Our Team
Frank S. Alexander
Chair and Executive Director
Sam Nunn Professor of Law, Emeritus, Emory Law
Co-founder & Senior Advisor, Center for Community Progress
Founder, Vulnerable Communities Initiative, Inc.
Frank.Alexander@Emory.edu
Frank S. Alexander is the Sam Nunn Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Emory University School of Law, where he was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He has served as Interim Dean of the Law School (2005-2006), and as Visiting Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University (2007). His courses include Property, Real Estate Finance, State and Local Government Law, Law and Theology, and Federal Housing Policies. He is the author of over seventy-five publications in the fields of real estate finance, law and theology, and community development.
Professor Alexander's work in recent years has focused on community development and affordable housing. He is the Co-founder and Senior Advisor of the Center for Community Progress, a national nonprofit entity that provides technical assistance to local and state governments in the conversion of vacant and abandoned properties into productive uses. He has served as the principal draftsman for legislation adopted in fifteen different states on vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties, affordable housing, and land banking.
From 1993 to 1996, he served as a Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University, specializing in neighborhood redevelopment activities and low-income housing in conjunction with The Atlanta Project. He served as a Commissioner of the Georgia Housing Trust Fund for the Homeless from 1994-98. He has testified twice before Congressional Committees on strategies to address the mortgage foreclosure crisis (2008, 2009).
Professor Alexander received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina.
Kim Graziani
Vice Chair and Director of Strategic Initiatives
kgraziani@gmail.com
Kim Graziani is the President of Indigo Collaborative LLC, a national consulting firm dedicated to building trust and sharing power between local government and residents to equitably revitalize communities.
Kim also serves as SeniorTechnical Assistance Advisor to the Center for Community Progress, a national nonprofit organization that works primarily with local governments, nonprofit organizations, and resident leaders to transform vacant and abandoned properties into community assets such as quality affordable housing. Since 2011, Kim helped create, lead, and provide expertise to the National Technical Assistance Program, which has served over 300 communities in 35 states. She is considered one of the leading national experts in land banks – an equitable, effective, and efficient tool utilized by hundreds of communities across the country to acquire properties that are causing the most harm and transfer to responsible ownership according to local community goals.
Prior to her national work, Kim served as the Director of Neighborhood Initiatives to the Mayor of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was instrumental in developing and implementing innovative policies and strategies for the equitable reuse of vacant and abandoned properties that prioritized resident engagement, neighborhood preservation, and community wealth-building. She created several policies and programs recognized by the National League of Cities and the United States Conference of Mayors focused on participatory budgeting and how to engage residents in the allocation of federal funds for local uses such as affordable housing, rental assistance, and the creative reuse of vacant land.
Kim also has expertise in affordable housing and community organizing through her work with multiple community development corporations, private foundations, and social service agencies in Atlanta, New York City, and Pittsburgh. She is a certified Housing Development Finance Professional through the National Development Council and received her master's degrees in Public Administration and Social Work from the University of Pittsburgh where she also served as part-time faculty. She currently resides in Birmingham, Alabama.
Josiah “Jazz” Watts
Director of Community Engagement
Josiah ‘Jazz’ Watts has worked as an Equal Justice Works Georgia Housing Corps Urban Community Advocate under a fellowship through the Georgia Bar Foundation with the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center in Atlanta, Ga.
He spearheaded conducting the first ever Wills clinic with Georgia Heirs Property Law Center in his historic Gullah Geechee community of Hogg Hummock on Sapelo Island, from which he is a direct descendant. He is an Environmental Justice Strategist with the coastal nonprofit One Hundred Miles (one hundred miles.org). He also serves as a facilitator for organizations the Nobis Project (https://nobisproject.org/) and Both And Partners (https://bothandpartners.com/).
Jazz holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Speech Communication and Theater from the University of Georgia and a Master of Arts Degree in Mass Communication from the University of Florida. He currently serves on the Boards of the Nobis Project and the Hogg Hummock Public Library on Sapelo Island and is a board member of the Butler Island Coalition (https://preservebutlerisland.org/) in Darien, Ga. He is a Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commissioner (https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/), a Board Member and Land Retention Advisor to the Sapelo Island Cultural & Revitalization Society (https://sicars.org/), and a Board Member of Coastal Community Health (https://coastalchs.org/).
He is a co-founder of the I Run With Maud Movement and 2:23 Foundation; an organization that was founded in the wake of the brutal lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Ga. Jazz is also a Certified Mediator with the Georgia Office of Dispute Resolution.
Stephanie Earl
Director of Finance and Research
StephanieEarl4@gmail.com
Stephanie has over a decade of experience in non-profit management, accounting, project management, and client relations. She received her Master’s degree in Public Policy in Spring 2019, which included a two-year research assistantship and co-authoring three publications.
Since her graduation she has worked with the Vulnerable Coastal Communities Initiative, now VCI, with lead responsibilities for empirical data analysis, index creation, and GIS mapping. She has presented her analysis at the 2019 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference in Atlanta, GA and the 2021 Georgia DNR Climate Conference. Prior to and throughout her graduate work Stephanie served as financial director at the Atlanta Birth Center. She now serves as the finance and contracts manager at data.org, a non-profit building the field of data science for social impact.
Below are a sampling of her co-authored publications:
Immergluck, D., Ernsthausen, J., Earl, S., & Powell, A. (2020). Evictions, large owners, and serial filings: Findings from Atlanta. Housing Studies, 35(5), 903-924. (available here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02673037.2019.1639635).
Harrison, A., Immergluck, D., Ernsthausen, J., & Earl, S. (2021). Housing stability, evictions, and subsidized rental properties: Evidence from Metro Atlanta, Georgia. Housing Policy Debate, 31(3-5), 411-424. (available here https://www.nlihc.org/sites/default/files/HPD_Evictions_Atlanta.pdf).
Immergluck, D., Earl, S., & Powell, A. (2019). Black homebuying after the Crisis: Appreciation patterns in fifteen large metropolitan areas. City & Community, 18(3), 983-1002. (available here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cico.12436).