Robin Snyderman has been providing leadership in the housing and community development arena for more than 30 years. A Founder and Principal with the “collaborative management” and consulting firm, BRicK Partners, Robin is also a former Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institution.
Currently, Robin is honored to serve as a board member of the Illinois Housing Council, Heartland Housing, The South Suburban Land Bank and Development Authority, and Housing Opportunities for Women (HOW). She has also been serving on the Governor’s Housing Task Force since its inception in 2003, after staffing the 2002 Gubernatorial Housing Transition Team Committee. She further co-chaired the Task Force’s Linkage Working Group, to identify the State’s optimal role promoting subregional and interagency coordination.
With BRicK Partners, Robin and her colleagues have supported a number of catalytic initiatives, beginning with the roll-out of Brookings’ Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, and the Illinois Attorney General’s funding for revitalization, housing counseling and technical assistance through the National Foreclosure Settlement awards to a variety of place-based teams and agencies. Another formative assignment for Robin was the transition of the Regional Housing Initiative from a successful pilot with nine public housing authorities and the Metropolitan Planning Council to a precious tool that the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning is deploying with these same partners to support priority regional development opportunities. BRicK has enjoyed helping numerous other clients and colleagues with similar work.
Through BRicK, Robin has further supported local and national leaders to align public and private sector priorities and resources through employer engagement in places as diverse as Buffalo, Milwaukee and Silicon Valley, as well as strategic planning implementation efforts with Cook County, Oak Park Housing Authority, the City of Aurora, the North West Suburban Housing Collaborative and other entities. Her technical assistance assignments have also allowed her to support regional housing innovation in Kansas City, the Twin Cities and Rockford, IL.
A native of the Chicago area, prior to founding BRicK, Robin served as Vice President of Community Development for the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) from 2006 through 2012, after initially joining as housing director in 1998. While at MPC, Robin managed the launch and growth of several nationally recognized efforts, promoting regional collaborations and securing resources for trailblazing initiatives in the areas of interjurisdictional municipal coordination, employer-assisted housing, public housing reform and local, state and federal policy innovation.
Prior to her work at MPC, Robin worked for 10 years with San Francisco’s Mission Housing Development Corporation, where she shaped its supportive housing strategy, transforming four troubled Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Hotels into vibrant housing communities with effective service strategies and active tenant leadership among the 240+ formerly homeless residents. During that period when she led both the SRO development and operations teams, in addition to receiving recognition for this work from the Fannie Mae Maxwell Award of Excellence, the New School of Social Research and others, Robin also wrote a monthly newspaper column for the neighborhood paper, served on the Board for Bernal Heights Housing Corporation and provided leadership to a variety of catalytic task forces on supportive housing, code enforcement and neighborhood empowerment.
Robin is a Fellow of Leadership Greater Chicago, a graduate of Colorado College and Harvard University’s Executive Education Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government, which is part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and completed terms of service for the City of Evanston’s Housing Commission, for the affordable housing committee of the Federal Home Loan Bank, and as faculty at Northwestern University’s Master of Arts in Public Policy and Administration Program.
Robin and her family reside in Evanston, IL and spend as much of their summers as possible in the wilderness (but not without WiFi) of Manitoulin Island.