The B’more Invested Grant Advisory Team consists of  Community Stakeholders and Funders who are eager to test, learn from, and scale promising innovations that tackle the most pressing issues of our city while also addressing the most urgent challenges and limitations of our local systems.

Kirsten Allen, Community Advisor
kallen@brazenconsultants.com 

Kirsten Allen is a business and strategy consultant with a focus on philanthropy and community. She has over ten years of hands-on experience spanning multiple industries, including real estate, mental health, and both the nonprofit and private sectors.

Huey Blake, Community Advisor
Yunghu3yp@gmail.com 

Huey Blake, (AKA King Brother Huey) is the voice of the people!  He is supremely interested in creating a way for communities to take matters into their own hands. He wants his communities to understand that it makes no sense to go to the same system for assistance that oppressed them in the first place. 

John Brothers, Funder Advisor
john.brothers@troweprice.com 

John Brothers currently serves as the President of both the T. Rowe Price Foundation and T. Rowe Price Charitable. 

Jacqueline Caldwell, Community Advisor
jcaldwell@aecf.org 

Jacqueline Caldwell is a community advocate and connector-of-the-dots for the organizations and communities she represents. 

Kate Essex, Funder Advisor
kate@goldsekerfoundation.org 

Kate Essex serves as the Program Officer for the Goldseker Foundation in Baltimore. 

Blair Franklin, Community Advisor
m.blair.franklin@gmail.com 

Born and bred in Southwest Baltimore, Blair Franklin is the Program Manager of Capacity Building and Fiscal Sponsorship at The Praxis Project, a national movement support intermediary that works to achieve health equity and justice for all communities. 

Shamoyia Gardiner, Community Advisor
shamoyiag@gmail.com 

Shamoyia Gardiner serves as Executive Director at Strong Schools Maryland, an organization striving to create world-class public schools capable of serving every single student in Maryland equitably. 

Dorcas Gilmore, Community Advisor
dorcas@gilmorekhandhar.com 

Dorcas R. Gilmore has spent the past 20 years as a racial and economic justice advocate in roles of a consultant and attorney working with nonprofit organizations, community enterprises, and social ventures. She is a principal of Gilmore Khandhar, LLC, a solidarity economies law firm. 

Darius Graham, Funder Advisor
dgraham@hjweinberg.org 

Darius Graham serves as Program Director, Baltimore at The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation where he leads the Foundation’s grant-making strategy in Baltimore and manages several of the Foundation’s signature initiatives and partnerships. 

Amy Gross, Funder Advisor
agross@france-merrickfdn.org 

Amy Gross has 15 years of experience as a grantmaker with both the France-Merrick Foundation and the Weinberg Foundation in Baltimore. Currently she is the Executive Director of the France-Merrick Foundation and in that role advises the board on strategy in a variety of areas and oversees the grant making process. 

Cynthia Gross, Community Advisor
Gross1901@gmail.com 

Cynthia Gross is a life-long Baltimore City resident who has been involved in community-lead initiatives for several years. She currently serves as the President of the C.A.R.E. Community Association, where she works and interacts with various Baltimore City agencies and other stakeholders to move resident-lead initiatives forward. 

Lara Hall, Funder Advisor
lhall@blaufund.org 

Lara Hall is a senior program officer with the Blaustein Philanthropic Group, staffing the Rosenberg, Hirschhorn and Roswell foundations as well as the Health and Mental Health and Education and Arts programs of the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation.

Brooke Hisle, Funder Advisor
bhisle@associated.org 

Brooke Hisle, LMSW, is the Executive Director of The Fund for Change and The Zanvyl and Isabelle Krieger Fund. Both foundations are committed to Baltimore City and focus funding on prevention, advocacy, community organizing, and systems change work. 

Talib Horne, Funder Advisor
thorne@aecf.org 

As director of the Baltimore Civic Site, Talib Horne leads the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s efforts to improve the health and well-being of young people and families throughout the city. 

Danista Hunte, Community Advisor
dhunte@childfirstauthority.org 

Danista Hunte is the Executive Director of Child First Authority, a non-profit that provides high quality community schools, after school and summer programming and parent leadership opportunities in Baltimore City. 

Laurie Kinkel, Funder Advisor
llatudakinkel@bcf.org 

Laurie Latuda Kinkel is the VP of Strategy at the Baltimore Community Foundation, where she oversees discretionary grantmaking and communications. 

Sara Lerner, Funder Advisor
saraelerner@gmail.com 

Sara Lerner is a Prevention and Wellness Educator at Educational Alliance’s Center for Recovery and Wellness. 

David Miller, Community Advisor
dmiller3941@gmail.com 

David Miller, a Baltimore native, is a writer who has received international acclaim for Dare to Be King: What If the Prince Lives? A Survival Workbook for African American Males, a thought-provoking, 52-week curriculum teaching adolescent males how to survive and thrive in toxic environments. 

Shawna Murray-Browne, Community Advisor
shawna@shawnamurraybrowne.com 

Shawna Murray-Browne, LCSW-C is an award-winning community healer, national speaker, and Liberation-Focused, Mind-Body Medicine Practitioner. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Kindred Community Healing and the Principal Consultant at Kindred Wellness LLC. 

Changa Onyango, Community Advisor
changabiz@gmail.com 

Ako Changa Onyango is a professional facilitator and state trained mediator. His work covers a variety of subjects including diversity, equity and inclusion in the context of organizational change, historic context of inequity, and the business case for change. 

DeJuan Patterson, Community Advisor
dejuanpatterson@gmail.com 

DeJuan Patterson is an advocate and social impact consultant with the Bridge Advisory Group. As a Baltimore native, he has developed a passion for the prevention of gun violence, addressing societal inequities and community empowerment. 

Geri Peak, Community Advisor
geri@twogemsconsulting.com 

Dr. Geri Lynn Peak has practiced evaluation 34 years and facilitation for 46 years. She founded Two Gems Consulting Services in 1997 to strengthen programs and support social innovation. 

Destini Philpot, Community Advisor

Destiniphilpot17@gmail.com 
Destini Philpot is a 20-year-old, non-binary person from Baltimore, Maryland. Destini is a published writer and spoken word poet. Their work has focused on the intersections of gun violence prevention and black and brown equity. 

Catherine Pitchford, Community Advisor
cpitchford@ccmpconsulting.com 

A lifelong resident of Baltimore City, Catherine Pitchford is Chief Program Officer at Baltimore’s Promise 

Lamontre Randall, Community Advisor
Lamontre_randall@yahoo.com

Lamontre Randall is a well-accomplished social construct visionary from Baltimore, Maryland. His upbringing in East Baltimore has shaped him into an innovative activist and entrepreneur with a niche for bettering low income communities. 

Catalina Rodriguez-Lima, Funder Advisor
Catalina.rodriguez-lima@baltimorecity.gov 

Catalina Rodriguez-Lima is the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MIMA) in Baltimore City, responsible for promoting community well-being, economic development, and the inclusion of immigrant and refugee communities in the City of Baltimore. 

Nikkia Rowe, Community Advisor
nikkiatrowe@gmail.com

Nikkia Tenee Rowe, raised in the community of Cherry Hill, is a veteran educator, writer and community leader. 

Ali Smith, Community Advisor
ali@hlfinc.org

Ali Smith, a natitve of Baltimore, is a writer and teacher. He cofounded the Holistic Life Foundation in 2001. During his tenure as Executive Director, his leadership helped guide HLF to grow an organization that employed 50 people and had an operating budget of over $2 million. 

Krystle Starvis, Community Advisor
kstarvis@gmail.com

Krystle Starvis serves as Associate Director for Weave: The Social Fabric Project and the Leadership Division at The Aspen Institute. In addition to leading program development and operations for Weave, Krystle is responsible for developing, leading and supporting projects and initiatives that utilize an equity lens to strengthen the people, operations, programming and impact of the Leadership Division. 

Alicia Wilson, Funder Advisor
aliciawilson@jhu.edu 

Alicia Wilson is the vice president for economic development at the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Health System. She leads a core team driving Johns Hopkins’ strategy and initiatives as an anchor institution in and around Baltimore, and elevating and expanding the institutions commitment to the city through investments in economic and neighborhood development, health care, and education.

Jewel Wilson, Community Advisor
qnspirit1@yahoo.com 

Jewel Wilson worked for the State of Maryland in various capacities, in areas of contracts, compliance and services to local agencies throughout Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore City for more than 23 years. 

Corey Witherspoon, Community Advisor
Witherspoon.corey@yahoo.com 

For the past 18 years, Corey Witherspoon has been mentoring at-risk youth in Baltimore Maryland, while working as a Residential Advocate at Thomas Offarell Youth Center, and as a Behavioral Specialist at Youth In Transition School. For the past 5 years, he has worked at Renaissance Academy as a Seeds of Promise Mentor. 

Crickett Woloson, Funder Advisor
crickettjo@gmail.com 

As Director of the Elbow Fund, Crickett Woloson strives to create positive social change in Baltimore by partnering with proven and passionate community leaders. This work includes identifying leaders through primary research and diligence, listening to and mentoring their partners, and creating strategies to remove barriers. 

Jamye Wooten, Community Advisor
jayme@kineticscom.com 

Jamye Wooten is a Digital Communications & Social Impact Strategist and Human Rights Organizer. In January 2019 Wooten launched CLLCTIVLY, to create an ecosystem to foster collaboration, increase social impact and amplify the voices of Black-led organizations in Greater Baltimore.