Patricia Marrone Bennett, Ph.D.
Principal and Chief Executive Officer
pbennett@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 105

Dr. Patricia Marrone Bennett has an extensive background as an advocate, administrator, community organizer and planner. With more than 30 years of experience in the nonprofit and government sectors, she has sought to develop the capacity of organizations to best serve their communities. Pat has participated in several of the largest and most innovative projects in the nation in the areas of youth violence prevention, juvenile justice reform, substance abuse, homelessness and child welfare reform. She has conducted research on the relationship between family violence and youth violence as well as on youth gangs and homelessness. As the CEO of Resource Development Associates, Pat provides leadership to this mission driven consulting firm which fosters social and economic equity for vulnerable groups of people such as children, youth and the poor.

Pat has authored numerous reports and publications including The San Francisco Mental Health Services Act Plan (2005), The Co-Occurrence of Youth Violence and Family Violence (2004), and Finding Home: A Report on At Risk and Homeless Youth (1998). She is the Vice President of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco and has five teenage and young adult children.

Nishi Moonka, M.C.P.
Managing Director
nmoonka@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 103

Nishi has contributed to a number of the RDA's most impacting projects. Her strong background in education and youth services has provided Nishi with the foundation for developing youth-friendly evaluation tools and training protocols for Youth Funding Youth Ideas (YFYI), which resulted in an extensive evaluation of YFYI's Board of Directors, funded organizations, and consumers. She is currently leading RDA's evaluation work on the After School for All (A4A) nonprofit collaborative, where she develops tools and manages an evaluation of nearly 30 after school programs in five school districts. Prior to her work with RDA, Nishi enjoyed an extensive career in urban youth development. For the Literacy for Environmental Justice Program, she trained youth consumers to perform evaluations of the agencies from which they receive services. This resulted in an extensive consumer-driven evaluation of over 40 youth-serving nonprofits funded by the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. Previously, Nishi helped SF Learns create tools to aggregate, analyze, and report youth input for a future-planned youth health clinic. As a result of her contribution, the Bayview Healing Arts Center was opened in 2005. She also planned and coordinated logistics for a youth forum on secondary school reform for the Every Child Can Learn Foundation and has served as a process consultant for Andersen Consulting, Inc. (now Accenture, Inc.).

Nishi holds both a B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Education, with a concentration in Human Development and Psychology, Risk and Prevention, from Harvard University.

Kayce Garcia Rane, M.C.P. 
Senior Program Associate
krane@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 106

For the past twelve years Ms. Rane has served as a consultant, helping community based organizations, foundations, and public agencies better serve their client constituents by conducting program evaluations, needs assessments, strategic planning, and community planning. Her primary focus for the last five years has been working with organizations to create trusting relationships amongst stakeholders to implement newly mandated policies and procedures. Ms. Rane is a skilled facilitator and trainer and has special expertise in reaching out to disenfranchised populations and in creating support for practice changes within community based organizations.

Prior to joining RDA, Ms. Rane worked with Harder+Company Community Research as the Lead Consultant on a team implementing the Statewide Evaluation of First 5 Programs and as the Lead Planner for the Capay Valley Community Action Plan. At Moore Iacafano Goltsman, Ms. Rane implemented a nine-county Public Outreach and Involvement Campaign for the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission and prepared the Public Involvement Report for the Regional Transportation Plan. She worked in San Jose to prepare the Aging Services Master Plan and in Alameda County to develop a Needs Assessment of Adults Age 55 and Older and conducted needs assessments for people with HIV/AIDS for both the City of Long Beach and Los Angeles County. She received her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and a Master's degree in City and Regional Planning, from UC Berkeley.

James Tharp
Senior Program Associate/IT Director
jtharp@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 112

Jay Tharp has 15 years experience in system analysis and process design. He is recognized for extracting data from large public agency data systems for use in program planning and analysis. He has designed data-driven applications to support case management at schools, health providers, justice agencies and nonprofit organizations. He has written compliance plans and best practices references, reviewed research protocols for an Institutional Review Board, and trained users in custom software and off-the-shelf tools such as MS Access, SQL Server, and MapInfo. Prior to joining RDA in 1999, Jay was Information Manager at the University/Oakland Metropolitan Forum at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jennifer Susskind, M.C.P.
Program Associate
jsusskind@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 109

Jennifer Susskind joined RDA in May 2007 after receiving a Master's degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. As a student, Ms. Susskind studied regional and local economic development, community development, redevelopment, and affordable housing policy. Also as a student, Ms. Susskind worked as an analyst for Seifel Consulting Inc., a firm that specializes in economic development, real estate, affordable housing and redevelopment. She is the assistant editor of the 2006 California Redevelopment Association Affordable Housing Handbook, and the principal author of a study of human capital in the nine-county Bay Area, to be published this summer by the Bay Area Economic Forum. In addition to working for RDA, Ms. Susskind works for a Bay Area non-profit organization, Urban Habitat, to develop and implement a community-based planning process in Richmond, California. The Richmond Equitable Development Initiative unites grassroots resident organizations with transportation, housing, economic development and land use technical assistance providers in order to formulate development strategies that benefit Richmond's low-income communities. Prior to returning to school, Ms. Susskind worked for 13 years in non-profit, civil rights and labor organizations. In addition to her writing and technical capacities, she is a trained community organizer, facilitator, and adult educator.

Jordan Presnick
Research Associate
jpresnick@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 111

Jordan Presnick graduated with a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied Economics and International Development. His professional interests and experience include community outreach and education; formal evaluation and strategic planning; and encouraging sustainable development, growth, and urban planning. Jordan has worked with a number of transportation agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area including the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, AC Transit, Vallejo Transit, and Fairfield-Suisun Transit. Most recently, he has worked with MTC and AC Transit on the Translink for TOD project, a joint venture pilot program and study to track transit usage with the availability of new "smart" cards.

Alisa LaRue
Executive Assistant
alarue@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 101

Alisa LaRue graduated with Honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a B.A. degree in Psychology. Prior to joining RDA, Alisa lived in Qingdao, China where she taught English to elementary-aged children. At RDA she fills many roles including working as a Research Assistant and Executive Assistant to the CEO.

Alexandra Howson, Ph.D.
Senior Consultant
ahowson@resourcedevelopment.net

Alexandra Howson Ph.D. is a medical sociologist with two decades of experience as a health practitioner, educator and social researcher. She brings a range of methodological skills to the study of policy, practice and participation in relation to health, education and human service organization issues. Alex has developed grant proposals and designed research and evaluation projects for clients in education, clinics, community health and emergency medical service settings. She specializes in using qualitative methods to gather data, such as in-depth interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation and in analyzing data generated in community contexts. In addition to authoring books in North America and in Europe, as well as several articles on public health initiatives, Alex has recently published Researching Trust in Health (2008). She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh.

Diana Sanders
Senior Consultant
dsanders@resourcedevelopment.net Ext. 110

Diana Sanders recently joined RDA as a consultant, bringing with her twenty years experience in non-profit management, organizational development, systems and program design and implementation, facilitation, training and team building. During her seventeen year tenure with Delancey Street Foundation, Ms. Sanders gained extensive insight working with disenfranchised populations. As manager of two Delancey satellite facilities, she honed her skills, designing and delivering training programs, successfully improving organizational processes while developing effective communication strategies for working with challenging populations. Her experiences and her passion for social justice issues and effecting systemic change through collaborative efforts in underserved communities continue to guide her work. Her work with RDA includes conducting survey trainings, site visits and observations for the A4A after-school collaborative in Contra Costa County, a mission and vision workshop for Stanford Medical Youth Science Program, an organizational development project for Mary Pickford Institute who is working with Los Angeles Unified School District to provide digital media instruction for their after-school programming. Most recently, Ms. Sanders has been part of a team conducting focus groups for an MHSA planning project as well as consulting on logistics and implementation planning for a Metropolitan Transportation Commission pilot program.

Ms. Sanders holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from San Francisco State University and recently completed the highly competitive Leadership San Francisco program. Ms. Sanders continues to volunteer her time with Delancey Street Foundation conducting groups and financial management classes for residents.

Emily Zukerberg, J.D.
Senior Consultant
ezukerberg@resourcedevelopment.net

Emily Zukerberg has more than 10 years experience performing prospect research, grant writing, and program development for national, local and regional nonprofit agencies. She has worked with RDA on a large federal grant proposal for Santa Barbara County to establish several drug courts. While working as a grant writer and research analyst for Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, San Mateo & Marin Counties, Emily was one of the original grant writers for an innovative collaboration with the SF District Attorney's office called Street to Work. The nation's first deferred entry workforce development alternative for first-time, low-level narcotic sales offenders, Street to Work has since become Back on Track, and is being touted as an exciting and effective restorative justice model. Emily's other accomplishments while at Goodwill SF included: writing the business plan that launched ReCompute, Goodwill's computer recycling and re-use operation, and securing start-up funding for the Bayview Hope Trucking Academy, a short-haul truck driver training and job placement program for San Francisco's ex-offender population. The Academy is now the proud owner of a state-of-the-art truck driving simulator named Emily, which is housed at the City College Bayview campus.

Emily holds a J.D. from UC Hastings and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. While at Hastings, she served as a research assistant for the Public Law Research Institute, a member of the Civil Justice Clinic, and Co-Director of The Survival Exchange Network, a grassroots nonprofit organization serving homeless African American men in the Tenderloin community.

Moira DeNike, Ph.D.
Senior Consultant
mdenike@resourcedevelopment.net

Moira DeNike has extensive experience in program evaluation, planning and grant writing, as well as both qualitative and quantitative data analysis. Among her many projects, Moira evaluated a SAMHSA funded violence prevention program in West Contra Costa County, a gang risk intervention program operated by the Alameda Office of Education, an innovative program from Asia Pacific Psychological Services serving mental health clients in Oakland, and several youth development programs for at-risk populations in the San Francisco Bay Area. She assisted San Mateo County in planning a gender-responsive expansion of their juvenile drug treatment court and is currently working with a collaboration of government and private agencies to transform the administration of mental health services for the State of Washington. Moira has published and taught in the areas of juvenile justice and criminal justice and has consulted on parole and probation evaluation projects at The Center for Juvenile & Criminal Justice, and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. While working as a consultant on school-based service programs, she facilitated and assessed numerous collaborations among public agencies and community based organizations. Moira is a committee member of the Ginetta Sagan Fund of Amnesty International USA; past President of Dancers for Democracy; and a member of the American Society of Criminology. She teaches research methodology in criminal justice at San Francisco State University.

Moira holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and an M.A. in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Patricia Brown Reyes, M.P.H.
Senior Consultant
preyes@resourcedevelopment.net

Pat Reyes brings 20 years of experience designing and directing evaluation studies with non-profit community based organizations and local agencies. She works from a theory-based, utilization-focused approach and advocates evaluative learning as an avenue to program capacity building. Pat is skilled in both quantitative and qualitative data collection approaches as well as logic model development and program planning. She conducts training and coaching in evaluation and presented a day-long workshop on evaluation and logic model development at CompassPoint in San Francisco. Pat's recent projects with RDA include evaluations of a SAMHSA funded substance abuse treatment program for users of methamphetamines with co-occurring mental health conditions, jail-based substance abuse treatment services in Marin County, an after school nutrition and fitness program for the Beacon Centers of San Francisco, a hospital based program seeking to reduce frequent emergency department use with the provision of case management services, and an assessment of the impact of a new social services management information system on worker productivity and satisfaction. Pat is also part of the RDA grantwriting team and recently wrote successful proposals that resulted in state funding of three after school programs for at-risk youth.

Prior to joining RDA, Ms. Reyes worked for the Center for Reproductive Health Policy Research at the University of California, San Francisco where she provided technical assistance and training in program evaluation and co-authored two guidebooks on evaluation. In that position she also conducted evaluations of a YMCA parenting program for teens, Perinatal Resource Centers, and the Healthy Infant Project, all in Oakland. She has a B.A. in Psychology from University of California, Irvine and a Master's degree in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley.

Stacey Smith, M.B.A.
Senior Consultant
ssmith@resourcedevelopment.net

For the past 20 years, Stacey Smith has worked to empower nonprofit leaders and arts, education and healthcare organizations manage growth and change. She specializes in organizational development, strategic planning, fundraising, board development and volunteer management. Before she began her consulting practice, Stacey held a variety of positions in several organizations as a Board Member, Executive Director, Development Director, staff member, and volunteer. This breadth of experience enhances her ability to work effectively with a wide range of organizations to address development and planning challenges. Stacey holds an M.B.A. from California State University, Hayward and a B.A. in Music from State University of New York at Albany. She also holds a Certificate from the Institute for Nonprofit Consulting, is a registered fundraising counsel in the State of California, and has completed graduate coursework in Performing Arts Administration at New York University.