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Q: At this stage of Olamina's development, what are you most excited to work on?
I'm most excited to partner with the Community Advisory Board to align our capital deployment with the field's needs — advancing community sovereignty, economic resilience, wealth-building opportunities, and long-term sustainability for local communities. Being accountable to practitioners with lived experience who bring deep commitment and care for the communities where we invest is both inspiring and empowering.
Q: As federal funding retreats, how can community-centered organizations and development groups continue advancing meaningful work?
Recent federal changes reveal how dependent communities are on public programs — and the devastating impact when that support disappears. Place-based funds like Olamina are critical to building community-led, sustainable infrastructure that can withstand this volatility. We invest in long-term solutions built by community, for community.
Q: What are you most looking forward to bringing into Olamina—be that strategy, experience, or a new perspective?
My career gave me experience in both community organizing and private equity asset management. I've learned how to work with communities and enterprises to capitalize, support, and develop long-term partnerships that achieve meaningful outcomes. I'm looking forward to applying this direct experience and perspective as we continue building Olamina's investment strategy.
Q: What has shifted in the years since Olamina's creation that might reframe and inform future work?
The affordability crisis has intensified dramatically. Property costs have exceeded what communities can afford, displacing long-term residents and local enterprises while fracturing social fabric. Olamina is uniquely positioned to address this through patient, flexible capital that supports community-controlled affordable housing, cooperative ownership models, and community land trusts. Our financing approach prioritizes long-term affordability and community wealth-building over short-term returns — ensuring that as localities stabilize and appreciate, the benefits accrue to the community rather than flowing elsewhere.
Bonus: Tell us about a hobby you really love, or a memory or person that inspires you!
I'm constantly reminded of Audre Lorde's insight: "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." She was critiquing how systems reproduce the same exclusionary structures they claim to challenge, even in reform efforts.
Applied to impact investing, this means recognizing that finance was built to extract and concentrate wealth. Its fundamental logic — returns, risk, scalability — encodes assumptions about what and who matters. When we redirect capital toward justice using only that logic, we risk funding only "investable" solutions that don't threaten underlying power arrangements.
But Lorde's framework invites nuance. She worked within academia her whole life — she wasn't advocating abandonment of institutions. The question is: are you only using the master's tools, or building new ones? Are you changing what counts as a valid return? Who defines risk? How can we partner to mitigate risk? Are communities shaping investment theses, or just receiving capital decided elsewhere?
The most compelling impact investors treat this tension as generative. They deploy capital and shift governance to communities. They work within markets and name what markets can't solve. This is the insight that inspires my work.
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