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Equity Trust Board of Directors

David Abromowitz
has been on the ETI board since 1994, and has served on the Equity Trust Fund committee even longer. David is a lawyer at Goulston & Storrs in Boston, where his focus is on public/private financing and development transactions, affordable housing, economic development and Section 42 tax credit matters, assisted living and senior housing, and strategic advice for businesses, including non-profits. David conducts a broad national practice, representing for-profit, non-profit and governmental organizations, and is nationally known for his expertise in many areas of affordable housing and economic development.

Jody Bolluyt is a biodynamic farmer in the Hudson Valley. Together with her husband Jean-Paul Courtens, Jody runs Roxbury Farm, one of the largest CSA farms in the country. Jody grew up in rural Iowa working for large-scale corn and soybean growers during summer vacations. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in biology and botany. In 2000, working with Equity Trust, Roxbury Farm secured long-term land tenure on 150 acres of land to which Jody and Jean-Paul hold a lifetime lease. Through the help of Equity Trust, Roxbury Farm CSA members, and Open Space Institute, Roxbury is now a protected farm, one of the first to make a new kind of land tenure work, and it is becoming a model for other small farms around the country.


Ellie Kastanopolous, Executive Director of Equity Trust since 2003, has been a staff member since 1997, and a board member since 1994. Ellie has managed the Equity Trust Fund, and ETI's operating finances since she joined the staff, in addition to providing technical assistance to groups around the country. Previous to that Ellie was the Director of the Maine Homestead Land Trust Alliance, a statewide coalition of community land trusts. Ellie and her children are homeowners and leaseholders with Covenant Community Land Trust in Orland, Maine.

Monica McGloin, Equity Trust Board Chair, is a long-time board member, who also served on the ICE board. Monica works with Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center in Cincinnati, and has been involved with numerous local and national organizing efforts over the years, including the Cincinnati Cooperative Land Trust. A member of the Dominican Sisters of Hope, she has been one of the key players in ETI's religious lands efforts, a program aimed at helping religious orders think through ways they can deal with the large amounts of property owned by religious groups.


Mary O'Hara is one of seven partners at Burlington Associates in Community Development LLC, a national consulting cooperative. She has 27 years of experience in the field of community development lending and community reinvestment, and has served in leadership positions at the Massachusetts Urban Reinvestment Advisory Group, Boston Community Capital, and the Institute for Community Economics. Mary is currently working with two leading cooperative financing and development non-profits - ROC USA™, a national social enterprise developing and financing resident-owned manufactured home communities ("mobile home park" cooperatives), and the Cooperative Fund of New England, a regional CDFI that finances consumer, housing, agriculture, and worker cooperatives, including CLTs and CSAs.



Scott Reed
is an organic CSA farmer in Western Massachusetts. Riverland Farm, his thriving 11-acre CSA, has over 100 members and a well-stocked, staffed farmstand. In addition to farming, for more than 20 years Scott has worked on land tenure issues as a member of the Valley Community Land Trust, and he also founded the Greenfield Area Land Trust.




Kathy Ruhf
is a consultant and project manager working on farm tenure and transfer, food systems and agriculture policy. Kathy served as Co-Director and Director of the New England Small Farm Institute from 1987 to 2004. She is a principal with Land For Good, INC. and a member of the USDA Advisory Committee for Beginning Farmers and Ranchers. She is also Coordinator of the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group.



Skipper G. StipeMaas
is a Community Economic Development Attorney with Georgia Legal Services and is providing technical assistance and legal help with organizing, fundraising and alternative land tenure models around the state of Georgia. Organizations that Skipper is working with include the Georgia Community Loan Fund, Inc., Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society, Inc., Athens Land Trust, Inc., and People of Hope, Inc., as well as many others.
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