A Community Land Trust is governed by a democratically elected board of directors. Most CLTs utilize a tripartite board structure, meaning a third of the board are elected leaseholders that live or work on the CLT’s land (leaseholder member), a third are community representatives in BVCLT’s service area (general member), and the last third are open representatives (public member). BVCLT utilizes a traditional tripartite board structure and a democratic election process to elect board members when their term is completed. Get to know our governing board below!
Our Staff
Ara Kim
Director of Finance & Operations
Ara Kim (they/them) was born in Korea, grew up in Southern California and currently lives in Koreatown. Ara is rooted in moving away from extractive systems and towards solidarity economies, creating other liberatory ways for everyone to thrive. Ara brings 10+ years of experience in affordable housing development in California, working with diverse affordable housing developers, community land trusts, community development financial institutions, foundations, and public agencies. They have managed all stages of real estate development, including site acquisition, securing necessary land use approvals, design development, financing, construction management and lease up. Through this work, they have contributed to the development of 1000+ multifamily housing units serving low-income individuals and families. Ara holds a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA and a Bachelor’s degree in History from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. In their free time, Ara likes to be outdoors around plants, reading or with their cats.
Citlalli Velasquez
Director of Resident & Land Stewardship
Citlalli (she/they) grew up in Lincoln Heights, lives in East Hollywood, and received her BA from Georgetown University. She brings to BVCLT over 8 years of housing organizing experience, popular education, cooperative development, language justice and many other things to the LA CLT movementinterpreter, and a de-escalation and by-stander intervention instructor with Defend Yourself. She brings a background in housing organizing where she supported tenants in DC through rent strikes, TOPA, cooperative conversions and city-wide campaigns such as Reclaim Rent Control, Cancel Rent and building a city wide Tenant Union. Citlalli is devoted to building joyous and life-affirming spaces alongside her communities. In her free time, she enjoys gardening, karaoke with friends, cuddling with her cat Señor, and writing snail mail to friends and family.
haejin bang
Director of Cultural Arts & Base building
haejin bang (they/he/haej) was born and raised on occupied Tongva land (koreatown and central los angeles). Committed to organizing and building around racial, class, disability, and gendered justice, they bring in their own experiences of being and growing up disabled+trans, unhoused, and working class to their work at BVCLT. He has been involved with various housing and labor struggles, most notably supporting the vendors at the North Hollywood Swapmeet from being displaced in 2022. Their cultural and political work also centers listening, trans-diaspora, and body: focusing on pansori and corean folk drumming, haejin was recently a Community Artist Fellow through the California Arts Council, a Fulbright Fellow in S. Korea, and is currently serving as an Emerge Fellow at the Longmore Institute on Disability. He enjoys making art, music, and zines with their friends, tending to land/body, intentional movement, and slowing down.
[image description: pictured is a black and white image of a trans corean looking into the camera with a short mullet and wearing a casual jeogori top. the background is sparse save for a few blurred frames of art hanging on the wall.]
Kasey Ventura
Director of Campaigns & Strategy
Kasey Ventura (he/they) is a child of the Salvadoran diaspora with roots in LA’s South Central and Koreatown. They’ve committed their work towards organizing and building political homes, having the privilege to work on campaigns that increased public funding towards youth, rent control, and community development for almost a decade. Motivated by the belief that people have the power to create their means of dignified living, he joined BVCLT in 2021 as one of the first staff members. In his time at BVCLT, he has co-led the acquisition of more units for the land trust, and runs political education for BVCLT members. Kasey holds a Bachelor’s specializing in Policy & Law from Cal State Long Beach and an Associate in the Arts from El Camino Community College. In their spare time, you can often find Kasey lip-syncing in his car, spamming his Instagram story, and attempting to put barbells over his head. Kasey also serves on the LA Co-op Lab board.
Board of Directors
Matthew Vu
President
Public Member
Matt Vu (he/sis) is the queer son of Vietnam War refugees, a lifelong student, activist, and community builder. He grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UCSD with a BA in Ethnic Studies before moving to Los Angeles in 2015. He brings with him 15 years of organizing and advocacy experience that includes efforts to build and formalize Asian American Studies Minor at UC San Diego, leading electoral campaigns for economic and housing justice, and building grassroots campaigns for regional community ownership policies. Matthew was a Training Coordinator for The People’s Project – a mutual aid training center powered by the LA County Federation of Labor – developing popular education and training materials to support community and labor organizing efforts throughout LA County. Currently, they are The TOPA Campaign Manager for the Los Angeles Community Land Trust Coalition.
Deshanae Cantley
Secretary
Public Member
Deshanae Cantley (she/hers) is an experienced advocate, peer support specialist, home health care aid, organizer, facilitator, leader in co-op development, tenants association steward, and community ownership leader. She loves working with cooperative minded people who care for each other and the land in order to design a better future. She took part in BVCLT’s 2022 Community Ownership Fellowship where she worked on Measure ULA – the mansion tax to increase funding for housing programs in Los Angeles. She is a member of Our Future LA and created her own tenant association in her building when it went up for sale in 2021. She hopes to one day acquire her building to create a housing cooperative.
Eni Chowdhury
Treasurer
General Member
Eni Chowdhury (they/them) is the child of immigrants who landed in the Little Bangladesh area in the 1990s, who then moved to North Hollywood to start school. They have returned to Little Bangladesh to grow roots within the community, and with their recent role as the 2023-2024 Outreach Fellow for BVCLT, to bring more Bangladeshi Americans into the housing justice fight.
Having learned from mistreatment by the corporate nonprofit structure, they are now invested in giving their time to fostering an authentic relationship to the people and to the land, and seeing what life-giving connections can spring from centering our unique intersections, so we can build solidarity that moves us from precarious, individualist extractive economies.
In their free time, Eni likes to crochet, paint, read, bike, and be on tumblr in 2024.
Rosa “Margarita” Quintanilla
leaseholder Member
Margarita (she/hers) is a resident of the BVCLT’s North Hollywood Property and is an immigrant from El Salvador where she was a teacher. Her introduction to community land trust came when BVCLT acquired the property utilizing LA County CLT pilot funds. At the time, she was living in an illegal unit with her daughter and her daughter’s partner. With support from staff, she was able to reunite with her husband who was living at the North Hollywood building and quickly turned her unit into a home. In 2022, Rosa joined the BVCLT Community Ownership Fellowship Program where she learned about community land trust, social housing, housing cooperative, and supported the advocacy for more funding to go into clts in the county. She is excited to continue learning about community land trust and organize her building to hopefully create another housing cooperative.
Jessica Brown
leaseholder Member
Jess (she/hers) served as BVCLT’s Director of Stewardship from 2023 to 2024. She supported BVCLT residents in their journey towards ownership and community controlled housing with a focus on management and resident engagement. Jessica came to BVCLT having spent many years working in property management across Los Angeles. She also has spent much of her life living and participating in established housing cooperatives. She received her Bachelors of Science in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems from UC Davis and is trained in conflict mediation and cooperative facilitation. When she is off the clock, Jessica spends her time dancing, gardening and riding her bicycle around the city.
Vladimir De Jesus Santos
leaseholder Member
Vladimir De Jesus Santos (he/him) is a Salvadoran-American “rocker foo” from Koreatown, Los Angeles, CA. He’s worked as Cinematographer/Editor for the past decade and enjoys Metal, Baseball, and all things radical.
David Choi
General Member
David (he/him) was born and raised in Koreatown, “Los Angeles” (the unceded territory of the Tongva people and their neighbors) and spent a significant part of his life a few blocks from Beverly and Vermont. He was part of the community supporting the struggle to prevent the North Hollywood Swapmeet from closing, which directly impacted his family’s livelihood. Previously an Organizing Fellow with Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust, David is currently a member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union and a volunteer for the Housing for Juanita Campaign. He hopes to sustain webs of care and interdependence both within and alongside his community.
Jennifer Ganata
General Member
Jen Ganata (she/hers) is the Legal Department Co-Director for Communities for a Better Environment but has also done work in the area of housing for several years doing eviction defense and land use. She has a deep interest in connecting her passion for environmental justice and housing in order to defend frontline communities’ right to housing and a better environment. Jen believes organizing is key to helping move the most vulnerable communities away from investing in an extractive economy. She has earned a BA in Ethnic Studies and a minor in Urban Studies and Planning from University of California, San Diego, a JD from City University of New York, where she was trained through the Adult Defender Clinical program and an LL.M from the University of California, Los Angeles with a focus on Critical Race Studies. She is a member of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles and volunteers time with the Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles.
Naoko Ward
Public Member
Naoko Ward (she/they) is a community organizer who is interested in the intersection of collective community well being, land autonomy, and food sovereignty. She primarily organizes with the Los Angeles Community Action Network’s Urban Growers Committee and helps steward the rooftop farm. She is currently teaching first through third graders about these very topics through a residency with Stem to the Future. Previously, she completed a fellowship with BVCLT where she created a model of stewardship and management that follows the Ozawa Boarding House cultural model and expands on the services and community needed for aging, elderly, and differently abled members.
Louis Elkner-Alfaro
Public Member
Louis (he/him) believes that access to decent housing should be guaranteed. Louis knows that when land and housing are things that greedy people use to enrich themselves, access to decent housing is undermined. If housing were developed and distributed with the purpose of fulfilling people’s needs rather than rich people’s desire for more wealth and power, we wouldn’t live in a society with pervasive fear of losing your home. Louis thinks that land trusts can be part of the solution in accomplishing guaranteed housing and he is excited to work with others confronting the issue.
Louis currently works as a web developer with a worker’s cooperative. Louis likes brewing, baking, biking and booking (reading books).
Zeno Roller
Public Member
Zeno Roller (they/them) is a city planner, researcher, and organizer whose work focuses on infrastructure justice, including water, housing, and transit. They currently work with Re:ciclos, a Koreatown-based organization that aims to increase access to biking and fabrication skills in communities that have been deprived of resources. Zeno organizes with the LA Tenants Union and CAT-911, a crisis response collective that develops alternatives to policing. Previously, they worked at the US Water Alliance, where they led nationwide initiatives to end the use of water shutoffs and bring infrastructure to communities that live without water and sanitation access. Prior to this, they spent several years in Brazil working on environmental and food justice issues in informal communities. Zeno is from San Francisco and they love picking fruit, boxing, and reading science fiction.
