community-development
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Sami Brown and the business of making a town work
A bakery taught Sami Brown to think about expansion. With Blue Sky Growth Agency in Arkadelphia, she turned that ambition toward the systems, people, and small businesses that keep a community going.
Bart Dickson Builds the Places Between Home and Work
A paperboy became a construction manager, went to law school at night, ran an electrical contractor and founded Cobalt. His latest bet is that a former warehouse can help give suburban Tualatin a little more soul.
Joe Brevard Has Spent 35 Years Making Plans That Leave the Office
The engineer turned city planner built a career around an unfashionable idea: a plan matters only when people can use it. At the Collaborative, that has meant water systems, revived land, public meetings, safer routes and a firm that still calls itself a startup after three and a half decades.
Joshua Simon Bet on the Strip Mall. Then He Made It a Community Strategy
He started SimonCRE in a bruised market with no outside equity. Sixteen years later, Joshua Simon is still making the unfashionable case that physical retail is civic infrastructure with a cash register.
Sorya Gaulin Markets a Hotel. The Product Is a Place.
After three decades in communications, Sorya Gaulin is applying the machinery of luxury marketing to a community asset - making every booking carry the story of Fogo Island with it.
Patty Jurca Makes a 200-Year-Old Bank Feel Present Tense
From a neighborhood reading garden to mobile ATMs dispensing tacos, KeyBank's chief brand officer has built a career around one durable idea: institutions earn attention by showing up in people's actual lives.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins (Charles M. Collins) is a Harvard-trained lawyer, MIT city planner, and former real estate developer who spent nearly two decades as President and CEO of YMCA of Greater San Francisco, transforming it into an organization serving more than 42,000 children annually across three Bay Area counties. Born in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1947 and raised as one of the first Black families in Mill Valley, he brings a lifetime of crossing boundaries to his work at the intersection of community, equity, and opportunity. Now a Presidential Fellow at USF's Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service, he continues to shape the region's civic life.
Mwalimu Karisa
Mwalimu Karisa is an executive at Kong Inc., the San Francisco-based API connectivity company behind the Kong Gateway and Konnect platform. Originally from Kilifi County on Kenya's coast, Karisa's path ran through an exchange program in Iowa and onto the front lines of global API and AI infrastructure. Kong serves enterprises managing critical API traffic across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, with over $424 million raised and a $2 billion valuation. Before entering the technology sector, Karisa was publicly recognized for community development work in his home village, raising funds for clean water access and healthcare infrastructure in coastal Kenya.
Kesha Cash
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.