SVP, National Housing

LISC

Michael Skrebutenas brings more than 25 years of experience in housing and public service to LISC. Prior to joining LISC, Michael was the Senior Vice President and Regional Director of Community Preservation Corporation’s (CPC) Albany office. CPC is the largest CDFI in the country solely committed to investing in multifamily housing and he led the company’s lending operations throughout New York State’s Capital Region. With an annual project pipeline of approximately $70 million, he underwrote and closed on construction, permanent and agency financing for affordable, supportive and naturally occurring affordable housing projects in his market. He was also responsible for identifying federal, state, and local government policy and programmatic opportunities to advance the company’s mission of creating affordable housing for underserved communities. Prior to CPC, Michael was President of Housing Preservation and Executive Deputy Commissioner at New York State Homes and Community Renewal (NYS HCR). Before serving at NYS HCR, he was Deputy Secretary of Economic Development and Housing for the Governor’s office and worked as a development project manager for various non-profit community development organizations. He also served in the Clinton White House.

Michael holds a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University, a Juris Doctor from the University of Connecticut School of Law, and Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University. Married to Anne, a librarian for the Schenectady Public Libraries, Mike is the proud father of two daughters, Lucy and Caroline. Mike is active in the outdoors and is an Adirondack 46er – he has climbed all 46 high peaks in New York State’s Adirondack Park. He is adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Formerly a member of his local planning board, he is active in local politics and serves on the board of directors for a local CDC in Schenectady County, New York.

Director, ENOUGH

Governor's Office of Children | Maryland

Pickett Slater Harrington is the Director, ENOUGH with the Maryland Governor's Office of Children, where he supports statewide strategies and community-led efforts to eradicate concentrated poverty in Maryland.

With a career dedicated to social change, Pickett’s experience spans roles in national nonprofits, including the Children’s Defense Fund and Public Allies. As the manager of leadership development at Independent Sector, he played a pivotal role in nurturing the next generation of social change leaders. Pickett is also the founder of Joltage, a social change design firm that supports sustainable, community-driven solutions to social challenges.

PIckett holds a Bachelor of Science in Education and a Master of Social Work. He has served as a professor of social work and senior associate at the Community Building Institute at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH and full-time faculty in the Master of Arts Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. Pickett currently resides in Baltimore, MD.

Pickett.Slater-Harrington@maryland.gov
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pickettslaterharrington/

Executive Director

Thrive Asheville

Ryan Smolar is the Executive Director of Thrive Asheville, bringing nearly two decades of experience in innovative, sustainable, and equitable community development. A nationally recognized leader, Ryan has worked extensively at the intersection of economic development, inclusion, and sustainability, building diverse local coalitions and public-private partnerships to drive community-driven solutions.

Along with joining Thrive Asheville, Ryan also leads the PlacemakingUS learning network, a national initiative dedicated to community building and placemaking. He also directed development efforts in Santa Ana, California’s historic district, where he supported projects in arts, culture, health, and small business development. Lastly, Ryan runs a food democracy project in Long Beach, California. His leadership has been funded by prominent philanthropies, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the US Department of State, AARP and The California Endowment, as well as various municipalities, arts commissions, and business councils.

Ryan’s deep appreciation for local history and culture, paired with his expertise in fostering collaborative solutions, make him a valuable asset in addressing the challenges faced by communities. He is committed to ensuring that the unique qualities of Asheville are preserved and shared equitably, working to create a vibrant, inclusive, and resilient community.

CEO

Full Frame Initiative

Katya Fels Smyth is Founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative (FFI), a social change organization partnering to build a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing — the needs and experiences essential to weather challenges and have health and hope. In 1995, Katya founded On The Rise, Inc., a community for women pushed to the margins. Because righting inequities requires structural change — not services — she founded FFI in 2009. Katya is the lead architect of FFI’s Five Domains of Wellbeing framework, adaptive systems change framework, and analysis of how structural and narrative barriers to wellbeing drive economic, health, and social inequities. She launched many of FFI’s signature systemic partnerships, including with Missouri’s juvenile justice and child welfare systems and the St. Louis County Family Court; a multi-system effort in Massachusetts to reframe the government’s approach to the intersection of homelessness, sexual assault, and domestic violence; a statewide project in California surfacing how survivors of violence define success that has shifted narratives and funding nationally; the Wellbeing Blueprint, an agenda for structural change in the wake of COVID and this country’s racial reckoning; and expansion into urban planning and the creation of WIATT, a tool for guiding infrastructure investments to increase wellbeing equity. She currently leads FFI’s new partnerships in addressing climate change.

A former Research Affiliate with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab, Research Fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Echoing Green Fellow, Katya speaks, publishes, and advocates nationally for addressing social injustice by removing barriers to wellbeing. She holds an AB in evolutionary biology from Harvard. She lives on a farm in western Massachusetts with her husband, teenagers, and an unwieldy menagerie of pets and rescued farm animals.

Executive Director

Parish Collective

Tim Soerens is the Co-Founding executive director of the Parish Collective, a network of churches around the United States focused on neighborhood flourishing. He recently wrote, “Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church, Right Where You Are.”

His co-authored first book “The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Transform Mission, Discipleship, and Community (Intervarsity Press, 2014) won multiple awards, including Christianity Today’s award of merit.

A convener at heart, he has launched multiple sold-out conferences including the Inhabit Conference, New Parish Conference UK, Conspire Gathering. He also co-founded Neighborhood Economics to connect the people repairing local economies.

A popular speaker, Tim communicates each year to a broad cross section of organizations and denominations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. He lives in Chicago with his family.

Senior Advisor to the Mayor, Strategic Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

City of Atlanta

Megan Sparks is a visionary leader with boundless energy for driving equitable growth among people, organizations, and communities. An architect of cross-sector movements, she thrives when bringing wild ideas to life in highly complex environments. Mayor Andre Dickens appointed Megan in 2022 as his Senior Advisor leading strategic partnerships, philanthropic initiatives, and strategic initiatives for the City of Atlanta. In this role, Megan is responsible for catalyzing hundreds of millions of dollars in public, private, and philanthropic investment across Atlanta and for innovating the City’s approach to public-private-philanthropic partnerships. Megan and her team also lead key strategic initiatives, enabling and steering high-priority initiatives from place-based revitalization to housing to youth development, public safety, and workforce development. She also co-leads the City’s FIFA World Cup 2026 preparations. In her free time, Megan loves painting, writing, storytelling, conversing, and playing with her family, friends, and any dog she can find.

Co- Director

Placemaking US

Biography Madeleine Thérèse Spencer is a visionary leader dedicated to community development, placemaking, and the celebration of authentic cultural vibrancy in community. As Co-Director of PlacemakingUS, a pioneering network organization dedicated to transforming the social life of public spaces and fostering inclusive, living and thriving communities. Notably, at the height of the pandemic, in response "purple-lining" Madeleine spearheaded a community design accelerator called "The United Streets of America". Through her co-leadership, PlacemakingUS has become a hub for creativity, inspiration, and collaboration, setting high standards for diversity, equity, and inclusion within the placemaking movement.

Co-Executive Director

Project for Public Spaces

Nate is passionate about engaging the public in urban design, policy, and planning through storytelling. As the Co-Executive Director at Project for Public Spaces, he leads and implements our organizational strategy. He also oversees our Placemaking Program, as well as our communications and development teams.

In his previous role as Director of Communications, Nate led an organization-wide rebranding in 2020. Over the years, he has played a leading role in many Project for Public Spaces publications, including the second edition of How to Turn a Place Around, as well as online resources on inclusive placemaking, measuring qualitative data in public space, and balancing transportation and placemaking on main street. Nate has also contributed to several resources and reports on place-based approaches to inclusive economic development as part of Project for Public Spaces’ partnership with the Bass Center on Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Institution. Nate regularly shares his knowledge and love of public space as a keynote speaker at conferences, trainings, and other events.

Prior to joining the team in 2015, Nate curated exhibitions and produced events with the Boston Society of Architects, the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, the Chicago Architecture Center, and Urbanspace Gallery in Toronto, Ontario. He is the co-editor of two books on participatory city building, Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World and Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs.

Outside of work, you’ll find Nate producing the Springfield Googolplex podcast about the movies parodied on The Simpsons or cycling around Lambertville, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and two cats.

Neighborhood Operations (2012-2024)

Nextdoor

I’m a product and community leader with extensive experience building online communities, as well as experience in the education and service worlds.

Over the last 25 years, I’ve focused primarily on creating and scaling local, online communities. Most recently, I led Nextdoor’s Neighborhood Operations Team for twelve years including developing and managing the 250k+ member Neighborhood Leads program. Previously, I was the senior product manager at Yahoo! Groups and also worked at the start-ups eCircles, Well Engaged, and Firefly.

Before focusing on technology initiatives, I wrote my undergraduate thesis about the idea of national service and then spent five years helping to start City Year, the youth service corps that was the model for Americorps, as well supporting other service efforts including Hands On Atlanta and Citizen Schools.

I’m now focused on developing and piloting initiatives and features designed to leverage technology to help build social capital in communities.

CEO

Build from Within Alliance

Since 2016, Mihailo (Mike) Temali has been the CEO of Build from Within Alliance. BfWA is a national alliance of community organizations from Miami to Anchorage utilizing a comprehensive approach to working with low-income entrepreneurs in low-income communities of color. This method of reaching deep into these communities was pioneered by the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) in Minneapolis and St. Paul, which he founded and led from 1993 to 2019.

As a wrap around, high-touch and risk tolerant model of place-based training, lending, TA and real estate, this model has supported thousands of neighborhood entrepreneurs across the country as implemented by the affiliates of BfWA, resulting in their entrepreneurs bringing significant economic and social impact to their own neighborhoods. BfWA provides extensive materials, training, networking and product innovation to its members, as they adopt and adapt this approach. BfWA is also advancing this approach on a research and policy level as an important addition to the field of community economic development and economic inclusion, in part with Reinvestment Fund’s Research Division.

While Temali was its CEO, NDC trained over 5000 low-income entrepreneurs in 11-week neighborhood-based business plan courses (over 85% owners of color), with 25% open for business on average for 9 years. NDC is a CDFI, SBA and Reba-Free lender, and is co-owner, developer and manager of six business incubators including Midtown Global Market, Mercado Central, Frogtown Square and Frogtown Crossroads. He led North End Area Revitalization, a CDC in St. Paul’s Rice Street district from 1984 – 1990, focusing on commercial corridor revitalization. Temali is the author of “Community Economic Development Handbook,” and was a Bush Fellow in Boston and Santiago, Chile.

Founding Steward

Common Agency

Deborah Tien, Founding Steward of Common Agency, helps people self-organize their neighborhoods to feel more like home - through re-imagining and cocreating the local governance structures and technologies we want.

Fellow

NYU Marron Sustaining Places Initiative/ Brookings Metro

Tim Tompkins has worked to transform cities through public spaces and public private partnerships. He leads the Sustaining Places Initiative at NYU’s Marron Institute and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution's Metro Program.

Tompkins was President of the Times Square Alliance, one of the nation’s pre-eminent Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), from 2002-2020. He is former Chair of the International Downtown Association and was the Founding Director of Partnerships for Parks, which won an Innovation in Government Award from Harvard's JFK School of Government and the Ford Foundation for its work in revitalizing the Bronx River. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale and an MBA from Wharton.

Managing Director, Field Building & Programs

Harlem Children's Zone

As Managing Director, Field Building & Programs for the William Julius Wilson Institute at Harlem Children’s Zone, Wendy Viola manages a portfolio that includes policy, education strategy, partnerships, and editorial and thought-leadership content for the Institute. A community psychologist by training, Wendy has 16 years of experience in the field of research and evaluation in academic and applied settings, including the New York City Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC and the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Research and Evaluation team. Wendy earned her bachelor’s from Cornell University and Masters and PhD in Applied Psychology from Portland State University.

CEO/President

Christian Community Development Association

Lorenzo A. Watson is the CEO/President of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) in Chicago, IL. With a career spanning community development, education, and Biblical justice, Lorenzo brings extensive experience in organizational leadership and strategic planning. He spent nearly two decades at North Carolina State University (NCSU), leading the Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering IT department while mentoring student leaders. At CCDA, Lorenzo has held key roles in communications, education, and event planning, including guiding the association’s first virtual conference during the COVID-19 pandemic. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from NCSU, an MDiv from Shaw University Divinity School, and a PhD in Educational Research and Policy Analysis. Lorenzo and his wife, Natarsha P. Sanders, serve as community pastors in Kerrville, Texas, fostering inclusion and belonging in every space they engage.

President & Chief Executive Officer

Providence Cultural Equity Initiative

Raymond Two Hawks Watson, Esq. is an attorney, advocate, educator, cultural practitioner, cultural consultant, and business professional with eighteen years of experience in nonprofit leadership and executive administration. Watson also has an extensive background in promoting and supporting cultural equity & cultural development initiatives in Rhode Island.

Watson received his juris doctorate in 2022 from the Roger Williams University School of Law, is licensed to practice law in the State of Rhode Island, and is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, most notably the U.S. President's Lifetime Achievement Award for Voluntary Service (2021).

Watson serves as the President & CEO of the Providence Cultural Equity Initiative, a 501c3 nonprofit cultural consultancy based in Providence, Rhode Island, and recently founded the international and annual Meshanticut Cultural Placemaking Confestival in Providence, Rhode Island. Watson also as the Chippinuonk Sâchem of the Mashapaug Nahaganset Tribe.