what is a agri-community

Shellie Meier following in the Legacy of her father Local, national and international Black Farmer. Robert Pierce. Shellie helped developed Badger Rock Middle School. Wisconsin's first Charter school centered around Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental studies, and more. Shellie has over 25 years of experience as a Agriculture Developer., 

Shellie is also the former Administrator for Essence Magazine and personal assistant of Mikki Taylor former Beauty Director and cover editor of Essence Magazine.

Shellie is a trail blazer and pioneer when it comes to agriculture, community engagement and bridging the gap between food justice, real estate development and partnerships. As the Agriculture and Urban Ag Developer with BT Farms. Shellie plans to help develop what it means to be a Black Idenginous farmer. While restoring and telling the history of Urban Agriculture, Community and More.!

Steve Glass is Emeritus Land Care Manager of the UW-Madison Arboretum where he practiced restoration ecology for more than 25 years.
Currently he is the principal at The Restoration Ecology Lab, a consulting collaborative in Madison, WI.


The Restoration Ecology Lab works at the intersection of science, art, ecosystem management, and civic engagement and is based upon helping build partnerships between science, ecosystem management, and engaged civic communities to help design and restore the ecosystems of the future.


Steve studies the history of restoration ecology, is interested in the factors that contribute to, or hinder, the success of long-term restoration ecology projects, and uses photography to document the restoration process and to spotlight the people and places of restoration ecology projects.

 Carrie Sanders has spent 15 years focused on community development finance. Prior to forming Hope Community Capital LLC, Carrie has been the Director of Lending and the Director of Structured Community Finance for  a statewide Community Development Financial Institution where she managed the organization’s community development consulting practice, providing consulting to mission-based organizations to access the capital for high impact projects. She also managed the development of the organization’s successful New Markets Tax Credit program. Carrie has also worked as a senior consultant for a national accounting firm. In this role, Carrie assisted nonprofit organizations, and community development entities with raising and deploying a variety of economic development and affordable housing financing tools including New Markets Tax Credits (“NMTC”), Low-income Housing Tax Credits, tax incremental financing, and HUD grants and loans.  Carrie worked at the City of Kansas City, Missouri as part of the City’s development finance division where she was an integral part of a team responsible for conducting front end financial analysis of economic development projects seeking public subsidy including TIF and brownfield remediation financing. While at the City of Kansas City, Carrie developed the City’s NMTC program and led the City’s efforts to apply for and win its first allocation of $40 million. Carrie’s career also includes experience in strategic planning for nonprofit community development organizations, public housing program evaluation, affordable housing finance with a particular focus on re-entry housing, and economic impact analysis. Carrie is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she earned her graduate degree in City Planning with a focus on community and economic development finance. Carrie is on faculty at Edgewood College’s Social Innovation & Sustainability Leadership Graduate Program and the School of Business where she lectures on topics of sustainable community development and social innovation. 

 Luke Samalya is President of Danna Capital. He has a Master of Science from Marquette University, where he began his development career by evaluating the housing needs of vulnerable members of the community. During his time as a Mental Health Therapist, Luke realized that his patients were united by a common problem: a lack of safe and affordable housing. Inspired by the housing first movement, which prioritizes providing safe housing to address the root cause of mental health challenges, Luke made the decision to transition his career to affordable housing development.

Luke graduated top of his class from the Associate in Commercial Real Estate (ACRE) program, an industry supported initiative to expand minority representation in commercial real estate, and began working for both nonprofit and for-profit housing developers in Wisconsin where his work focused on affordable, market rate, master plan, and commercial development. In 2020, Luke founded Danna Capital with a mission of providing resident and community-centric housing solutions. In the first three years of operations, Danna Capital has been awarded Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) from the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA) and the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) for the development of seven affordable housing communities, bringing more than 400 new housing units to market.

As a minority business owner, Luke is a passionate advocate for the importance of diversity and representation in the provision of housing solutions. For his work in this space, Luke received the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago’s 2021 Community First Award for Emerging Leadership. This award recognized the significant impact he has made in the world of affordable housing and for his leadership and advocacy in expanding minority and disability representation.
 

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Mrill Ingram combines research and practice in a career dedicated to understanding peoples' relationships with their environments. She is Participatory Action Research Scientist with Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, working on citizen science and integrated agricultural systems. She is author of a 2022 book with Temple University Press, “Loving Orphaned Space, the art and science of belonging to Earth.” It’s a geographer’s take on the enormous amount of overlooked and abused space around us created by our infrastructure, and a call to create new ways to occupy and participate in those spaces

to center equity and ecology and negotiate being better citizens of Earth. Mrill also has a 2013 co-authored book from MIT Press on the use of narrative analysis to understand grassroots environmental action.