HIGHLAND PARK COMMUNITY LAND TRUST
Board of Directors
The leadership of the HPCLT represents our diverse community
Current
Members
of the
Board
Former
Members
of the
Board
Paige Brooks-Cook
Verdaya Mitchell Brown
Dr. Angela Paige and Brother Joe Cook
Ernest (Randy) Coston
Jon Ellertson
Jessica Leete
Maggie Levine
Mark Martinez
Evan Pankey
Mandy Townsend
Scotland Willis
Andrea Caceres
Emily Jones
Mimi Jones
Board member emerita – In memoriam
Lisa Lee
Judy Powers
Paige is an educator with a BA from Wheelock. She enjoys gardening. As a renter, she is particularly interested in learning how the HPCLT can promote affordable housing.
Verdaya is a retired educator and long-time Highland Park resident. She supports the twin missions of the HPCLT: community open space and affordable housing.
Their advocacy for education goes back decades, first as teachers at the Highland Park Community School and later as founders of nationally acclaimed Paige Academy which is now celebrating its 52th anniversary.
She is a Commissioner on the Highland Park ACD. Both are graduates of Fisk University. She holds an MA from Wheelock College and PhD from u/Mass Boston. He has an MS in Physics from Vanderbilt and an MA
of theology from the Episcopal Divinity School.
A Highland Park resident since 1972, Ernest owned a landscaping business and was a co-founder of the Highland Park Neighborhood Association. In 1980 he incorporated the Margaret Wright Memorial Public Land Trust, a community garden on Fort Avenue; he serves as a Commissioner on the Highland Park ACD.
Jon and his wife Wendy moved to Highland Park in 1967 and became active in community planning for the Model Cities program. He currently serves as Clerk of the Roxbury Historical Society and Clerk of this Community Land Trust. He has been a leader in community gardening, as the founder of Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG), and as the director of the SW Corridor Community Farm. He received a US Dept of Energy Appropriate Technology Small Grant for a DIY energy conservation and low-cost solar demonstration project. Jon has a BA in Economics (Honors) from Stanford and an ABD in Political Science from MIT
Jessica is an international landscape architect focused on bringing environment and social sustainability to community. She runs her own consulting firm, Boston dot dash Studio, and teaches at the Boston
Architectural College. She served on the planning committee to form the HPCLT and was one of the three incorporators in 2017. She and husband Harry Lowd moved here in 2009 and have 2 daughters.
Maggie is a children's librarian at the main branch of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. She and her husband and son live in a condo developed as affordable through the partnership of the Mayor's Office of Housing and the Highland Park PRC.
Mark is the Housing Attorney for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Prior to joining MLRI in 2022, he served three years as Legal Counsel and Budget Director to State Senator Patricia D. Jehlen. He has lived in Highland Park for over 6 years as a renter and served on the Steering Committee for the Highland Park Neighborhood Coalition
With his medical school training and technology skills, Evan works in a start-up as a "Lean Startup Intrapreneur", product manager and healthcare informatics specialist with over 10-year experience. Active in this neighborhood since 2017, he was elected to the HPCLT Board in 2018. He and his wife Lucy Lomas have 2 children and have lived in Highland Park since 2017.
Mandy holds a BS in Psychology plus a BA in Anthropology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an M.Ed. in International Education Development Program from Boston University. She is the Senior Vice President of Employer Engagement at Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) in Boston where she works with employers across sectors to identify, design, implement, and provide critical workforce development services and improve job quality. An avid gardener, she and her husband Casey have lived in Highland Park since 2019. They have a son.
Scotland has lived in Highland Park for most of his life. He has been active with the Highland Park Neighborhood Coalition. Recently, he developed some new condos on Hawthorne Street, adjacent to the historic home owned by his mother, Erline Willis.
Andrea is a community organizer. Through the HPCLT, she worked to give our neighborhood to have a collective voice. She brought her organizing skills to help increase neighborhood participation and engagement, information-sharing, and education, and to empower our residents in planning and implementation.
Emily is Senior Program Officer, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) for Boston's Green Retrofit Initiative, where she supports affordable housing partners in advancing high-performance, resilient and healthy homes. For the past decade she has worked to build systems that mobilize communities and transform spaces.
Following her move to Highland Park in 1976, Mimi was active in a host of community-serving non-profits, including Friends of Dudley Library, the Unitarian-Universalist Urban Ministry and Roxbury Historical Society. She was well known for her decades of civil rights work. Mimi passed away July 26, 2020.
A resident of the Highland Park neighborhood since 2006, Lisa is an Author, Interrelated Media Artist, and Art-trepreneur of Artisan Lisa Lee of Boston. She has particular interest in creative economics for women and girls, and empowering those within her reach.
With legislative experience serving in the Maine House of Representatives as well as other civic involvement in Philadelphia, Judy brought to the HPCLT Board a great skill set, honed by experience as well as participation at the Kennedy School of Government.
Rodney Singleton
Rodney, a lifelong Roxbury resident, is a Senior Test Development Engineer with Teradyne, Inc. and had worked with medical systems and high-speed digital systems. He serves as Co-Chair of the HPCLT, Co-Chair of the Highland Park Project Review Committee, and is a member of the Highland Park Neighborhood Coalition Steering Committee.