Our Leadership
SBAN’s leadership team includes scholars and small business practitioners whose work focuses on issues of gentrification, community and economic development, and small business support services.
Willow Lung-Amam
Willow Lung, Ph.D. is Director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. She is also Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she serves as Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and Director of the Urban Equity Collaborative. Dr. Lung’s research focuses on suburban poverty, racial segregation, immigration, gentrification, redevelopment politics, and neighborhood opportunity. She is the author of The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge and Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia. Her research has appeared in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, National Public Radio, New Republic, Bloomberg CityLab, and Al Jazeera. Dr. Lung holds nonresident fellowships at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program.
Gerrit Knaap
Bobby Boone
Bobby Boone is impassioned about highlighting, growing, and sustaining independent retailers and restaurants that create the communities we love. From policy and engagement to pro forma modeling and tenanting, he works with municipalities, non-profit organizations, real estate developers, and business owners to co-create feasible and equitable solutions. Before founding &Access, Boone led a citywide effort to attract and maintain small businesses in Detroit and was a Senior Strategist at Streetsense, where he tackled wide-ranging retail challenges—from repositioning malls of yesteryear to crafting expansion strategies for emerging brands and commercial corridors. He is a lecturer at Howard University and the University of Maryland and serves as a Culture of Health Leader, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Manuel Ochoa
Manuel T. Ochoa is Principal and Founder of the Ochoa Urban Collaborative, a planning, community and economic development firm with an equity lens that provides strategy, policy, and implementation services to help people, neighborhoods, and communities revitalize and thrive. For the past several years, Ochoa has worked in Miami and the Washington, D.C., metro area with small business and community leaders on the issue of gentrification and displacement. With over 25 years of experience, he brings a unique mix of experience in federal and local government as well as national non-profits. Previously, Ochoa served in senior leadership positions at National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders (NALCAB) and Enterprise Community Partners, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Grant Programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Community Development. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, is fluent in Spanish, and lives in a walkable community with his family in Friendship Heights, Maryland.
Reemberto Rodríguez
Reemberto Rodríguez is SBAN’s Case Study Coordinator. He works with grantees to facilitate learning across teams, enhance their ability to conduct policy-relevant research, and ensure broad distribution of their work inside and outside the network.
Reemberto comes to SBAN with a long history in community economic development. Most recently, he helped lead COVID-19 recovery efforts for restaurants and retail in Montgomery County, Maryland. He previously served as Silver Spring Region Director for the county and worked for two decades in various roles at NeighborWorks America.
Born in Cuba, raised in the South, and now living in Silver Spring, Maryland, Reemberto is an architect and urban planner by education and a placemaker and community organizer by practice. He is also an affiliate instructor with the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Our Staff
Jamie Shanker-Passero
Jamie previously served as the Director of Programs for the Temple University Small Business Development Center, the Program Director for the Women’s Business Center in New Jersey, the Development Director of the Philadelphia Mobile Food Association, and the Commercial Corridor Revitalization and Business Association Manager for Mt. Airy USA Community Development Corporation. In these roles, she focused on partnership cultivation, grant writing, direct client work, event planning, entrepreneurship education, and developing programs to offer wrap-around services for entrepreneurs. She is a barred attorney with a degree from Temple University Beasley School of Law, where she focused on nonprofit law. She received a B.A. in Social Justice from Franklin and Marshall College. Jamie also owns and operates a local food tour company in Philadelphia, where she lives.
Katy June-Friesen
Katy is a writer, editor, and media producer with a background in communications and journalism. She is also an experienced researcher in various arenas, including academia. She has worked for nonprofits, higher ed institutions, and news outlets producing stories, editing diverse publications, conducting and managing research projects, and writing for documentary and public history projects. Her journalism has appeared in national magazines and newspapers. She is also a PhD candidate in journalism/media studies at University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where her research focuses on news coverage and public discourse surrounding gentrification.
Alejandra Gonzalez Ariza
Sophie McManus
Sophie is a mission-driven mixed-methods researcher, working at the intersection of research, policy and community development for more than a decade. She has led and contributed to research and publications spanning small business ecosystems and support, gentrification and neighborhood change, anti-displacement strategies, place-based community economic development, and affordable housing laws and policies. Most recently, she was a research associate at the Urban Institute. Sophie is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has a master’s degree in town and regional planning from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was a Rotary International Global Scholar.
Eram Ahmed
Eram is a doctoral student in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland. Previously, he worked as a community and political organizer, where experiences with residential gentrification and displacement and labor exploitation drove him to study urban planning. Eram has a master’s in urban and regional planning from Ball State University and a bachelor’s in political science from Arizona State University. His research interests include social and community based models for housing, specifically the decommodification of housing.
Lauren Meyer
Lauren is a master’s student in applied anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include how archaeology can lead to reclaimed cultural heritage after community displacement. This interest extends to displacement’s present-day impact and related advocacy. Lauren received a dual bachelor’s in anthropology and history from William & Mary.
Dejuan Johnson
Dejuan Johnson recently received his bachelor’s degree in architecture with a minor in construction project management from the University of Maryland. He is currently pursuing a dual master’s degree in architecture and community planning at UMD. Through his graduate work and work with SBAN, Dejuan looks forward to building on his current knowledge and skills and using them to contribute to local communities and the world around him.
Fayla Sutton
Fayla is a master’s student in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland. She previously served as Director of Programs for Our Place, a youth and community services organization in Portland, Maine. Fayla received her bachelor’s in psychology, with a minor in health, law, and policy from The University of New England. At SBAN, she looks forward to learning more about the needs of communities experiencing displacement, proactive measures to keep vulnerable communities in place, and strategic uses of community voices to shape planning processes.
Our Advisory Board
The SBAN Advisory Board includes representatives from diverse sectors, organizations, geographic regions, and backgrounds who advise the leadership and staff on all phases of the work. They include nationally and internationally renowned scholars, nonprofit leaders, and small business advocates that bring experience in economic and community development, entrepreneurship, commercial real estate and finance, commercial gentrification, and related issues.
Anna Marie Cruz
Derek Peebles
Derek excels in building peer networks, driving policy changes, and aligning resources for place-based economic solutions. By leveraging private and philanthropic investments to achieve social impact goals, he advances equity while ensuring sustainable outcomes.
Dionne Baux
Dionne Baux serves as the Director of Urban Programs for Main Street America. Dionne leads the initiative to broaden the Center’s offerings and engagement in urban neighborhood commercial districts. Dionne has over a decade of experience in project coordination in the fields of urban economic development and commercial district revitalization.
Joyce Pisnanot
Joyce Pisnanont serves as the Deputy Director of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. Joyce has over 15 years of experience working with Asian Pacific Islander community development organizations, including for several National CAPACD members in New York, California, and Washington.
Larisa Ortiz
Larisa Ortiz serves as the Managing Director of Public and Non-Profit Solutions at Street Sense. Larisa brings over 25 years of experience advising public, private, and non-profit sector clients on retail real estate strategy in urban environments. She has led hundreds of comprehensive retail planning efforts across communities large and small, both nationally and internationally.
Levar Martin
Emma Gonzalez Roberts
Emma Gonzalez Roberts is the Chief Operating Officer of TREND Community Development Corporation, a non-profit whose mission is to strengthen urban neighborhoods and build wealth for low-and moderate-income community investors. Roberts has over a decade of experience advancing community development through a non-profit affordable housing developer, city government, a social health tech start up, and academic research. She received a master’s in city planning from MIT where her research focused on equitable economic development tools and practices.
David Johnson
David Johnson is Business Development Officer for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). He has eight years of experience in the CDFI lending world, including the last four years at LISC. He has worked with organizations that support microlending, business coaching, and resource connection to marginalized small business owners. David’s passion is centered around connectivity and the ecosystem of entrepreneurs and resource providers, and how we can all align to support the sustainability of underserved small businesses.
Donovan Rypkema
Loretta Lees
Loretta Lees, Ph.D., is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Leicester, UK. She is co-organizer of The Urban Salon, a London forum for architecture, cities, and international urbanism, and The Leicester Urban Observatory. She is also chair of the London Housing Panel (co-funded by the Greater London Assembly and Trust for London). Lees is an international expert on gentrification and urban policy, and has just completed a 3-year project on gentrification-induced displacement from council estates in London.
Stacey Sutton
Stacey Sutton, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy and the Director of Applied Research and Strategic Partnerships at the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Through her research on community economic development, Sutton examines questions related to neighborhood racial transition, gentrification, and small business survival; solidarity economy ecosystems and worker-owned cooperatives; infrastructures and ideologies of Black liberatory zones; and racially disparate effects of place-based city policy and planning.
Gregory Reaves
Greg spent more than 30 years working at all levels in corporate and private industries. He graduated from Howard University, Washington, D.C., with a bachelor’s in chemical engineering and began his career with McNeil Consumer Products Company. Greg then joined Merck and Co. Inc., where he received eight promotions and became a member of the research division executive committee. He joined a midsize real estate development company, where he became COO and a member of the executive team. In 2008, Greg co-founded Mosaic Development Partners, and together with his partner, Leslie Smallwood-Lewis, they have developed over $750 million in real estate projects and have created hundreds of construction and full-time jobs. Mosaic currently has $7B in real estate in its pipeline.