Daniela Cocco Beltrame
Daniela specializes in human settlements, marginalized populations and international cooperation. She is a researcher at the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), in the Informal Settlements Domain, through Slum Dwellers International (SDI). She is also an affiliate researcher at MIT.
She has worked as programme director, advisor and consultant in the national and international public and non-profit sectors, particularly with women-led community-based organizations in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
She is a Fulbright Scholar and holds a Master in City Planning from MIT, as well as an MSc in International Cooperation and Public Policy and a BA in Political Science from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Joaquin Benitez
Joaquin is a lecturer in urban sociology and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. He was a visiting SPURS Fellow at MIT for the academic year 2019-2020, and holds both a Masters in Urban Studies and a BA in Sociology. He teaches and researches urban policies, housing, participation, and slum upgrading in Argentina. Before becoming an academic, he worked for the Government of the City of Buenos Aires monitoring and evaluating social programs, and for the non-profit sector, assisting community leaders in their demands for adequate housing and human rights in informal settlements.
Karenna Groff
Karenna is a masters student at MIT studying Biomedical Engineering. She received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and has a BS in Biological Engineering from MIT, with a minor in Brain and Cognitive Science and a concentration in Public Health. She is interested in global public health and specifically the implementation of healthcare in informal settlements in the global south. She is also dedicated to reducing maternal deaths by improving access to healthcare for mothers in low-resource areas. In Boston, she works as an emergency medical technician (EMT) and conducts translational epilepsy research at Boston Children's Hospital. She hopes each of these interests will play a prominent role in her future, where she intends to increase global access to high-quality healthcare as a physician-scientist.
Amelia Seabold
Amelia is a third year undergraduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is studying Urban Planning and minoring in Biology, with hopes of continuing on into the international development field post-graduation. She has previous research experience in biology and immunology in both wet and dry labs and has been working on projects about informality since June, 2020. Combining her health and planning knowledge, she wants to work to increase access to quality healthcare for marginalized people around the world. Working in policy, she plans to advocate for people who are often neglected by government structures. Outside of the classroom, she is an active member of the Undergraduate Association on COVID-19 where she promotes student interests and acts as a liaison between MIT administration and the student body.
Marcelle Mardon
Marcelle is a trained architect with a passion for socially driven participatory design processes within urbanism and, in particular, its intersection with gender inclusivity. Working within a context of informal urban neighbourhoods in Africa, she has been fundraising, technically supporting, and working to bring awareness to the incredible potential of women-led transnational community grassroots movements in implementing sustainable solutions for the future. With over 20 years of multi-disciplinary experience behind her, she has combined both her technical and creative background with international development. Currently, her work sees her strongly advocating for women as agents of change, both on the continent and in the diaspora, focusing on livelihoods and entrepreneurship.
Affiliates and Collaborators
MIT SIS is affiliated with the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Several of our members are/were students or faculty at DUSP.
Ceasar L. McDowell
Ceasar is a Professor of the Practice of Civic Design at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He is also Special Advisor to MIT’s Media Lab. His current work is on the design of civic infrastructures and processes to connect the increasingly demographically complex public. He co-hosts the TheMove, a podcast series on civic design. At DUSP, Ceasar teaches on civic and community engagement and the use of social media to enhance both. Ceasar brings his deep commitment to the work of building beloved, just and equitable communities that are able to – as his friend Carl Moore says – ”struggle with traditions that bind and the interests that separate in order to build a future that is an equitable improvement on the past.”
Ceasar is the founder of MIT's CoLab and Civic Designers consulting. He served as Director of the global civic engagement organization Dropping Knowledge International, President of Interaction Institute for Social Change, co-founder of The Civil Rights Forum on Telecommunications Policy, and founding Board member of The Algebra Project. Ceasar is also a musician and filmmaker.
Rodrigo Cordova Ponce
Rodrigo is a Research Affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB and Lecturer in Survey Methodology and Probability and Statistics at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico. His main work focuses on informal and illegal markets’ dynamics, urban violence, and economic development strategies for local governments. Previously, he worked as an instructor in Economics at the Harvard Kennedy School, as a consultant for the World Bank on impact evaluation strategies, and as a Research Associate at the Drug Policy Program at CIDE. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from CIDE and a Master’s degree in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from Harvard University.
Partners
MITx Course Partners
Centre of Dialogue on Human Settlement and Poverty Alleviation (CODOHSAPA) & Federation of Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP) - Freetown, Sierra Leone
Visit CODOHSAPA & FEDURP's website
CODOHSAPA is a non-profit and non-governmental organization established in 2011, working to mobilize and provide both technical and financial support to its community counterpart, FEDURP. FEDURP is comprised of vulnerable women, men, youth and children who are mobilized around dynamic saving schemes, networked at settlement, city and national levels to drive a collective, bottom-up initiatives influencing change towards inclusive and resilient cities and localities, and contribute to national development agenda. We use tools and strategies such as daily savings, peer-to-peer exchanges, community profiling, enumeration, and mapping to organize a critical mass to engage with local and state authorities as partners in development rather than beneficiaries, and shift development priorities to be more inclusive and pro-poor and ultimately more resilient and sustainable. CODOHSAPA and FEDURP are part of the SDI (Slum Dwellers International) network, which is a transnational social movement of the urban poor, present in over 30 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. SDI has evolved over many years of peer-to-peer exchanges in a network of community-based organizations driven by the poor themselves.
Foundation for the Future Sierra Leone (FFF-SL) - Freetown, Sierra Leone
FFF is an educational syndicate, non-profit, community-led organization in Cockle Bay, Freetown. Their mission is to teach, inspire, and transform vulnerable and underprivileged children and young people, especially girls, in Sierra Leone’s informal settlement communities. One of their mandates is to work for less privileged school aged children so that they can complete their school curriculums. Through the hard work of volunteer teachers and the support of our donors they are able to offer free classes five days a week. During the COVID-19 pandemic they have continued programs with great results; children that took the national primary exam were able to meet the requirement for the school of their choice.
El Hormiguero - Buenos Aires, Argentina
El Hormiguero is an organization dedicated to political advocacy and popular participation in the neighborhoods in the City of Buenos Aires. They originated in the slums of the city to empower communities and mobilize for a just society. On this path, they move forward by building and advocating for public and popular education in our slums, with the Dorita Acosta Teacher Training School in the Villa 31 community, with the popular high school Voces de Latinoamerica in the Rodrigo Bueno community, and with trade schools in many other communities. They support communication as a right of the people from our community FM radio station "FM Soldati" and by many other multimedia projects. They move our struggle (nuestra lucha) forward from the neighborhoods in Buenos Aires by creating community teams, activities and projects regarding land, housing and urbanization. These actions represent a calling to build a city for everyone, and not just those who can economically afford it.
Dialogue on Shelter for the Homeless Zimbabwe (DoS) and the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation (ZIHOPFE) - Harare and Masvingo, Zimbabwe
Visit DoS and ZIHOPFE’s website
Dialogue on Shelter is an NGO working in alliance with the Zimbabwe Homeless People's Federation (ZIHOPFE) to address urban poverty in its various forms. Together they are the ZImbabwean affiliate of Slum Dwellers International (SDI). Dialogue on Shelter is registered as a trust and acts as the technical partner supporting the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and the alliance of the two organizations work in partnership to address issues of low-income housing in particular and poverty in general. Dialogue on Shelter provides technical support in the form of capacity-building, training and facilitating interface between communities and government, private sector and academic institutions. This support is mainly geared towards enabling the poor to access resources and address systems and practices that hinder affordable housing and infrastructural services.
The Ahmedabad Project - Ahmedabad, India
The Ahmedabad Project is a platform for urban governance. By means of public policy courses, workshops, fellowships and projects, it engages young citizens with policy and governance. Their focus is on city governance, informal settlements and reforms within governance structures.