A Founder and Principal with the consulting and collaborative management firm, BRicK Partners, Robin is also a former Brookings Institution Non Resident Senior Fellow.
Currently, Robin is honored to serve as a board member of the Illinois Housing Council, Heartland Alliance, 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. She has enjoyed playing an active leadership role with most of BRicK’s innovative clients, most recently including a variety of work related to increasing and sustaining capacity through the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the South Suburban Mayors and Managers, the City of Kansas City, the Regional Housing Initiative, the Pritzker Traubert Foundation and the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus.
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 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. She led the SRO development and operations teams, receiving recognition from the Fannie Mae Maxwell Award of Excellence, the New School of Social Research and others. Robin also wrote a monthly column for the neighborhood paper, served on the Bernal Heights Housing Corporation Board 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 (part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government), and completed terms of service for the City of Evanston’s Housing Commission, 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.