the first neighborhood-based, community-led organization that aims to support a full continuum of asset-building opportunities for low-income and immigrant families in San Francisco's historic Mission District. Jose is a graduate of the University of California at Davis. He went on to earn a Master in Public Affairs degree at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. After graduation, he joined the Office of Congressman Ruben Hinojosa, where he worked as a Legislative Assistant. Learning the ways of Capitol Hill, Jose went on to work as a lobbyist for various non-profit organizations in Washington D.C., advocating on an array of issues including immigration, hunger, welfare and other poverty-related issues. After moving to California, Jose worked for the Center for Responsible Lending, advocating against predatory mortgage and payday lending practices that strip assets from hard-working families; and the Asset Policy Initiative in California where he worked to develop a state-wide coalition to move an asset-building policy agenda in Sacramento.

IDA RADEMACHER is CFED's Research Director. In this capacity she provides research and evaluation expertise to help CFED define and advance a research agenda that identifies, investigates and advances effective strategies for building assets and expanding economic opportunity. She provides research support and guidance to CFED's field development, product innovation and policy teams. She is also responsible for development of key research publications, and for working with CFED's research partners in government, academia and community-based institutions. Ida has over 10 years of applied research and evaluation experience in the fields of workforce development, rural and immigrant entrepreneurship, and community economic development. Prior to joining CFED, she worked as a Senior Research Officer with the Academy for Educational Development where she managed a portfolio of evaluations of community development and social change initiatives. Key projects included the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Mid South Delta Initiative and the Northwest Area Foundation's Rural Latino Capacity Building Initiative. Ida also worked for five years at the Aspen Institute as a Senior Research & Program Associate with the Community Strategies Group and the Economic Opportunities Program where she formulated and led participatory research and peer-learning projects in the fields of workforce and economic development. Before joining The Aspen Institute, she worked as a management and research consultant in the U.S. and Australia documenting the social, economic and environmental impacts of privatization and market transitions in energy, agriculture and financial sectors of the economy. She undertook graduate studies in economic anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and received her Masters Degree in Public Policy from the University of Maryland. Her undergraduate degree is in anthropology and economics from James Madison University.

DORY RAND joined Woodstock Institute as its sixth president in July 2008. She brings a wealth of community reinvestment knowledge and proven ability to shape financial services policy to promote real world benefits for lower-income people. Dory joined Woodstock Institute after 12 years at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago, most recently as the supervising attorney of the Center's Community Investment Unit. In this position, Ms. Rand advocated for and represented lower-income people on welfare law and public policy issues at the local, state, and national levels. She and her staff focused on expanding community reinvestment and asset-building opportunities that move people from poverty to prosperity. Prior to her work at the Shriver Center, Dory was a senior attorney with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, an associate with a Chicago law firm, and a staff attorney with the ACLU of Illinois. Dory is a graduate of the Ohio State University College of Law.

TERRY RATIGAN is a Senior Consultant for the Federation and manager of CU Breakthrough consulting services, including its work for the AFI Resource Center New Grantee Initiative and the HUD Housing Counseling Program. Since 2001, he has worked primarily with the Federation in preparing business plans and grant proposals to support new financial products and technical assistance services for financial institutions serving low-income communities. Terry has thirteen years of international development experience, including ten years as a senior manager for CARE in Bangladesh and Mozambique and three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone. While with CARE, he was responsible for the design and supervision of economic development and asset-building programs, management of CARE's own financial operations, and supervision of disaster preparedness and emergency response operations. Terry holds a B.A. in Economics and History from the University of Virginia and Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University.

MARGOT RAWLINS is an initiative officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation's Center for Venture Philanthropy, headquartered in Mountain View, California. Working with Lenders for Community Development, a San Jose-based CDFI, the Center created the Assets for All Alliance in 1999 to bring IDAs to the region. Having served 2300 low income families on the San Francisco Peninsula and in Silicon Valley, the Alliance is considered one of the most successful IDA programs in the country. As co-manager of this multi-partner initiative for five years, Rawlins lectured around the country on how to build and maintain effective collaboratives to deliver IDAs. She initiated and managed the Alliance's longitudinal study that ran from 2004 - 2006 to determine the effects of asset acquisition by Alliance graduates. She currently manages an initiative helping youth aging out of the foster care system become successful adults.

MAGGIE REILLY joined CASA of Oregon in 2007 as Program Manager for Asset Development Programs, bringing over seven years of community development and corporate experience from domestic and international work. At CASA she oversees the Matched Education Savings Accounts College Initiative and provides operational and technical support to CASA's individual development account (IDA) program VIDA, a collaborative of over forty entities that deliver IDAs. Prior to joining CASA, Ms. Reilly served as Program Officer for Asset Development Services at Mercy Corps Northwest. In that capacity, she worked with entrepreneurs to access capital through microloans and individual development accounts; in 2006 her program received the Spirit of Portland award for its asset building programs in the metro area. She also provided assistance to Mercy Corps' international work in the area of microcredit. Ms. Reilly holds a dual-degree in Foreign Languages & Literatures (Hons.), and International Affairs.

CARL RIST is the director of the SEED (Savings for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayments) Policy and Practice Initiative, a multi-year, multi-site demonstration of matched savings accounts for children and youth in low-income families. The primary goal of the initiative is to set the stage for a large-scale, universal, progressive policy for asset building among American children, youth and families.

Previously, Mr. Rist was responsible for CFED's efforts to support state-level policy and coalition-building initiatives designed to expand individual development account (IDA) programs. He led the development and design of the State Asset Development Report Card, a benchmarking tool that uses 68 socioeconomic and policy measures to grade state performance on asset accumulation, distribution and protection. He is also the co-author of the IDA State Policy Guide, a guide for advancing public policies at the state-level in support of IDAs. Mr. Rist's experience at the state level includes working with state task forces in both Delaware and Pennsylvania to develop recommendations for helping citizens, especially those of low-incomes, to build and protect their assets. Mr. Rist also has served in an advisory capacity for a number of state-level IDA coalitions, including the North Carolina IDA and Asset-Building Collaborative, the Michigan IDA Partnership, the South Carolina IDA Collaborative and the Mid South IDA Initiative (Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi).

Mr. Rist is the former director of the Economic Development Fellowship Program, a fellowship program designed to encourage mutual learning and the transfer of new ideas, approaches, and strategies between the United States and Europe in the fields of employment and local or regional economic development. In operation from 1998 until 2003, this program (funded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States) enabled over 150 development policymakers and program managers from Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, and Romania to visit the U.S. for extended stays to study a focused economic development topic and meet with their counterparts.

Mr. Rist also has considerable experience working on the question of what constitutes a healthy business climate. He is a co-author of both Improving Your Business Climate: A Guide to Smarter Public Investments In Economic Development and CFED's widely acclaimed 1994 report, Bidding for Business: Are Cities and States Selling Themselves Short? Bidding for Business explores the use and abuse of tax incentives as an economic development strategy. Within the topic of business climate, Mr. Rist has also done in-depth research on the link between education spending and economic development and was the principal author of a report released in 1995 entitled How Education Spending Matters to Economic Development.

Mr. Rist earned a M.A. in public policy in 1991 from the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. He also holds an undergraduate degree from Davidson College.

BÁRBARA J. ROBLES, PHD is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work and Coordinator, Office of Latino Projects. She is also a Research Faculty at the Center for Community Development and Civil Rights, at Arizona State University's College of Public Programs. She joined the College of Public Programs at Arizona State University as an Associate Professor in August 2005. She currently sits on the Board of Economic Advisors for the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Foundation. She is the author of Financial Services and Product Usage by Latinos in the U.S. (2007) and a co-author of The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (2006). Formerly, she was a Revenue Estimator for the Joint Committee on Taxation scoring tax legislation for Congress. Her research focuses on Latino wealth inequality, Southwest Border family and community asset building linked to the Earned Income Tax Credit and Latino micro-businesses and entrepreneurship.

CLIFFORD N. ROSENTHAL, President/CEO, National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions. Mr. Rosenthal joined the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions in 1980 and has served as its chief executive officer since 1983. The Federation represents and serves more than 200 credit unions that specialize in serving low-income communities across the United States. Under his leadership, the Federation has invested more than $60 million in low-income credit unions.

From 1989 through 1991, Mr. Rosenthal served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve System. A founding member of the national Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Coalition, he has served on boards and advisory groups for J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, the Southern New Hampshire University School of Community Economic Development, Seedco, and Wall Street Without Walls. In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed him to the advisory board of New York City's Office of Financial Empowerment.

Mr. Rosenthal was a Charles Revson Foundation Fellow for the Future of the City of New York (1983-84) and received postgraduate training in the management of financial institutions at Columbia University, where he also obtained his B.A. and M.A. degrees. In February 2005, the National Credit Union Foundation presented him the Herb Wegner Memorial Award for Individual Achievement, the highest national honor of the credit union movement.

MARK RUKAVINA, Executive Director, The Access Project. Mark serves as director of The Access Project, a national research and advocacy organization. He is responsible for the overall management of the group's health policy work, as well as the technical assistance, research and policy support provided to local initiatives. This assistance is designed to enhance local groups' policy advocacy campaigns to expand or improve access to health care for uninsured and other vulnerable populations.

Mark was responsible for designing The Access Project's initial research on medical debt, helping to expose a problem that had been largely invisible to policymakers and the general public. He has worked closely with several national foundations, state-based organizations and federal agencies encouraging them to initiate research into the medical debt issue. Mark is a nationally recognized expert on issues related to health access and medical debt, especially as they pertain to low and moderate income Americans, and has written numerous articles and reports on these topics.

Mark has testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the hospital billing and collection issue and the House Committee on the Judiciary on medical debt and medical bankruptcy. He currently serves on the National Advisory Committee of the Public Health Institute's Advancing the State of the Art of Community Benefits Demonstration Program, the Association of Community Health Improvement Advisory Council and the Technical Advisory Panel for the Hospitals, Language, and Culture Project of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

Before joining The Access Project in 1998, Mark served program director for the Massachusetts site of national demonstration program supported by the American Hospital Association's Health Research and Educational Trust. Prior to that, he worked as a community organizer and policy advocate with advocacy organizations including Health Care For All and the Massachusetts Senior Action Council. Mark received a MBA from Babson College in Wellesley, MA and is a graduate of the UMASS, Amherst.

ANICE SCHERVISH is the Program Manager for the ROSS and PH FSS programs and a HOPE VI CSS Grant Manager in the Office of Public Housing Investments at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. She has held this position since 2005. She started her career at HUD in 2002 in the Chicago Regional Office, Office of Public Housing as a Presidential Management Fellow and has worked in the Office of Community Planning and Development, McKinney Homeless Programs and with the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. Prior to coming to HUD, Anice worked with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless doing advocacy and community organizing, with the Chicago Juvenile Court System and as a full-time Amate House Volunteer in direct practice with people who were homeless and low-income families in inner-city Chicago. Her research experience is in the area female prisoner re-entry, community-based alternatives to incarceration for women and alternatives for girls in the juvenile justice system. Anice has a Masters of Social Work from the Jane Addams College of Social work at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a BA in Sociology from Georgetown University.

EUGENE SEVERENS, Director Self-Employment Tax Initiative, CFED. In 1989, Eugene Severens founded the Rural Enterprise Assistance Project (REAP), a microlending and training program housed at the Center for Rural Affairs and serving rural Nebraska. He went on to found, in 1994, the Nebraska Microenterprise Partnership Fund, a successful statewide financial intermediary and CDFI which supports microenterprise programs in Nebraska. The Partnership Fund received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Microenterprise Development in 1995. Gene is currently Director of CFED's National Fund for Enterprise Development, a CDFI intermediary, and he directs CFED's Self-employment Tax Initiative (SETI), a project which explores how the tax code can be used as an important new direct delivery systems for microbusinesses. SETI makes mini-grants to community-based organizations that provide microlending and/or free tax preparation assistance to self-employed start-up businesses, and it also researches and advocates for tax policy reforms that support self-employed start-ups as well as small and growing businesses.

JULIA SEWARD is Director of State Policy for Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) where she is responsible for both development and implementation of state community development policy and coordination of LISC's smart growth work. She is located in LISC's national policy office in Washington, D.C. Julia has enjoyed a diverse career in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Before coming to LISC, she managed the corporate community reinvestment and philanthropic programs for Signet Banking Corporation and was active in state, regional, and national community development affairs. Her activities included chairmanship of The Consumer Advisory Council for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and work as founding chair of the Community Reinvestment Committee of the Consumer Bankers Association. In addition, she has been a private CRA consultant to both financial institutions and nonprofit organizations, served as a special policy assistant to the Governor of Virginia, on the staff of the Richmond Urban Institute, and taught American government and economics at the high school level. She is a frequent speaker and panelist and serves on the Boards of the Virginia Literacy Foundation, the Virginia Housing Coalition, the National Neighborhood Coalition, and the Virginia Housing and the Environment Network. She is also the proud mother of a daughter.

ELDAR SHAFIR is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on decision-making behavior, and on issues related to behavioral economics, with a special interest in the application of behavioral research to policy. Of particular interest is the tension between normative assumptions and behavioral findings, and the implications for the design of policy. Shafir received his Ph.D. from MIT and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. He has held visiting positions at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, The Kennedy School of Government, The Russell Sage Foundation, The Institute for Advanced Studies of The Hebrew University, Universita` Ca` Foscari in Venice, and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Among other activities, he is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, and a trustee of Isles, Inc. His work has received coverage in The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, La Repubblica, and NPR, among other places.

TRINA SHANKS is Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She completed her Ph.D. and Masters in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis and is also a faculty associate with its Center for Social Development. In 1994 she was awarded the Rhodes scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where she earned a Masters in Comparative Social Research. In addition to her graduate schooling, Dr. Shanks served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador working in micro-enterprise development and served as executive director of Christian Community Services, a church-affiliated not-for-profit agency she was invited to help form in Nashville, Tennessee. Shanks initiated its family mentoring program and introduced Individual Development Accounts to its work with public housing residents. In her current research, funded by the Ford Foundation, she is co-investigator for the SEED Impact Assessment study, which sets up a quasi-experimental research design in Pontiac, Michigan, to test the impact of offering Head Start families 529 college education plans for their enrolled children. Other areas of research/scholarly interest: the relationship between assets, poverty and children's well-being; public policy for families; social and economic development, particularly in urban communities.

PROFESSOR THOMAS SHAPIRO directs the Institute on Assets and Social Policy and is the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University.

Professor Shapiro's primary interest is in racial inequality and public policy. He is a leader in the asset development field with a particular focus on closing the racial wealth gap. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, published by Oxford University Press, 2004 (soft cover, 2005) was widely reviewed, including by the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and others. The book was named one of the Notable Books of 2004 by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

With Dr. Melvin Oliver, he wrote the award-winning Black Wealth/ White Wealth, which received the 1997 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. This book also won the 1995 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America named it an Outstanding Book of 1996.

A Tenth Anniversary Edition of Black Wealth/White Wealth, with two new chapters that examine the most important changes in racial inequality and developments in asset policy in the past decade, was published in 2006.

DR. MICHAEL SHERRADEN is Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and founding director of the Center for Social Development (CSD), George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis. As an overarching theme, Michael's work focuses on development rather than maintenance. He is particularly interested in ways in which social policy does not detract from, but rather contributes to, economic growth of households and communities. His work is characterized by innovative approaches to long-standing policy challenges, frequently drawing on insights from US history and experiences of other nations. The emphasis is on careful theoretical specification and testing of innovations in large-scale, multi-method studies, and using research evidence to inform public policy and the private sector. His current research project is a test of Children's Savings Accounts in the United States.

Michael articulated the concept of asset-based development. His book Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy (1991), proposes universal and progressive saving beginning at birth. A research monograph with Mark Schreiner entitled Can the Poor Save? (2007) studies matched savings in the form of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). CSD's research on IDAs has influenced policy discussions and community projects in several countries. In the United Kingdom, Michael advised the Prime Minister's Office and Chancellor of the Exchequer in creating a Child Trust Fund.

Michael was educated at Harvard (AB, 1970) and the University of Michigan (MSW, 1976; PhD, 1979). He has been a Visiting Professor at universities in Mexico, Singapore, Israel, and the US. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship (1992-93) and many other awards.

MARIA SISON brings over 14 years of nonprofit experience in the areas of immigrant and low-income family asset development, youth services, and human rights in the United States and the Philippines. Maria received her Bachelors degree in Sociology at UC Berkeley and a Masters in International Relations at the University of the Philippines.

Maria worked at East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC), an Oakland-based community development organization and one of the 12 program sites chosen to be part of the American Dream Demonstration. Maria managed and provided technical assistance and capacity building support to more than 15 non-profit partnerships that served over 1000 participant accounts, including refugee and immigrant populations, public housing residents, workforce development and CALworks recipients and youth populations. Currently, Maria manages youth IDA and asset programming at Juma Ventures, a national social enterprise agency. Juma runs one of the oldest and largest youth IDA programs to date and has served over 600 participants in the SF Bay Area. Juma has newly launched GROW (Gain Resources Opportunity and Wealth), a California-wide initiative to help expand IDA programming in partnerships with youth serving agencies.

PETER SKILLERN is the Executive Director of the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina a nonprofit agency that uses advocacy and social entrepreneurship to promote and protect community wealth. Skillern has twenty years experience in the field of housing and community economic development at the local, state and national levels. He graduated with Highest Honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz and earned a Masters in City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. Skillern has earned several leadership awards and fellowships. Skillern served as Executive Producer for Nuestro Barrio and will present on the model of edutainment as a financial literacy strategy.

IRENE SKRICKI is the Program Manager for Assets and Savings at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private philanthropy dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States. Irene has been at the Foundation since 1996. She is in the Family Economic Success unit at the Foundation and is responsible for work on asset development, consumer financial services, and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). At the Foundation, she has also worked on income security policy, including welfare reform and welfare-to-work policies, the intersection of substance abuse and welfare reform, and policies affecting the working poor. Previously, Irene worked at the Ford Foundation and the Coalition on Human Needs. She holds a Master's Degree in Public Policy from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CATHERINE SOLHEIM is a faculty member in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on personal and family finance, family policy, and global family systems. Currently, she is planning to lead her second learning abroad seminar to Thailand in 2009. Catherine's scholarship centers on family resource management and the ways that culture and socio-economic status impact the diverse ways families make decisions about and manage scarce financial resources. She has conducted research on decision-making in Thai families and is currently collaborating with Mexican colleagues to study transnational Mexican-Minnesota family resource and relationship decisions. She has recently completed a study of values and financial practices of two-generation Hmong immigrant families in Minnesota. Catherine has been working with the Family Assets for Independence in Minnesota IDA program since 2000, when she initiated a four-year qualitative study of FAIM participants with Dr. Jan Hogan. Since 2004, she has served on the FAIM Council and is currently collaborating with FAIM colleagues to implement a comprehensive data collection and evaluation system for the statewide program.

JENNIFER TESCHER is the Director of the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), launched in 2004 to bring together diverse members of the financial services industry to develop, test, and implement new ways of building long-term, profitable relationships with underbanked consumers. The Center is a non-profit affiliate of ShoreBank Corporation, the nation's leading community development bank holding company. Ms. Tescher has been part of the ShoreBank family since 1996 in a variety of capacities, focused primarily on the development and implementation of new financial products and services.

Ms. Tescher has guided CFSI since its inception, and has already achieved notable success in raising the profile of unbanked access and asset-building as an objective for the industry. She has become a nationally known expert on this topic, with a monthly column in American Banker, frequent interviews and articles in the financial services press, and major speaking engagements at a broad spectrum of industry events.

Ms. Tescher serves as a member of the Board of Directors for both the Center for Economic Progress as well as the Credit Builders Alliance. She is actively engaged in discussions around asset building at both the state and federal levels and is a member of Bank of America's National Community Advisory Council. A recipient of the Crain's Chicago Business "40 Under 40" Award for 2006, Ms. Tescher received undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism from Northwestern University and a public policy degree from the University of Chicago.

LEIGH TIVOL is a Senior Program Manager at CFED, where she supports the SEED Initiative, CFED's national demonstration of children's development accounts. She has extensive experience in the assets field, including public policy, technical assistance, and community practice. Prior to joining CFED, Ms. Tivol was engaged in state-level policy and advocacy work for the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority and for the Indiana Association for Community Economic Development, with a particular focus on asset generation and preservation. She participated in the development of statewide policy initiatives relating to Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), homeownership education and counseling, predatory lending, and Indiana's Affordable Housing and Community Development Fund. From 1999 to 2002, Ms. Tivol directed the Near Eastside IDA Program in Indianapolis, one of the American Dream Demonstration sites. Previously, she served on the staff of RESULTS, a grassroots citizens' lobbying group focused on hunger and poverty issues. Ms. Tivol holds bachelor's degrees in Sociology and French from Brown University, and an M.P.A. from Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

DEBRA TRUDE-SUTER is Director of Training for the McCormick Tribune Center for Early Childhood Leadership at National-Louis University. She has a master's degree in psychology with special focus on women and children's studies. She has more than 25 years work with positive team management in both the profit and non-profit industries. She has focused her energies over the past ten years on diversity and social justice issues. Her teaching experience includes work at ITT Technical Institute, Kendall College, and presently National-Louis University.

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JEROME UHER is Communications Director for CFED. He oversees media relations, CFED's Web sites and the development and production of publications and communications tools. Prior to joining CFED in 2004, Mr. Uher served as a communications and outreach consultant to clients in the non-profit, foundation, and industry association fields. Mr. Uher began his career in policy communications as a press secretary to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). He served as communications director for the National Parks Conservation Association and worked as an associate for Widmeyer Communications, where he advised the U.S. Department of Agriculture on communication of its farmland conservation and rural development programs. Mr. Uher also served as director of outreach for Public Agenda, where he shared public opinion research with policymakers and opinion leaders. Mr. Uher earned his M.A. in Public Relations from Louisiana State University and holds a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism from New Mexico State University.

KENNETH D. WADE, chief executive officer of NeighborWorks America, oversees the multimillion-dollar grant programs and training activities that support a national network of more than 240 affordable housing and community development organizations. NeighborWorks America is a public nonprofit corporation established as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation by an Act of Congress in 1978. NeighborWorks America is the organization's trade name.

Wade, who joined NeighborWorks America in 1990, has more than 25 years of experience in community development. He most recently served for five years as NeighborWorks America's director of national programs, initiatives, and research. In this role, Wade directed all national programmatic initiatives for NeighborWorks America, including the NeighborWorks Campaign for Home Ownership, the NeighborWorks Multifamily Initiative, the NeighborWorks Insurance Alliance, the NeighborWorks Rural Initiative, and the NeighborWorks Community Building and Organizing Initiative. Wade has overseen the development of a number of national partnerships on behalf of the NeighborWorks network. In addition, he served as the director of the NeighborWorks America New England district for eight years.

Prior to joining NeighborWorks America, Wade worked for nine years with Boston's United South End Settlements. He participated in the development of the "Community Investment Plan" in Boston established by local banks and the Community Investment Coalition in 1990. He has served on a variety of boards and committees. Currently he serves on the Fannie Mae National Housing Advisory Council; the Bank of America National Community Advisory Council; the Board of Trustees of the National Housing Conference; the Board of Overseers of the School of Community & Economic Development of Southern New Hampshire University; the board for the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders; the Board of Trustees for The Appraisal Foundation; the board for the National Human Services Assembly; and the board for the National Housing Counseling Association.

Wade studied at Springfield College and University of Massachusetts College of Public and Community Service.

KRISTEN WAGNER is a doctoral student at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently a Research Associate with the Center for Social Development. Ms. Wagner holds a Master of Social Work (2005) and B.A. in Psychology (1997). Ms. Wagner's main research interests center on social and economic development. Her current research focuses on policies and programs that support the economic security of working families. She is also interested in participatory research and development.

CHRIS WALKER is Director of Research and Assessment for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development intermediary. He is responsible for assembling, conducting, sponsoring, or disseminating high-quality research on community development's contributions to the well-being of individuals, families and communities. He also supports the research activities of the 33 LISC field offices throughout the United States. Currently, he is working on the value of low-income housing tax credits to neighborhood revitalization and on new ways to measure the market potential of low-income urban neighborhoods.

Prior to joining LISC in 2005, Mr. Walker was director of the community and economic development program of the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. His research at the Urban Institute included national studies of federal- and foundation-funded affordable housing, community lending, small business development, and other community and economic development programs. He has specialized in community-based initiatives, local government policies, multi-party collaborations, performance measurement and community impact analysis. Work in 2005 included studies on the contributions of arts and culture to economic development and community vitality and local government accountability in federal community development programs.

EMILY WATERBURY has experience in local economic development within the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. As the Asset Services Director at EARN, she manages one of the nation's largest Individual Development Account programs, overseeing the provision of financial education and matched savings accounts to low-resource individuals and families. As Outreach Coordinator for Women's Initiative for Self Employment, she was responsible for managing relationships with local community-based organizations and government agencies, as well as coordinating grassroots marketing and public relations campaigns. As an Americorps VISTA with the Small Business Administration in San Jose, Emily developed and managed a Spanish-language micro-enterprise training program designed to meet the needs of the immigrant Latino community. During the dotcom boom, she spent over two years with a start-up staffing business, where she supervised the account management team and led the launch of a satellite office in Boston. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Studies from Northwestern University.

CAROL WAYMAN is the Senior Legislative Director at CFED. She directs CFED's efforts to expand economic opportunity through federal legislative and regulatory advocacy. During her tenure at CFED, Ms. Wayman has led efforts to reform asset limits in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (previously called Food Stamps) resulting in the exemption of IRAs and 529 College Savings Accounts from asset limits and indexing asset limits to inflation. She also led efforts to enact a new $5 million Beginning Farmer and Rancher Individual Development Account program and renew funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement. She lead CFED's efforts to expand matched savings accounts through enactment of a an Individual Development Account tax credit, refundable Saver's Credit, reauthorization of the Assets for Independence Act, and Children's Savings Accounts. Prior to joining CFED, Ms. Wayman served as the Director of Policy at the National Congress for Community Economic Development for nearly a decade. She advocated on behalf of nonprofit community development corporations and successfully increased federal and state government investment in their activities.

ERIC WEAVER, founder and CEO of Opportunity Fund, has spent his entire career as an advocate for low-income communities. He has combined his background as a community organizer with an education from Stanford Business School to develop an innovative not-for-profit financial institution that uses market principles, rigorously measures community impact and seeks to effect systemic change. His ideas - and track record of successful implementation - provide a roadmap for achieving long term, sustainable improvements in the lives of low-wage workers.

Eric joined Opportunity Fund in its nascent stages, where he has acted on his commitment to the idea that assets - a home, a business, an education - are the key to helping enterprising families climb the economic ladder. Eric was responsible for developing the original business plan for Opportunity Fund; leveraging diverse sources of funding and infrastructure to support Opportunity Fund's mission; and building a highly respected management team and board of directors. Under his leadership, Opportunity Fund has gown into one of the nation's largest and most effective microfinance institutions, with an emphasis on both savings and credit. Opportunity Fund operates one of the nation's largest Individual Development Account (IDA) program, and is the largest provider of micro-loans to low-income entrepreneurs in the Bay Area. Opportunity Fund has also become one of the most innovative community development real estate lenders in the nation, through its partnerships with local banks, the Sobrato Family Foundation, and the Housing Trust of Santa Clara County, and through its use of the New Markets Tax Credit. Eric's prior work experience includes developing affordable housing in Washington, DC and serving as a relief worker in El Salvador.

Eric's has also shown leadership in the broader field of community development and social entrepreneurship. He was the founding board chair of Net Impact, and continues to serve on the board of Pacific Community Ventures, of which he is a founding board member.

In 2006, Eric was named one of the first seven recipients of the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award, which was established to recognize and celebrate individuals who are successfully tackling some of California's most challenging problems. In addition, the Skoll Foundation has twice selected Opportunity Fund for the Skoll Award for Innovation in Silicon Valley; Bank of America chose Opportunity Fund for a 2005 Neighborhood Builders Award; and the Small Business Administration named Eric Weaver its Financial Services Advocate of the Year in 2006.

WOODY WIDROW is the executive director of RAISE Texas, a statewide coalition of nonprofit, private, and public institutions interested in moving individual, families, and communities along a path toward financial success and stability by increasing their access to assets. He is currently developing a statewide asset building movement to increase wealth building products, programs, and policies through the RAISE Texas action campaign. Woody has over 35 years experience in housing and community development. Before moving to Texas in 1999, Woody served as the Vice President of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the Deputy Director of the National Association for Affordable Housing Lenders, and the Executive Director of the National Housing Institute, and Editor of SHELTERFORCE. Woody received a Masters in Community and Regional Planning degree from Rutgers University.

KASEY WIEDRICH is a program manager in applied research and innovation at CFED. Her work focuses on the I'M HOME initiative as well as research on asset building and financial security. Prior to joining CFED, Kasey worked for the City of New York as a policy analyst for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and a research assistant at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. While in graduate school, she conducted research on factors associated with uptake and knowledge of the EITC. She also worked with Public/Private Ventures labor market initiatives evaluating workforce development programs in New York City. Before attending graduate school, Kasey managed Lenders for Community Development's IDA program, the Assets for All Alliance. Kasey holds a B.A. in sociology/anthropology from Carleton College and an M.P.A from New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.

LAKIA F. WILLIAMS is presently a Community Development Associate for Capital One Bank. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Capital One Financial Corporation (www.capitalone.com) is a financial holding company with 725 locations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Texas and Louisiana.

Currently, Ms. Williams works in the Community Development Banking division of Capital One Bank. She manages innovative, high-impact youth development programs including the establishment of a high school branch.

Prior to joining the Community Development Banking, she began her career with GreenPoint Bank as a Management Associate. The Management Associates Program was a two-year training program where college graduates had six-month long rotations in various departments throughout the bank and mortgage company. Ms. Williams' first rotation was as a Broker Service Representative at a GreenPoint Mortgage branch. She then moved to Novato, California for six months and worked on an offshore outsourcing project at the GreenPoint Mortgage headquarters. Upon her return to New York, Ms. Williams worked in the Information Systems department at GreenPoint Bank. Shortly thereafter, GreenPoint Bank was acquired by North Fork Bank. Ms. Williams then completed the Management Associates program with her last rotation in the General Counsel's Office at North Fork Bank.

LaKia Williams graduated from Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Management. She is currently pursing her MBA at St. John's University in Queens, NY.

LAUREN E. WILLIS, Associate Professor of Law. While in law school, Willis was on the senior staff of the Stanford Law Review, was a co-founder of the Stanford Public Interest Law Students Association and was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (Russian) Fellow. She received the Block Civil Liberties Award, the Stanford Women Lawyers Scholarship and the University Goldstein Award for Scholarship on Children at Risk. After law school, she clerked for the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States and for Judge Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She practiced law with Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP in Baltimore and at the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, DC. She taught at Stanford Law School as a Fellow, joined the Loyola faculty in 2004, and spent the 2008 Spring semester as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

RYLANDA EPPS WILSON, Philadelphia Housing Authority, Supervisor, Program Compliance/HOPE VI. She has more than 30 years experience as a Planner and implementer of affordable housing, community revitalization, social service, educational and staff development programs.

Ms. Wilson has been with the Philadelphia Housing Authority since May 1994. Previous to that, she was a Senior Analyst in the Planning Department with the City of Philadelphia Office of Housing and Community Development. And before that she was a schoolteacher.

She is Supervisor of the PHA department responsible for writing Grants to federal, state and local, public and private sources. After the grants are awarded, she is responsible to ensure that programs and services are implemented in compliance with all requirements, that all goals, objectives and benchmarks in the Work Plans are met, and that public housing residents receive the services they need to become self sufficient.

Ms. Wilson has been responsible for planning and implementation of PHA's 5 HOPE VI sites: Richard Allen, Falls Ridge, Martin Luther King, Lucien E. Blackwell and Ludlow Scattered sites. After coordinating the writing of the grant applications, she is responsible to implement the Supportive Services portions of the grants that focus on: 1) Outreach and recruitment; 2) Education for Job Placement (ABE/GED, Career education, Job Skills Training, computer literacy, financial literacy, youth leadership development); 3) Resident owned business development; 4) Homeownership, and 5) Supportive social services.

Ms Wilson is a spokesperson at community and resident meetings for all aspects of the HOPE VI revitalization process based on her experience with social service delivery and as a Project Manager for mixed income developments, vacancy reduction, Modernization, demolition and disposition projects.

BEADSIE WOO is a Senior Fellow in the Family Economic Success unit of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. She works on asset development and protection issues and policies, including those related to retirement and foreclosure, as well as economic development and workforce development. Prior to joining the Foundation, Ms. Woo was Senior Economist at CFED, where she managed the annual assessment of state economic development for each of the fifty states and the biennial assessment of state asset development outcomes and policies for the 50 states and DC; conducted and led quantitative analysis of states' economic development expenditures and other key indicators; and gathered information through community interviews and research on behalf of various philanthropic organizations. She holds an AB in Economics from Davidson College, a Master of Public Policy from the JFK School of Government at Harvard University, and earned her Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Economics from the University of North Carolina.

ROBERT WYNN, J.D., is the founder of Asset Builders of America Inc. which is a national non profit organization with the mission of designing and implementing wealth building strategies for low and moderate income youth, families and communities. Through Asset Builders of America Inc., Mr. Wynn is engaged in an effort entitled "CLIMB" to establish one hundred investment clubs in the city of Milwaukee. Mr. Wynn also lead an alternative credit data project which is funded in part by the Brookings Institution of Washington D.C. More recently, Mr. Wynn has launched a project entitled "Land Rich" which is an ambitious effort to help cash poor property owners to derive greater value from their real estate holdings. In addition, Mr. Wynn is an investment advisor, and owner of Akamai LLC which is a business and community development consulting firm. An alumnus of the Universities of North Carolina and Michigan, Mr. Wynn is a former member of the Federal Reserves' Consumer Advisory Council, and he is a trustee of Better Investing which is the national trade association for investment clubs.

JEFF ZINSMEYER is Executive Director for the D2D Fund. D2D is a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding access to financial services for traditionally under-served low and moderate-income households through innovative use of technology and partnerships. Jeff has spent most of the last 35 years in the community development field. Before D2D, he was a Director with BankBoston's Community Banking Group. In this capacity he supervised small business and real estate lending as well as Community Development and LMI Segment Marketing. Jeff left the Bank in 2001 to help form D2D. Before his banking career, he worked for a number of nonprofit organizations including the Center for Community Change. He holds an MBA from Columbia University and a MA in Economics from American University.

STEVE ZUCKERMAN is the founder and managing director of Self-Help's California Office. Self-Help is one of the nation's leading Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) committed to creating and protecting ownership and economic opportunity for people of color, women, rural residents, and low-wealth families and communities. Over its 28-year history, Self-Help has provided more than $5 billion in financing to 55,000 borrowers, and Self-Help Credit Union now serves more than 22,000 members with a full range of financial services. After working for Self-Help shortly after its founding (1984-85) and serving on its board for most of the next 20 years, Steve rejoined Self-Help in 2006 to launch its Oakland office which, among other things, is now leading an effort to develop and launch an innovative credit union micro-branch model for serving low income communities. During his time away from Self-Help and community development work, Steve spent 15 years with McCown De Leeuw & Co., a middle market leveraged buyout firm based in Menlo Park, CA, with prior experience in consulting with Bain & Company and investment banking with Morgan Stanley. Steve earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in economics and mathematics from Yale University.

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