Christy is an urban and regional planning professional. She has 15+ years of experience in housing and land use planning, policy advocacy, and community organizing. Her most recent role was Project Manager of The Association of Bay Area Governments’ (ABAG) Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AB 686) technical assistance program. She lead the development of trainings, resource guides, policy toolkits, and a wide variety of data and analysis metrics for evaluating segregation, displacement, and racial and ethnic concentrations of poverty in the Bay Area. Prior to that role, she served as a planning liaison and coordinator between jurisdiction planners, civic- and community-based stakeholders to advance equitable housing, land use and transportation growth strategies as envisioned in the Bay Area’s regional plan, Plan Bay Area 2050. Her love of Richmond began as the coordinator of the Richmond Equitable Development Initiative (REDI), which brought together a coalition of community-based groups that campaigned and achieved passage of the State’s first Health Element in a municipal General Plan.
She is a creative design- and systems-thinker who brings a strong background in stakeholder engagement; project and grant management; housing & land use policy; data collection and analysis; facilitation and holding space with marginalized groups, and building story narrative.
She enjoys road trips, the outdoors, a nice run along the Bay and her vipassana meditation practice. She holds a Master of City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cal Poly Pomona.