Chief Tissue Officer

Connective Tissue

Writing, researching, organizing, and experimenting at Connective Tissue. Fellowing at Harvard Human Flourishing Project, UVA's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and UVA's Karsh Institute of Democracy. Growing tomatoes in Charlottesville, VA.

Fun fact: Seth Kaplan's dad and my grandma were neighbors in Paterson, NJ!

Founder & CEO

Recast City

Ilana Preuss is Founder and CEO of Recast City, the national firm that pioneered small-scale and advanced manufacturing as tools for downtown revitalization, inclusive economic development, and locally rooted wealth building. Her book, Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing (Island Press, 2021), has become a defining reference for the field, and her premier program, Recast Leaders, equips civic leaders nationwide with the tools to translate strategy for this sector into ground-level implementation. Her TEDx talk, The Economic Power of Great Places, distills her core thesis: that durable and prosperous local economies are built from the talent and assets cities already have.

Executive Director, Population Flourishing & Regional Systems

Cincinnati Children's Hospital

Carley Riley, MD, MPP, MHS (she/her), is a systems thinker and actor. In the pediatric ICU, she leads complex teams through uncertainty to care for every patient as a whole person. In community, she acts on leverage points to transform interconnected systems that shape whether children and families flourish.

Dr. Riley is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an Attending Physician in Critical Care at Cincinnati Children’s, where she is Executive Director of Population Flourishing & Regional Systems, Co-Executive Director of Community Flourishing for the Michael Fisher Child Health Equity Center, and Director of the Mayerson Child Well-being Initiative. She is Chief Learning Officer for Investing in Flourishing and a Nova Institute for Health Fellow.

Grounded in the conviction that flourishing is an expectation, not an aspiration, she builds cross-sector collaborations using participatory research, systems science, and outcomes-based financing, centering those most affected.

Director, Community Safety Planning

Enterprise Community Development

Sarah Ritter has worked across the fields of community development and public safety. Before her current role with Enterprise Residential, she served as the Deputy Chief of Community Policing for the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). In previous roles at BPD, she worked in the Administration Bureau, Operations Bureau, Chief of Detectives Office, Chief of Patrol Office, and the Consent Decree Implementation Unit. She has also worked on policing and public safety in Baltimore for Johns Hopkins and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. Before her work in Baltimore, Sarah spent several years in San Francisco as a Program Development Consultant for the Mayor's Office of Economic Development. Sarah grew up in Baltimore and began her career as an Americorps VISTA at the Parks and People Foundation. She holds a Master's degree in City Planning with a concentration in Housing, Community and Economic Development from The University of California, Berkeley.

Senior Program Officer

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Sharon Roerty, AICP/PP/MCRP, is a Senior Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where she concentrates on the impact of the built, natural and social environments on population health including looking for global exemplars that are equity centric and can be adapted and adopted and inspire change in the U.S. She has developed programming initiatives relative to childhood obesity, sustainable community development, climate change, social belonging and elevating community science. Prior to RWJF, Sharon was the CEO of the National Center for Bicycling & Walking (NCBW). In and outside government organizations, Sharon has comprehensive experience working on transportation, environmental and urban policy and planning initiatives.

Vice President of Strategic Growth

Main Street America

Bethany Rogers is Vice President of Strategic Growth at Main Street America (MSA), where she helps Main Streets get ahead of what's next, piloting and scaling initiatives in community finance, real estate development, disaster preparedness, and small business resilience. She also oversees MSA's Grantmaking department, which has delivered more than $30 million in direct financial assistance to the network since the COVID-19 pandemic. Before joining MSA, she grew NewTown Macon's local loan fund into Middle Georgia's first certified Community Development Financial Institution. Under her leadership, the loan portfolio and the racial diversity of NewTown’s borrowers tripled. Bethany began her career in community preservation, working as a folklorist, documentarian, and architectural historian. She holds a PhD in Cultural Geography from Louisiana State University.

CEO & Cofounder

WeavingImpact

Pamela Roussos is the CEO and Cofounder of WeavingImpact, an organization working to close the racial wealth gap by helping social entrepreneurs build thriving businesses in Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous communities across Chicago, Baltimore, and Gaithersburg.

After a full career in tech, Pamela traded the C-suite for a mission that felt more personal: spending nine-plus years at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, traveling the world to help entrepreneurs turn big ideas into real, sustainable businesses.

Inspired by what she’d seen abroad — and by the challenges right in her own backyard — Pamela brought that same model home, founding WeavingImpact to help neighbors build businesses that strengthen their own communities.

Vice Chair, Clinical Innovation and Entreprenuership

Boston Medical Center

She serves

Dr Megan Sandel is a Professor at the Boston University (BU) Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and a Professor at the BU School of Public Health. At Boston Medical Center (BMC), she is the Vice Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Department of Pediatrics and the Co-Director of the Grow Clinic for Children, which is a multispecialty clinic for children with failure to thrive. She is the Principal Investigator for the Boston Opportunity System Collaborative, which helps underserved Boston neighborhoods with employment and affordable housing opportunities. Dr. Sandel advocates for place-based investing—focusing on specific, disinvested neighborhoods and ZIP codes to address health inequities. She is also the Co-Lead Principal Investigator for Children’s HealthWatch at BMC, and the medical center’s lead of a $6.5-million housing and place-based community health initiative.

Senior Portfolio Manager, Radius

Stand Together Foundation

Anna has spent her career building partnerships with nonprofits, businesses, thought leaders, and social entrepreneurs who share her vision of a more humane society where all people are empowered to realize their potential. Throughout her tenure with the Stand Together community, she has held leadership roles spanning strategic partnerships, talent development, education, and operations. Today, she leads the place-based investment portfolio at Stand Together Foundation, supporting locally driven approaches that strengthen communities, foster connection, and create the conditions for people to flourish. Though her work frequently takes her across the country, she calls Wichita, Kansas, home.

Chief Executive Officer

Build from Within Alliance

Chanell Scott Contreras is the President and CEO of the Build from Within Alliance (BfWA), a national network advancing entrepreneurship to revitalize disinvested neighborhoods. She leads efforts to strengthen local small business ecosystems, expand access to capital, and ensure entrepreneurs of color and resident leaders have the tools to create wealth and opportunity in their own communities.
With more than 15 years of experience in community economic development, Chanell is known for her equity-driven and systems-focused leadership. Prior to joining BfWA, she served as President and CEO of Michigan Saves, the nation’s first nonprofit green bank, where she expanded equitable access to clean energy financing and advanced environmental and economic justice statewide.
Previously, as Executive Director of ProsperUs Detroit, Chanell led the organization’s transformation into Michigan’s first Black- and woman-led certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), strengthening programs that support Detroit’s entrepreneurs of color through training, microlending, and technical assistance.

Executive Director and Vice President, Community Health

Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health

Samantha Shaak, Ph.D., is the Executive Director for the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health (LPPIH) and Vice President of Community Health for the Lehigh Valley region of Jefferson Health. She received her Doctorate degree in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Connecticut. Samantha is also a Pool Fellowship for Health alumni, a place-based professional development training for nonprofit and government leaders in the Lehigh Valley with the goal of increasing the local capacity to address complex social issues through cross-sector partnerships. Her work focuses on community-level systems change efforts to improve quality of life and health and cultivating the environments and conditions that support transformational change. Her career began with a focus on program evaluation of child development, child welfare, and community health initiatives and has grown to focus more on larger-scale, complex change implementation and evaluation.

Co-founder & CEO

Trust Neighborhoods

Kavya has dedicated her career to creating more equitable communities. She is co-founder and CEO of Trust Neighborhoods, a national nonprofit that helps neighborhoods worried about gentrification own their own mixed-income rental housing. Trust Neighborhoods has helped set-up mixed-income neighborhood trusts, or MINTs, in 5 neighborhoods across the country, which together own nearly 350 housing units. Prior to Trust Neighborhoods, she helped young people get more civically active through helping start The Obama Foundation and supported access to economic opportunity through her policy work at the Obama White House. She started her career at McKinsey and Company, focused on local and state economic development. She has lived in a total of eight cities across the country, allowing her to learn about a diversity of neighborhoods. She has a BA in economics from Harvard College and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

CEO

Life Remodeled

Diallo Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Life Remodeled, is a native Detroiter passionate about revitalizing neighborhoods and creating opportunities for communities to thrive. With over 20 years of leadership experience, Diallo brings expertise in strategic planning, financial management, operational efficiency, and organizational growth.

Under his leadership, Life Remodeled transforms vacant school buildings into vibrant Opportunity Hubs, connecting thousands of Detroit residents with essential resources, education, and workforce opportunities.

A graduate of Cass Technical High School, Diallo earned his bachelor's degree in finance from Wilberforce University and a Master of Divinity from Southern Methodist University. His professional background includes roles at ExxonMobil, BP Amoco, and IBM Consulting, as well as entrepreneurship through his former Detroit business, Drive Ping Pong Bar & Grille.

Diallo remains committed to fostering collaboration, equity, and lasting community transformation. He and his wife, Dr. Jameel Smith, enjoy raising their two children in their beloved hometown of Detroit.

Senior Fellow

Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University

Katya Fels Smyth is a Senior Fellow at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University, where she works on “wellLeaving” – increasing care and accountability for how philanthropy leaves nonprofits and nonprofits leave communities. She is a nationally recognized systems change leader who has spent over 30 years challenging assumptions and structures underlying American systems, including that scale and perpetuity are inherently valuable. In 1995, Katya founded On The Rise, a community of women pushed to the margins. In 2007, she spun off what would become the Full Frame Initiative (FFI), a national social change organization advancing wellbeing equity through power- and resource-shifting. In 2024, FFI initiated a transition of its mission to a national network of leaders, publicly challenging misconceptions about nonprofit closure. A former Echoing Green Fellow, MIT CoLab Affiliate, and Harvard Research Fellow, Katya and her family live on a Western Massachusetts farm.

Co-Founder

Parish Collective

Tim is the co-founding director of the Parish Collective, a co-founder of Neighborhood Economics and author of two books on how churches are being reorganized around neighborhood flourishing.