People

The Surdna Foundation has appointed Kim Burnett and Vanitha Venugopal as program officers for community revitalization. Burnett resigns her post as executive director of Community Development Partnerships’ Network, where she has served for five years. Prior to joining CDPN, she was a program officer with the Neighborhood Partnership Fund, a local community development intermediary in Portland, OR. She also served as program manager for REACH CDC in Portland, where she was responsible for a grassroots community revitalization effort in a low-income commercial district that received the Governor’s Commendation for Community Collaboration. Venugopal was most recently associate program officer for community revitalization at Surdna and was promoted to program officer. Venugopal and Burnett will jointly oversee an annual grant portfolio in excess of $5 million.

The Institute for Community Economics has selected Gus Newport as its executive director. Newport has been a longtime leader in community development, municipal government and nonprofit capacity building. He served two terms as the mayor (1979-1986) of Berkeley, CA, and also as the executive director of Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative from 1988 to 1992. Newport has provided technical assistance to such major philanthropies as the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Edna McConnell Clark foundations. He has served on the faculties of the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Massachusetts, Boston; Yale University and Portland (OR) State University. Newport has served on two United Nations Sub-committees and on the Conference of Mayors Advisory Council. He is currently a member of the board of overseers of the graduate program in community development at Southern New Hampshire University.

Jack Preiss, co-founder of the North Carolina Low Income Housing Coalition, was honored with a lifetime achievement award from The North Carolina Interagency Council for Coordinating Homeless Programs. Preiss was also co-founder of Development Ventures Inc. and the Durham Affordable Housing Coalition.

Impact Capital, a Seattle/Spokane-based nonprofit organization that supports the efforts of hundreds of Washington State grassroots organizations, recently named Mark Flynn as executive director. Impact Capital runs programs in conjunction with Local Initiatives Support Corporation. For the last nine years, Flynn served as the director of the Compliance and Preservation Division for the Washington State Housing Finance Commission. Earlier in his career, he worked in a number of positions with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Resolution Trust Corporation. He also operated private real estate development, management and syndication firms in Kansas City, MO, and provided extensive technical and development assistance to local governments and nonprofit community development entities.

Irma Flores-Gonzales, a longtime member of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), passed away on December 24 in Albuquerque, NM. She served as a member of the NCLR board of directors for nearly three decades. She served as president of the Colegio Cesar Chavez, a college in Mount Angel, OR, which had a student body composed predominantly of the children of farmworkers. She helped develop Portland’s community policing effort and was later appointed by then-Governor Neil Goldschmidt as head of the Oregon State Community Services Agency. She became a national figure through her work as an adviser and community needs consultant for a number of regional and national foundations, including the Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, MI. She also served as chair of the board of directors for the Center for Community Change and as NCLR’s representative for the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility. She was a recent recipient of The Unity Council’s Herman Gallegos Exceptional Leadership Award for her lifelong commitment to the Hispanic community. Throughout her tenure at NCLR, she was a counselor, mentor and inspiration to dozens of NCLR staff and board members. She will be remembered not only for her professional accomplishments and profound commitment to justice and equality but also for her remarkable spirit and extraordinary personal strength and courage.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded $1 million over three years to the D.C.-based Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program to support research and communications efforts to help state and local leaders make their regions more economically competitive. The foundation also awarded $400,000 over 18 months to the Institute for Urban and Regional Development at the University of California at Berkeley to support its Successful Regions project, which is designed to help leaders understand the demographic, economic and technological changes affecting major metropolitan areas. The interdisciplinary project will identify the immediate and emerging challenges many regions are facing, including rapid economic growth, prolonged economic decline, large-scale immigration and growing poverty in suburbs, and will highlight strategies for adapting to these challenges and seizing the opportunities they present. www.macfound.org.

A new Web site for the Los Angeles Harbor Industrial Center Redevelopment Project will serve as a pilot for other redevelopment and brownfields projects in the region and nation. The new site offers potential developers and investors information about the Wilmington Industrial Park, a Los Angeles redevelopment project. Managed by the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, the site was conceived by the city’s Brownfields Team to demonstrate how multiple agencies can collaborate to offer a single repository for information, reports, images, maps, analysis and information about local businesses and the community. The site includes an interactive map providing detailed data and analysis on any parcel or block and “map gallery” featuring the 20 most popular maps, a photo gallery of actual photographs and property ownership charts from key blocks in the project area, profiles and links to businesses operating in the area and a real estate bulletin board where brokers can list projects for sale or lease. www.wilmingtonindustrialpark.org.