Bios

Brian Reilly

Brian is a facilitative leader in urban economic, community and sustainable development with over 20 years of experience in public-sector, philanthropic and nonprofit leadership positions. He has served as the economic development director in Cleveland and Buffalo, and won national awards for his program management of the City of Milwaukee’s Menomonee River Valley redevelopment. A Brookings Institution study identified his Menomonee Valley project as the key contributor to Milwaukee’s performance as the only top 45 US city to gain jobs between 1998 and 2006 within three miles of its downtown.

For the past eight years Brian has been advancing a cross-sector approach to “incremental” real estate development. He is a faculty member of the Incremental Development Alliance, co-founded Small Development Counts, and launched Homegrown Housing to apply an ecosystem approach to grow local capacity to produce residential, commercial and mixed-use buildings that are more responsive to local needs.

In his career, Brian has coached over a dozen cities in various roles. Notably, he directed The Integration Initiative, the signature program of Living Cities (a New York-based collaboration among 22 of the world’s largest foundations and banks). There he coached nine US cities in their own development strategies within a common collective impact framework he co-designed.

Other roles have included overseeing technical assistance to dozens of New Jersey’s 566 towns while directing that state’s Municipal Land Use Center providing best practice land use, transportation and economic development planning assistance to local governments. He has been a pioneer in applying incremental development to transit oriented development and was among the first wave to launch a citywide zoning code reform to legalize and enable more missing middle and other incremental development.

Terrell “TJ” Jolly

Terrell “TJ” Jolly is a visionary entrepreneur deeply committed to urban revitalization in Kansas City and beyond. As the driving force behind Integrity Capital Management, Jolly & Associates, and Legacy Asset Group, Terrell manages an impressive portfolio of over 200 plus residential and commercial properties. His approach to property management is holistic, prioritizing affordable housing and pathways to ownership, thus ensuring that his businesses are not merely profit-driven, but also serve as catalysts for community upliftment.

Terrell’s entrepreneurial journey began with Integrity Capital Management, where his exceptional professionalism and customer service quickly garnered recognition, especially from local non-profit organizations. This venture specializes in seamless property management, offering services such as maintenance, emergency responses, and rent collection, significantly easing the burdens of property owners in the Kansas City Metropolitan area.

Jolly & Associates, the property acquisition arm of his business, focuses on restoring distressed properties and ensuring their responsible occupancy. This endeavor demonstrates Terrell’s commitment to community engagement, as it involves collaboration with local organizations and significant investment in property refurbishments. His efforts here go beyond mere management; they represent an active participation in the growth and development of local communities.

As Terrell scales up the operations of Integrity Capital Management and Jolly & Associates, the core of his mission remains unchanged: to acquire and rejuvenate properties within Kansas City’s urban core, transforming them into affordable, attractive housing options, and thereby playing a pivotal role in the revitalization of local neighborhoods.

TJ is more than an entrepreneur; he is a community advocate and a visionary leader. His dedication to community service, combined with his entrepreneurial acumen, makes him a key figure in shaping a brighter, more vibrant future for the communities he serves. His formal education includes a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications & Public Relations and a Master’s Degree in Business, from Alabama State University and the University of Phoenix, Kansas City.

Mark Ehlinger

Mark has over 30 years of experience working with real estate owners and developers to obtain financing for their properties. His transaction experience has involved hundreds of properties in markets throughout the United States, ranging from duplexes valued at less than $500,000 to various types of commercial and multi-family properties and portfolios valued in excess of $500,000,000. These transactions have involved multiple types of financing, including mortgage debt, mezzanine debt, preferred equity, joint venture equity, tax credits, ground leases, and commercial property assessed clean energy (C-PACE) financing.

In the course of this work, Mark maintains regular contact with a large number of the most active commercial and multi-family capital providers in the country. He also has a particular expertise in financial modeling and analysis, which he utilizes to assist clients and capital providers in structuring the most effective and efficient financing transactions.

Mark currently conducts his work as a member of the Commercial Division of Compass, which is one of the largest real estate brokerage companies in the United States. From 1994 to 2020, Mark worked in the Capital Markets Group of Cushman & Wakefield, and from 1990 to 1993, he worked in the Real Estate Consulting Division of Deloitte & Touche.

David Kim

David is an architect, urban designer and developer focused on long term, regenerative
development of existing neighborhoods and districts. He is a partner in two ventures – Tolar
Anderson Kim LLC, an urban design and planning firm, and Artifex DBD, a development firm,
working collaboratively on development of factory built cottages and small scale buildings, design
and development of attainable market-rate infill (commercial and housing) projects that
complement its neighbors, and projects that lead to revitalization of economically challenged
districts.

David graduated from Cornell University in 1988 with a Bachelors of Architecture, a five-year
professional degree program. He has worked with Barton Myers Associates, Zimmer Gunsul
Frasca and Moule & Polyzoides on projects ranging from small scale multi-family housing to
performing art centers. He has also worked with New Urban Builders, a development and
construction company involved in building new mixed-use neighborhoods. In 2009, he
established a partnership to form Anderson/Kim practicing architecture and urban design which
transitioned into Tolar Anderson Kim LLC in 2017.

David is a co-founder of the Incremental Development Alliance
(www.incrementaldevelopment.org) and served on the board of the Congress for the
New Urbanism (www.cnu.org). He has been a resident of Tarrytown since 2016.

Jennifer O’Donnell

Jennifer is the principal of HONE STRATEGIC LLC. As practitioners in urban revitalization and the preservation of buildings and sites, Hone Strategic has worked on a wide range of projects in design and construction, urban and regional planning, historic preservation, farmland protection, participatory mapping, civic engagement, and organizational planning and development. Jennifer is a seasoned urban planner and historic preservationist. She has lived in New York state’s Hudson Valley since 2004 where she has worked with numerous communities and organizations to plan and implement projects in historic sites and neighborhoods.

She specializes in projects that engage local participants and stakeholders in community-driven approaches to planning. Jennifer has Masters’ degrees from Columbia University in Urban Planning and Real Estate Development, a BA in Art History from SUNY Stony Brook, and studied urban and regional conservation at UNESCO’s ICCROM program in Rome, Italy. She is fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish. She has also led several local planning and economic development efforts that have resulted in large grant awards for funding in housing, trails, main streets grants, cultural and downtown anchors, and more.

In her work with municipalities, as Deputy Director of Planning in Ulster County, NY, as a Local Government Specialist at the New York State Department of State, and as Principal at Hone Strategic LLC, Jennifer has led, trained, advised, and facilitated scores of local governments in their work to transform their communities. These successful, locally-driven programs helped revitalize their main streets, protected their open spaces, nominate their historic districts, make their waterfronts more resilient, and build their local economies through comprehensive planning, design charrettes, community organizing, civic engagement, and policy change.

She recently developed a pilot program for the NY State Department of State for comprehensive planning and trained numerous local officials in a range of planning and economic development topics and is a co founding member of the Small Development Counts collaborative. Jennifer is also an incremental developer herself, now in the process of creating a row of new dwellings and a mixed-use project in her adopted neighborhood in Ulster County, New York.

Damon Dorsey

Damon is founder & president of the national nonprofit Develop America.

Damon has built businesses, done real estate development, and directed a county-level economic development department in Milwaukee, WI. As a small business owner himself, Damon knew a chief indicator of small business success is connection. He founded Develop America to connect unconnected businesses. He does it by building and strengthening industry ecosystems.

Today Develop America is the largest business development ecosystem serving BIPOC-owned and other small businesses in target industries in America. Develop Wisconsin is Develop America’s leading statewide ecosystem affiliate. Similar efforts are emerging in industry segments in Michigan, North Carolina and elsewhere.

Scott Bernstein

Scott is Founder & Emeritus President & Chief Innovation Officer of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) (1977-2019), which promotes sustainable communities by helping local leaders to better use their hidden assets, and received the MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative & Effective Organizations. President Clinton appointed Scott to the President’s Council for Sustainable Development where he co-chaired its task forces on Metropolitan & Rural Sustainable Communities and on Cross-Cutting Climate Change Strategies.

Scott is known for promoting location-efficient regions, with tools ranging from mortgage lending (e.g. a successful $100 Million demonstration underwriting experiment for Fannie Mae) to foreclosure prevention to transit-oriented development. From 2003-2016 he co-led the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD) which achieved a national goal of making TOD a preferred form of real estate development with a significant focus on affordability.
Scott led CNT in creating the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index (http://htaindex.org) to help communities understand their direct transportation costs, including maps & data for all US regions, helping shift public investment to mass transit and sustainable infrastructure and creating new financing for affordable housing near transit. This tool, which is used by most major cities in the U.S., also provides a basis for analyzing and illustrating the transportation GHG emissions for all U.S. Census block groups, tracts, places, counties and regions.
Scott has received lifetime recognition with appointment as Fellow of the Congress for a New Urbanism. Scott is listed in Planetizen’s 100 Top Urban Thinkers (2009), and in its list of Leading Thinkers in Urban Planning and Technology (2010) and has received lifetime achievement awards from the Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Energy and from the American Society of Landscape Architects among others.

Michael Herman

Michael calls his practice “Inviting Agility.” It is a story he has been working his way into for a long time. While still in school, his Dad’s experience working at the world headquarters of an iconic American corporation convinced him that organizations were not working very well for people. He wanted to be part of the solution.
Two years out of a top business school, he resigned his position as a financial analyst and project manager to spend the summer as an Outward Bound instructor in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. After that, he churned through a series of business names and projects with partners. When people at parties asked him “What do you do?” he usually said, somewhat sheepishly, “I make it up as I go.”
He still says that today, but now he knows that an abundance of research and practice has shown the wisdom of an adaptive, self-organizing, expeditionary approach. When pressed for details, he also now calls himself a process designer, facilitator, teacher, consultant and/or coach.

Two examples of Michael’s work and the outcomes it leads to:
The Chicago Community Trust and a number of co-sponsoring organizations brought stakeholders in the Illinois food security ecosystem together into one room for the first time. This 200-person, 3-day Illinois Food Security Summit addressed 70 different issues, identified a number of immediate next steps, and established the Chicago-Area Food Policy Council to shepherd future activities. Years later participants continue to be amazed that so many different kinds of people, who met there for the first time, continued to talk and work together on dozens of large and small, old and new projects. See Proceedings and FoodSummitStory.

Peoria School District 150 held a 3-evening, 200-person summit meeting, in the midst of post-911 budget cuts and other major change issues, to create a community-wide vision and set new priorities for revitalizing their school system. The meeting was well-covered by local broadcast and print media, the 100-page proceedings was publicly available via the District’s website, and the top priorities identified on the third evening became the working agenda for their new superintendent and school board. Link to the event’s Proceedings.

Karen Winkle-Gorsline 

Karen connects people in need to funding streams and real estate solutions. She founded Painted Love in 2011 to assist various segments of the population (veterans, disabled, seniors, among others) with social and environmental enhancements and modifications to their living situations. She draws on her wide range of experience in social services, nonprofit advocacy, and government to creatively navigate the bureaucracy and regulations of various disconnected programs to provide a seamless set of outcomes for those with whom she works. Painted Love projects have included or supported efforts such as 

•       Nursing Home Transition Waiver Program
•       Assistive Technology Provision
•       Veterans Agency Provider of Service for People with disabilities 
•       Social and Environmental Provider for the NHTD, facilitating subcontractors in making e-mods to client’s homes
•       among others

Painted Love’s services attract not only people with housing needs, but various service agencies, local governments and even developers.  Painted Love is a state certified Minority Women Business Enterprise (WMBE).

Karen has a range of experience in real estate and property management. She is a licensed real estate professional (Principal Broker, Individually Licensed Real Estate Broker, Senior Real Estate Specialist (SRES) and Property Manager). Currently she also serves as an Olmstead Housing Specialist where she transitions nursing home residents back into a community setting with supportive services back and eligible financial support.

Karen is also a small-scale developer with a keen interest in innovative linkages between homeowners, tenants with special needs, and a diversity of housing configurations that meet the needs of the range of contemporary households as part of an inclusive community.

Neil Heller

Neil is Principal of Neighborhood Workshop, a pro forma-based urban planning firm based in Portland, OR.

With a strong background in design, urban planning, housing policy, and real estate development, Neil brings value to communities through user-focused site design, equitable housing policy, pro-forma-based scenarios, and supporting projects through to adoption.

Neil is a faculty member of the national nonprofit Incremental development Alliance through which he trains small scale developers planning and business methods critical to small-scale development success.

As a small business and landlord himself, he is familiar with the regulatory, operations and maintenance for 2-4 unit buildings through the renovation of a duplex and the addition of a basement suite + ADU to a single family home using owner-occupied financing.

He is a longtime advocate in Portland for changing zoning and related regulation to unlock new opportunities for increasing housing supply in that city and was recently featured in the national online publication, Strong Towns, for his work to provide the financial justification toward the political action for increasing the number of units allowed in that city’s zoning code—the first such coordinated change in the US.

Neil’s background in development data and analytics gives him a big picture backdrop for project-specific implications that help to reduce small-developer risk, reduce costs and help remove barriers to project completion