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-Amam, Ph.D., has written extensively on suburban poverty, racial segregation, immigration, gentrification, redevelopment politics, and neighborhood opportunity. She is the author of Trespassers? Asian American and the Battle for Suburbia, and a forthcoming book on redevelopment politics and equitable development organizing in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Her research has also appeared in various journals, books, and popular media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, National Public Radio, The New Republic, Bloomberg’s CityLab, and Al Jazeera. Lung-Amam is a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and a nonresident senior fellow at 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
Our senior leadership is supported by a Project Manager and a robust team of UMD students.
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.
Nohely Alvarez
Nohely is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban and Regional Planning and Design at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her focus and interests include the intersection of immigrant communities, transnational planning, participatory community building, social justice, gentrification, and equity development. She is particularly interested in advocacy and radical planning pedagogy in her field and thinking of ways the gap between practice and academia in planning can be improved.
Katy June-Friesen
Maura Dwyer
Kushagra Gali Venkata
Kushagra is pursuing his master’s degree in applied economics at University of Maryland. He recently received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Nottingham. Kushagra previously worked in leadership roles at a pro bono consultancy and a student-led volunteer organization, where he facilitated event planning and devised data-driven solutions to aid the growth of nonprofit organizations.
Varun Gole
Varun is a master’s student in software engineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. He previously worked as a software engineer at Quorum Software, crafting customized software solutions for a diverse range of clients. Varun’s areas of expertise include web development and deep learning. He is committed to using his skills to make a meaningful impact in communities.
Hannah Cameron
Hannah Cameron is a PhD student in the Urban and Regional Planning and Design program within the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests explore the ways in which narrative and representation intersect with past and present forms of commemoration and memorialization in racialized spaces of cities. Previously, Hannah has worked as researcher on a variety of urban planning projects focused on community engagement, placemaking, cultural landscapes and historic preservation.
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.
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 Peebles is Senior Director of Policy & Advocacy for Inclusive Economy at the American Sustainable Business Network. Previously, he served as the Executive Director of the American Independent Business Alliance. Derek is a leader in community economic development with extensive success moving organizations forward by building on cross-cultural and cross-sector collaboration. He began his career in small business banking and over the past decade has been organizing local business communities, residents, and institutions to leverage both social and private capital for sustainable economic development.
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.
Steve Hall
Steve joined the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) in 2017 and has over 20 years of experience in small business lending, banking, and social impact. Steve currently serves as the Senior Director of Small Business and Economic Development Lending where he leads and expands all corporate relations, small business engagement, and Economic Development Lending strategies for LISC.
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
Gregory Reaves is Founder and Co-Owner of Mosaic Development Partners, a Philadelphia-based commercial real estate development company focused on ground up and adaptive reuse of small- and large-scale real estate that drives full economic inclusion. The company has developed more than $200 million in real estate projects and promotes the inclusion of small businesses that represent their communities. With a degree in chemical engineering, he spent more than 30 years working in publicly traded and private companies, including a long career at Merck, where he held multiple positions including Vice President of Global Research Communications Policy.