Jane Knodell
10 Charles Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 656-4400
jane.knodell@uvm.edu
JANE KNODELL, Partner, is a Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont, where she teaches and conducts research on financial institutions. Jane has hands-on experience working with banks, municipal governments, and nonprofit organizations in fostering broad-based economic development.
John Emmeus Davis
52 Booth Street
Burlington, Vermont 05401
802-651-0730
BurlAssoc@aol.com
JOHN EMMEUS DAVIS, Partner, has spent over 40 years providing technical assistance to community land trusts and other nonprofit community development organizations throughout the United States. He was one of the founders of Burlington Associates in 1993. He previously worked as a community organizer and nonprofit executive director in East Tennessee and served for ten years as the city’s housing director in Burlington, Vermont under two mayors, Bernie Sanders and Peter Clavelle. He was a co-founder of the National CLT Academy (USA) and served from 2009 to 2012 as the Academy’s dean. His publications include Contested Ground (1991), The Affordable City (1994), Shared Equity Homeownership (2006), The Community Land Trust Handbook (2010), On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust (2020), Community Matters (2022), and Reweaving the Tapestry of Tenure (2023). He was a co-founder of the International Center for Community Land Trusts (www.cltweb.org) in 2018 and presently serves on the Center’s board. He is editor-in-chief of the Center’s imprint, Terra Nostra Press.
Michael Brown
Michael Brown
7600 Sypes Canyon Road
Bozeman MT 59715
320-363-0912
mbrown@burlingtonassociates.com
MICHAEL BROWN, Partner, has over 40 years of experience in community development, housing development, advocacy, and organizational development – particularly with community land trusts and other shared-equity strategies. Prior to becoming a Partner in Burlington Associates, he served as the first Executive Director of the Woodland Community Land Trust in Clairfield, Tennessee, one of the first CLTs operating in the United States, the Associate Director of the Institute for Community Economics and the founding Executive Director of the Housing Coalition in St. Cloud, Minnesota. In the past 25 years, he has logged lots of miles on the road, providing on-site technical assistance to establish and build the capacity of new and existing CLTs – services ranging from feasibility analysis and business planning to program implementation and evaluation – and to build support for CLTs from their public sector and private sector partners.
Michael Monte
115 Charlotte Street
Burlington, Vermont 05401
(802) 863-3038
mmonte@burlingtontelecom.net
MICHAEL MONTE, Partner, has worked in the community development field for over 45 years. During the course of his career, Michael has served as executive director for several nonprofit organizations and was employed by the City of Burlington (Vermont) for 19 years. For twelve of those years, he was a department director, leading Burlington’s award-winning Community and Economic Development Office. Since 2007, Michael has served as the Chief Operating and Financial Officer for the Champlain Housing Trust. Michael was appointed CEO in January, 2021. CHT is the largest community land trust in the United States with a portfolio containing over 3200 units of permanently affordable housing, both rental and homeownership, as well as community facilities, neighborhood parks, and commercial space for local businesses.
He serves on the Board of the National NeighborWorks Association, the Grounded Solutions Network and leads the CEO forum of the Housing Partnership Network. He is the Chair of HPIex, a national insurance captive that provides workers comp, health care and property and liability insurance to members of the Housing partnership Network. Michael Is a recipient of the Con Hogan Award for Creative, Entrepreneurial, Community Leadership and has been recognized for his work by the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board with the Mollie Beattie award. Michael is a graduate of Achieving Excellence, a leadership program of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and NeighborWorks America. He holds a BA degree from Goddard College.
Jeff Washburne
Everlong Consulting LLC
3613 15th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55407
(612) 619-9647
jeff@everlongconsulting.com
JEFF WASHBURNE, Partner, works with several community land trusts nationally. He transitioned away from the City of Lakes Community Land Trust (CLCLT) in 2023 after serving as the Director since its incorporation in November of 2002. Over the 20+ year tenure with the CLCLT the organization was able to assist over 490 low-income homeowners into the Community Land Trust homeownership with over 375 homes in trust. Through his tenure, the CLCLT grew to become the largest ownership Community Land Trust in MN and the 3rd largest nationally, creatively using the Community Land Trust in many groundbreaking ways. Over time, the CLCLT created and spun off a Commercial Land Trust, an Agricultural Land Trust and is currently working with partner organizations to establish the first African American Community Land Trust in the Twin Cities.
Prior to joining the CLCLT, he worked at Twin Cities Neighborhood Housing Services from 1997 – 2000 and 2001 – 2002, serving as the Executive Director the latter two years. Prior to his nonprofit housing experience, Jeff worked as a construction supervisor/trainer for a residential construction firm in South Korea, a YMCA Program Manager in New Mexico, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras. He holds an M.A. in Public Administration from Hamline University and a B.A. in Psychology from DePauw University. He’s gained certificates from the Harvard Kennedy School/NeighborWorks America Achieving Excellence and the Bank of America Neighborhood Builder Leadership Programs. Over the past 25 years in Minneapolis, he has served on dozens of nonprofit boards in the community. He has lived in Minneapolis since 1997.
In Minnesota, Jeff currently serves as the contract administrator for the MN CLT Coalition, supporting the 13 community land trusts in Minnesota with advocacy, policy, technical assistance, fundraising, and coalition building. For work in Minnesota, Jeff utilizes his own consulting LLC, Everlong Consulting.
Heather Benham
Heather Benham
(706) 201-6804
heather@burlingtonassociates.com
HEATHER BENHAM, Partner, has over 20 years’ experience in community development. Prior to joining Burlington Associates, she served as the Executive Director of the Athens Land Trust (2013-2024), an innovative community and conservation land trust that has developed over 200 units of affordable housing and renovated over 50 low-income, owner-occupied homes while protecting over 20,000 acres of land with an emphasis on farmland and community greenspace. Her work at the organization saw growth as she raised the budget from $90,000 to over $3 million a year, a staff of 3 to 25 full-time employees, and place-based programming that included community gardens, community agriculture, a neighborhood farmers market, youth programming, housing counseling, and the development of the neighborhood advisory board structure. She started with the Athens Land Trust as an intern while earning a joint Juris Doctorate and Masters in Historic Preservation from the University of Georgia.
Mary O’Hara
Mary O’Hara
(603) 724-8363
mary@burlingtonassociates.com
Mary O’Hara, Partner, has spent more than four decades helping design, build, and scale some of the most influential models for community ownership and permanently affordable housing in the United States. Her work in community development finance, cooperative housing, and community land trusts has helped communities, nonprofits, and public agencies preserve affordable housing while strengthening resident control.
Mary served as founding director of the ROC USA Network, helping build the initiative from its initial development through national scale. She recruited and guided a national network of nonprofit technical assistance providers working with resident leaders across the country to purchase and operate their manufactured home communities as cooperatives — widely recognized as the nation’s most affordable path to homeownership. Together they helped establish 357 Resident Owned Communities in 21 states, representing the owners of more than 24,400 homes.
She later served as Executive Vice President for the ROC Movement, working closely with the elected leadership of the ROC Association — the national membership organization of Resident Owned Communities. In that role, she helped mobilize resident leaders to advocate for their communities locally, regionally, and nationally, including meeting with federal policymakers in Washington and hosting tours of resident-owned communities for public officials and agency staff.
These efforts contributed significantly to passage of the federal PRICE (Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement) legislation — the first national investment dedicated to preserving manufactured housing communities as permanently affordable housing. The legislation directed $225 million toward community preservation and ensured that funding supported stable resident-owned communities and community land trust models rather than investor-owned communities.
Mary has been a partner with Burlington Associates in Community Development since 1999, advising nonprofits, community land trusts, and public agencies on governance, strategic planning, and the design and expansion of cooperative and shared-equity housing initiatives.
Olivia R. Williams
Olivia R. Williams
(608) 285-2691
OLIVIA R. WILLIAMS, Associate, has served as a researcher, advocate, and practitioner in the community land trust (CLT) and shared-equity housing movement, beginning with her doctoral research in 2014. Prior to joining Burlington Associates, she served as the Executive Director of the Madison Area Community Land Trust (MACLT) from 2020 to 2025. During her tenure, she completely rebuilt organizational operations, overhauled policies and bylaws, modernized the ground lease and resale formula, and reinstated core stewardship, housing development, and fundraising programs. Her work multiplied MACLT’s operating budget and reserves tenfold, expanded staff capacity from 0.75 to 4.0 FTE, and catalyzed a new era of growth for the organization.
Regionally, Olivia founded the Wisconsin CLT Network in 2021 and hosted the 2025 Midwest CLT Conference. She currently serves as the Network’s contract administrator, supporting six Wisconsin CLTs and several CLT start-up efforts. Beyond CLTs, she brings experience in the broader cooperative movement, having served in a variety of leadership roles with the Riverwest Investment Cooperative, North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO), EcoVillagers Alliance, Bread & Roses Food Cooperative, and Madison Community Cooperative.Olivia has authored or co-authored 14 peer-reviewed journal articles, with work appearing in Urban Affairs Review, Antipode, Urban Geography, and Housing Studies, in addition to popular news and opinion outlets like Shelterforce, Jacobin, and Tone Madison. She has also taught courses in Environmental Studies at Augustana College and Urban Geography at Florida State University, where she earned her PhD in Geography in 2017 with research on CLTs.