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Speaker Biographies

André Anderson is first vice president and chief operating officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, a position he assumed in July 2018. He oversees the day-to-day operations of the Atlanta Fed, including all operating and support activities at the corporate headquarters in Atlanta and at the branch offices in Birmingham, Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, and New Orleans. He is also vice chair of the Bank's Management Committee and a member of the Discount Committee that reviews district discount window lending, and is backup to the Atlanta Fed president in the execution of his monetary policy responsibilities. In addition to his responsibilities at the Atlanta Fed, Anderson is the retail payments product director for the Federal Reserve System. His responsibilities in this area include the management and direction of check collection and automated clearinghouse products and services that the Federal Reserve System provides. He is also a member of the Conference of First Vice Presidents and is involved in various projects and initiatives to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the Federal Reserve's System-wide operations.

Nikitra Bailey is an executive vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending, which is the policy affiliate of Self-Help, the nation's largest community development lender that has provided over $7 billion in financing for underserved borrowers and communities. The nonpartisan and nonprofit center seeks to end abusive financial services. Bailey's work advances state and federal reforms that result in access to credit on affordable terms. Bailey has written articles, reports, and testified before Congress on fair lending issues. She serves on the boards of the North Carolina Community Development Initiative and North Carolina Housing Coalition. She is a member of the Insight Center's Experts of Color Network, which includes scholars and policy analysts who share their knowledge on addressing the nation's racial wealth gap.  Bailey earned a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University.

Ann Carpenter is a senior community and economic development adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta who specializes in housing and neighborhood revitalization. Her recent work includes studies on land contracts, heirs' property, and strategies to increase the production of mixed-income housing. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed, Carpenter was a senior research associate at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, where she specialized in the areas of community resilience, emergency management planning, and sustainability. Her work has been published by the Brookings Institution and in several scholarly journals. She recently served as a reviewer for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Carpenter earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and master's and doctoral degrees in city and regional planning from Georgia Tech. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners and a member of the Urban Land Institute of Atlanta's Center for Leadership Class of 2017. She serves on the advisory board of ULI Atlanta.

Chrishette Carter is the chief FHA (Federal Housing Administration) underwriter of Regions Bank's Real Estate Capital Markets Division. She manages underwriting responsibilities within the division's Housing and Urban Development (HUD) multifamily and health care lending platform.  With more than 15 years of experience in the FHA/HUD debt-financing industry, Carter has been involved in the underwriting and closing of numerous HUD transactions, including mixed-income, affordable, Low Income Housing Tax Credit, and Rental Assistance Demonstration projects across the country. Prior to joining Regions Bank in 2016, Carter was a senior underwriter at Oppenheimer Multifamily Housing & Healthcare Finance and Capmark Finance (now Berkadia Commercial Mortgage). She earned a bachelor of science degree in business administration from Washington University in St. Louis and a master of real estate development degree from the University of Southern California. She is also a member of the Mortgage Bankers Association's FHA Lenders Roundtable and the Women's Affordable Housing Network.

Denise Cleveland-Leggett is the Southeast regional administrator at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Based in Atlanta, she oversees programs and operations in HUD's largest U.S. region, which includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The Southeast region has 12 field offices and 840 employees. Cleveland-Leggett has more than 30 years of legal experience in the public and private sectors.

Phil Eide is senior vice president at Hope Enterprise Corporation, a community development financial institution in Jackson, Mississippi. In his nearly 20 years there, he has helped create and manage a mortgage department for the company, coordinated efforts to rebuild coastal areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and worked on new market and housing tax credit developments. Eide previously was a Housing and Urban Development fellow before joining Hope. He previously served as executive director of Jackson Metro Housing Partnership, the largest nonprofit housing organization in the Jackson metropolitan area. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and a master's degree from Jackson State University. Eide served on the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas advisory board and the governor's Task Force for Affordable Housing after Katrina. He is a board member of the Gulf Coast Renaissance Corporation, Housing Mississippi, Working Together Jackson, and NeighborWorks Rural Advisory Committee. He is also chair of Fannie Mae's Affordable Housing Advisory Council and the Mississippi Association of Affordable Housing Providers.

Doug Faust, executive director of the Decatur Housing Authority (DHA) in metro Atlanta, has more than 35 years of experience in affordable housing development at the local, state, and federal levels. He has been a development consultant for inner-city revitalization for 11 years in Atlanta, Chicago, Toledo, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Charlotte, and many other communities. At the DHA, he is responsible for operations and real estate development efforts. DHA acts as its own real estate developer, property manager, and owner of affordable and workforce housing. The authority has 484 housing units and manages more than 1,200 housing choice vouchers. DHA currently has 34 rental homes under construction. Faust has been in the Atlanta area for 23 years.

Danny Gardner leads Freddie Mac's Single-Family Affordable Lending and Access to Credit business. He is primarily responsible for fulfilling Freddie Mac's mission to provide sustainable homeownership education and financing to families that are traditionally underserved. He also supervises Freddie Mac's delivery and performance against the Single-Family Affordable Lending goals, duty to serve regulation, and access to credit activities in the Federal Housing Finance Agency Scorecard.  He also leads engagement with state and local housing finance agencies, Realtor associations, and national and local community development organizations to establish partnerships and programs that create successful homeowners. Gardner has more than 24 years of mortgage banking experience and has spent most of his career focused on providing opportunities for families to buy their first homes. As leader of Community Reinvestment Act lending for the mortgage businesses of Citibank and Capital One and chief operating officer of the National Community Stabilization Trust, he helped municipalities and nonprofit organizations reclaim neighborhoods devastated by the foreclosure crisis.

Julia Gordon is the executive vice president of the National Community Stabilization Trust, a nonprofit organization that works to restore vacant and abandoned properties to productive use and protect neighborhoods from blight. Gordon manages the trust's flagship REOMatch/First Look program, which provides local community development organizations opportunities to acquire REO (or real-estate owned) properties from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other sellers. A national expert on housing finance, mortgage, and foreclosure issues, Gordon also drives the trust's policy work, which focuses on federal, state, and local policies on neighborhood stabilization, blight, and foreclosure prevention. Prior to taking her current job, Gordon was the senior director of housing and consumer finance at the Center for American Progress. She has also managed the single-family policy team at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, served as senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, and worked in civil legal aid. Gordon earned a bachelor's degree in government and a law degree from Harvard.

Jeffrey Hicks, a native of Atlanta, is a broker with Apollo Associates Realty, where he started his real estate career in 1995. His concentration has been in the area of acquisitions, feasibility analysis, financial performance, asset management, and sale of real property. Hicks's primary goal as president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) is to continue the rollout of its Black Wealth through Homeownership initiative, whose goal is to increase the number of black homeowners by 2 million in the next five years. A focus of NAREB's is to implement initiatives that identify economic solutions, rebuild communities, increase real estate values, and elevate the rate of black homeownership. Hicks is a graduate of Georgia State University, with a degree in marketing.

Cashauna Hill has served as executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) since 2015. Prior to leading GNO Fair Housing, Hill spent several years litigating cases as Fair Housing staff attorney at the Oregon Law Center in Portland and senior staff attorney at GNOFHAC. In addition to her litigation experience, Hill has advised policymakers and city agencies on fair housing policy and best practices. In 2016, she led GNOFHAC's partnership with the City of New Orleans and the Housing Authority of New Orleans to draft and submit the nation's very first Assessment of Fair Housing plan. She has also directed GNOFHAC's efforts to expand its programmatic services to communities across Louisiana. Hill is a New Leaders Council fellow and was supported by the Ford Foundation as a 2017 OpEd Project Public Voices fellow. She has written about housing segregation and civil rights for several publications. Hill is a graduate of Spelman College and Tulane Law School.

Dan Immergluck is a professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University. His research concerns housing, fair housing and fair lending, community reinvestment, housing finance, neighborhood change, real estate, and community and economic development. Immergluck has written four books, more than 50 scholarly articles, and scores of applied research and policy reports. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Justice, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Atlanta Legal Aid, and other organizations. Prior to his full-time work in academia, Immergluck spent more than 12 years in Chicago working in community and economic development, including nine years with the Woodstock Institute. He has been cited and quoted extensively in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, National Public Radio, and other media. He has testified several times before Congress and the Federal Reserve Board. He has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and as a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress in Washington, D.C.

Kate Little is special projects director for Georgia Strategic Alliance for New Directions and Unified Policies (STAND-UP), a group that serves as a think-and-act tank for working communities. Until December 2017, she was president and CEO of Georgia Advancing Communities Together, a statewide network of nonprofit housing and community development organizations. In recognition of her work there, the Georgia Commission on Equal Opportunity honored her with the 2018 Freedom Award. Little previously served as Atlanta director of the Enterprise Foundation, where she worked with community development corporations in neglected neighborhoods. Before joining Enterprise, she worked for a Wisconsin-based tax credit equity investment firm, Heartland Properties and the Georgia Housing Finance Authority. Little began her career as a district manager for the Atlanta Housing Authority, implementing a lease-purchase homebuyer initiative and the Section 8 rental assistance program. She previously chaired the BeltLine Affordable Housing Advisory Board and is currently a member of housing advocacy coalition City for All, the University of Georgia's housing and demographics research advisory board, and the board of the Atlanta Land Trust. She earned a master's degree in urban studies from Trinity University in San Antonio and a bachelor's degree from North Carolina Central University. In June 2016, she participated in Georgia State University's Study Space program in Cape Town, South Africa.

Sarah Mancini splits her time between the National Consumer Law Center and the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. She is counsel for the National Consumer Law Center, where she focuses on foreclosures and mortgage lending. At Atlanta Legal Aid, she practices in the home defense program. She has represented homeowners in bankruptcy cases and litigated in state, federal, district, and bankruptcy courts. She was a clerk for Judge Amy Totenberg of the U.S. District Court for the northern district of Georgia. Mancini graduated from Princeton University with a degree in public policy and a certificate in African-American Studies and attended Harvard Law School.

Danielle McCoy is Fannie Mae's vice president and fair lending officer. She assesses and monitors fair lending risk on an enterprise-wide level, facilitates the company's compliance with fair lending laws and regulations, and promotes responsible lending throughout various aspects of Fannie Mae's business practices, including its underwriting standards and pricing policies. Before assuming her current position in October 2015, McCoy was Fannie Mae's managing director, deputy general counsel, and assistant corporate secretary. In that role, she provided legal advice to senior management and the board of directors on corporate governance.  Additionally, she coordinated annual shareholder meetings and supported shareholder outreach on governance matters prior to Fannie Mae's conservatorship. She joined Fannie Mae in 2006 as associate general counsel for corporate governance. Previously, McCoy was an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Virginia and a law degree from New York University.

Patrick Pontius is a senior adviser on the community and economic development team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He served for six years in the Obama Administration in several roles. As executive director of the White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2), he led an interagency team that piloted an innovative model of federal-local collaboration dedicated to helping communities get back on their feet by better leveraging government resources and forming private-public partnerships. Additionally, he was a senior policy adviser to two secretaries at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and served as a special assistant to the assistant secretary for policy development and research, focusing on issues related to fair housing, inclusive economic growth, and regional planning. Prior to joining HUD, Pontius worked at the Urban Land Institute as a research director in Los Angeles and as a director of the education and advisory group in Washington. He started his career as a third-grade Teach For America teacher in Compton, California, and then worked for the organization as director of Mid-Atlantic Recruitment in Washington. He earned dual master's degrees in planning and real estate development at the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia.

Lisa Rice is president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, which works to eliminate discrimination in housing and expand equal lending opportunities for millions of Americans. She played a major role in crafting sections of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and in establishing the Office of Fair Lending within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Rice was previously CEO of the Toledo Fair Housing Center, where she established the Northwest Ohio Development Agency, a community development financial institution, and the State of Ohio's first antipredatory lending remediation program, called Restoring the Dream.

Gisele G. Roget is the deputy assistant secretary for single-family housing at the Federal Housing Administration. She oversees an insurance-in-force portfolio of approximately 7.7 million FHA-insured single-family loans and roughly 850 staff nationwide who administer programs and policies. Her responsibilities include managing all aspects of the FHA's single-family housing operation, including program management, quality control, and institutional risk management. Roget joined FHA in 2017 from MetLife, where she was an assistant vice president. Prior to that, she spent several years as a congressional staffer for the House Financial Services Committee. Roget earned a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University.

Richard Rothstein is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California–Berkeley. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. The 2017 book expands upon and provides a national perspective on his work documenting the history of state-sponsored residential segregation. He also wrote Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (published in 2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (from 2004). His other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (cowritten in 2005) and All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (cowritten in 2003).