Marian Liou
Marian Liou is the Director of Arts and Culture at Smart Growth America. As the founder and executive director of We Love BuHi, Marian established efforts to preserve and strengthen the multicultural Buford Highway community in metro Atlanta through storytelling, creative place-keeping, and design. Prior to Smart Growth America, Marian led the arts and culture and creative placemaking program at the Atlanta Regional Commission, metro Atlanta’s regional planning agency and MPO. At ARC, she guided the transformation of the agency’s community engagement practices and initiated an arts and culture-led, cross-sector approach to planning by centering artists and community-based arts and culture organizations as co-designers of social change.
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. Manuel has worked around the country on issues of gentrification and displacement, disaster recovery, and housing policy. With 30 years of experience, Manuel brings a unique mix of experience in both the non-profit and government sectors. Manuel served as a senior official at the US HUD for seven years. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.
Jenn Tran
Jenn Tran is an architecture & planning professional and community organizer with Viet Place Collective. Jenn works in the Vietnamese diaspora community of Falls Church, VA to advocate for immigrant businesses and combat gentrification and cultural erasure. She is committed to addressing inequity in the built environment and re-envisioning how land development distributes wealth in communities. She believes in building agency within post-war communities and celebrating the resilience of a people who have thrived against direct and systemic violence. Viet Place Collective is supporting the immigrant businesses of the Eden Center in Falls Church through impending development. We hope to minimize commercial displacement and maintain the strong cultural and communal nature of Eden Center.
[alert type=”info”] The Equity Summit gathers housing, transportation, and community development advocates and leaders to learn from one another and identify tools to advance racial equity through smart growth. The dynamic two-day program will be held in person for the first time on March 27-28, 2024, in Washington, DC, at the iconic Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.
The Equity Summit will uplift strategies to advance racial equity in smart growth amidst growing political uncertainty in 2024 and beyond, as well as a shift away from explicit equity initiatives by elected officials, state agencies, and the private sector.
[button type=”primary” size=”lg” link=”https://smartgrowthamerica.org/equity-summit”] Learn more about the Equity Summit[/button]
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