Dena Belzer, Board Chair

Dena Belzer is the founder and President of Strategic Economics, an urban economics firm located in Berkeley, CA. She has 30 years’ experience working on economic issues ranging in scale from regional growth management to individual development projects, and regularly speaks and writes on the topic of transit-oriented development (TOD). Dena’s recent work has focused on plan implementation, including identifying ways to clear market barriers to private development and addressing the need for new infrastructure investment. In addition to her consulting work, Ms. Belzer has numerous publications and has served as a national expert on many topics for the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, US EPA, The Mayors Institutes for City Design, and The Urban Land Institute.

Lynette Lee

Lynette Jung Lee spent 33 years with the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC), the last 27 as executive director. She grew EBALDC from a staff of two to ninety, and helped guide its affordable housing development to achieve over 1400 completed affordable apartments, over 200 homes and condos for first time home buyers, and 300,000 sf of retail, office, and community facilities. After retirement, Lynette helped establish Diversity in Health Training Institute, a nonprofit focusing on helping immigrants and refugees with medical backgrounds to re-enter the medical field. Lynette currently serves on the boards of Gum Moon/Asian Women’s Resource Center, and The Center for Leadership Innovation. She is a commissioner with the Oakland Housing Authority, a Steering Committee member of Renewed Hope Housing Associates in Alameda, treasurer of the California Nevada Conference of United Methodist Women and co-chair of the Buena Vista United Methodist Women.

Irma Poe

Irma Poe retired from full-time employment in 2013, after eleven years with the Corporation for Supportive Housing* (CSH); the last six as Senior Program Manager. Over a 30+ years career in the supportive housing industry, Irma held several increasingly demanding positions: Director of Tenant Services, Occupancy Specialist and Certified Housing Manager for HomeRise, San Francisco (1990-1996); Resident Services Director for Resources for Community Development (RCD) Berkeley, 1997-2001; CSH, where she was initially hired as Program Officer for Program Monitoring and Quality Assurance. Irma was deployed from CSH’s Northern CA region to provide technical assistance, training, grants monitoring and advocacy in 56 CA counties and more than 20 states.

Since 2013, Irma continues to be employed as a Supportive Housing Consultant, contracted by CSH, the SF Mayors Office of Housing, Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp (TNDC) and other SF bay-area affordable/supportive housing entities, to provide training and technical assistance to supportive housing stakeholders; she is currently under contract with Chinatown CDC (CCDC), SF. Since 1992, Irma has served on the board of directors of several non-profit corporations committed to providing quality affordable housing, economic development opportunity, and other assistance to special needs households, e.g. TNDC, Community Housing Development Corp., North Richmond (CHDCNR), East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO); she is currently serving a third board term with CCDC.

Mike Rawson

Michael Rawson is the director of the Public Interest Law Project in Oakland, a nonprofit state support center for California legal services and public interest law programs. He also directs PILP’s California Affordable Housing Law Project. Michael focuses on affordable housing, land use, fair housing and anti-displacement. He advocates before local, state and federal bodies on housing law reform, and he has drafted local and state affordable housing legislation and authored many publications and training materials on affordable housing law and policy. Michael also has litigated many housing related cases with legal services programs, including suits addressing the adequacy of local housing elements, displacement of lower income households, community acceptance of affordable housing, the constitutionality of inclusionary zoning and discrimination against persons protected by the fair housing laws.

Gisela Salgado

Ms. Salgado graduated from CCRH’s Rural West Internship Program for Diversity in Nonprofit Housing and Community Development in 2003 and has a bachelor in business administration from the University of San Diego. She oversees CCRH’s Rural West Internship Program. To date she has graduated over 100 students from the program, built partnerships with NeighborWorks America, Rural LISC, the Washington State Farmworker Housing Trust and the California State VISTA Americorps Program. She has successfully overseen program expansion to Washington State and Oregon as well as supported Arizona implement an internship program based on the CCRH model. In the past, she has also led CCRH’s VISTA AmeriCorps Program and seeks to reinstate it in the near future. Before joining CCRH in 2005, she worked as a project developer for three years with Community Housing Works in San Diego County. There she successfully packaged and developed three properties with 168 units total. She is fluent in Spanish and, coming from an immigrant and underserved community background, has a strong cultural and social affinity for ensuring better opportunities and quality of life for under-represented communities.

Roy Schweyer

Roy L. Schweyer is the Executive Director of the Bay Area HomeBuyer Agency, a Joint Powers Authority dedicated to the expansion of homeownership opportunity in the Bay Area. He was previously Director of Housing and Community Development Department of the City of Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency (CEDA) where he was responsible for all of the City’s efforts to provide affordable housing opportunities. His over 30 years with the City included a variety of positions where he was responsible for affordable housing, community development and real estate programs.

Steven Shum

Steven Shum has dedicated more than 25 years as a housing and community development professional, working with nonprofit, for-profit, public sector, and foundation partners to create and operate high-quality affordable and supportive housing. From 2006 to 2019, Steven served as Senior Program Manager and then Associate Director for the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), a national nonprofit intermediary organization committed to advancing a model of housing and services to improve the lives of the most vulnerable. He oversaw CSH’s Northern California office, providing consulting, training, systems change and lending support to community-based organizations and public agencies to develop and operate more than 4,000 units of supportive housing for individuals and families with histories of homelessness, long-term physical and behavioral health issues, social services and justice involvement. Prior to CSH, Steven served as Senior Associate with ICF International’s Housing and Community Development Practice, Planning and Development Associate with LifeLong Medical Care, and Founding Director of the LGBT Resource Center at UC Riverside. Steven has a Master’s of City Planning from UC Berkeley, and a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA.