CIC’s Board of Directors is elected annually by the members of CIC. Board members’ strong leadership and commitment is key to the success of the organization. Click on a name to see biographical information.
We welcome suggestions for new board members — anyone interested in joining the board or nominating a colleague for the board should email us, c/o Nominating Committee, with their suggestion. The next opportunity to join the board will be for 2023.
CIC 2022 Board of Directors
wealth, and the economy. She has a MA in Education and another in Public Policy from the University of Texas-Austin.
Noel is a co-founder and current senior researcher at the Sustainable Calgary Society, an active & founding member of the National Working Group for the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, and is Associate Professor of Sustainable Design in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary.
Noel has 30 years experience working in community development both locally and internationally. His work has included local renewable energy assessment and design, sustainability education, community development, popular theatre, sustainability indicators design and technology assessment. Through his unique experience Noel has been successful in building bridges between community groups and planning and engineering professionals. Internationally, Noel has worked in Central America, Central and South East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Locally, Noel has worked with community groups in Alberta, Newfoundland and British Columbia.
Chantal Stevens has a long history with CIC. Having previously served as a board member between 2005 and 2008, she also served as its executive director from 2012 to 2020. She’s an experienced nonprofit manager, formerly with Sustainable Seattle, a pioneer in the development of community indicators, and People for Salmon, a statewide public outreach initiative. More recently she has worked for King County as the oversight manager of the Countywide Community Forums and as a performance management analyst . She was the co-lead of the first conference dedicated to the exploration of CI-PM integration and is an active advocate for community indicators and public engagement as a key element of a functioning performance management system in the public and nonprofit sectors. She holds a BS and MMA from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Dr. Patsy Kraeger is an associate professor at Georgia Southern University in the Department of Public and Nonprofit Studies. Prior to working in academia, she worked in community development in Arizona for the Arizona Governor’s office, state government and in nonprofit organizations.
She researches in community development, community well-being philanthropy and social enterprise, public policy implications philanthropy and social enterprise. Dr. Kraeger presents her research at international, national and regional academic conferences. She has authored book chapters and edited books for Edward Elgar Publishing, Routledge Publishing and Springer Publishing. Her work is published in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Kraeger is the Reviews Editor for Local Development and Society and the Special Issues Editor for the international Journal For Community Well-Being, both peer –reviewed journals. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the International Society of Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS). Dr. Kraeger is the Founding Co-Chair of the Nonprofit, Philanthropy, Social Enterprise, and Entrepreneurship (NPSEE) section for the Western Social Science Association (WSSA).
Kien S. Lee, Ph.D., Principal Associate & Vice President, Community Science, provides research, evaluation, and technical assistance support to initiatives that address the needs of underserved populations. Dr. Lee is committed to developing the capacity of community organizations and community leaders to become more informed consumers of data. She has led a national initiative funded by the Office of Minority Health to test a framework to develop community collaboration around the use and sharing of data to inform strategies to end health disparities and a guide to help community-based organizations use and compile social determinants of health data to tell the story of their needs and proposed solutions. She is developing a handbook to teach community organizations how to be better informed consumers of evaluation and data. She also has published and presented about working in racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse communities. Dr. Lee is recipient of the 2013 award for Distinguished Contributions to Practice in Community Psychology.
Since 2004, Lyle Wray has served as Executive Director of the Capitol Region Council of Governments in Hartford, Connecticut (www.crcog.org), after serving as Executive Director of the Ventura County Civic Alliance. Earlier he served as Executive Director at the Citizens League in the Twin Cities for 11 years. Before that he served as Dakota County Administrator and Human Services Director for 7 years in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area.
Originally from Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, he earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of Manitoba in 1980. He has had a variety of international teaching and consulting experience in e-government, performance measurement, civil society, and human services. He co-authored the book Results That Matter published by J. Wiley in 2006. He was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2015 and served as Chair of the Board of the Community Indicators Consortium in 2017 .
International travel is his main hobby in addition to reading nonfiction and fiction.
Senior Research Fellow within the Healthy Liveable Cities Unit and Centre for Urban Design at RMIT University – Melbourne, Victoria (Australia)
Dr Melanie Davern interests and passion are in policy focused research with specific expertise in the development and application of population based indicators of wellbeing at the community level (community indicators) and the individual level (subjective wellbeing) within Australia and internationally.
She has extensive expertise in the development and construction of community wellbeing indicators, worked closely with a range of government and community partners and is passionate about using data as a catalyst for action.
Melanie was formally the Director of Community Indicators Victoria (CIV) at the McCaughey VicHealth Unit of Community Wellbeing, which is located within the Centre for Health Equity, School of Population & Global Health at the University of Melbourne.
Lisa Parson is Project Manager with the City of Santa Monica. She recently developed the City of Santa Monica Wellbeing Index
Seema D. Iyer, PhD is Director of the Real Estate and Economic Development (REED) program in the Merrick School of Business (MSB). She also is associate director for the Jacob France Institute (JFI) MSB’s economic research center. She oversees the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at JFI which collects, integrates and disseminates community-based quality of life indicators. BNIA-JFI annually produces the City’s Vital Signs report that “takes the pulse” of what’s going on in Baltimore’s neighborhoods. BNIA-JFI is part of the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership of sites that provide longitudinal, community based data for neighborhood planning and advocacy.
Dr. Iyer is a recognized expert on strategic planning in community development; recent projects include the McElderry Park Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Plan, Regional Housing Plan for the Opportunity Collaborative, an evaluation of Baltimore City’s Vacants to Value program and verification of work for the Baltimore Energy Initiative. Her research focuses on the role of data sharing in collaborative public innovation processes. In 2017, she served as a consultant to the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Information Technology on the city’s Open Data program.
Academically, Dr. Iyer is the director of the undergraduate program in Real Estate & Economic Development. She teaches courses on real estate principles and local economic development. In 2019, she helped launch UBalt’s Real Estate Fellows Pitch for a Million competition to create pathways for early-stage developers interested in working with stable, middle-market communities in Baltimore. She received the 2020 Dean’s award for Public Service and the 2021 USM Regents Award for Excellence in Public Service.
Prior to joining UB, Dr. Iyer served as Chief of Research & Strategic Planning for Baltimore City’s Planning Department. She holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has extensive international research experience gained through her study of comprehensive planning strategies in post-socialist countries.
Dr. Iyer was a 2017 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Bangalore, India, researching the role of urban governance for metropolitan economic competitiveness. Her blog from the experience is available at blogs.ubalt.edu/siyer.
Kyle is an urban planner (Master of Urban Planning, McGill University) who seeks to operationalize complex urban issues and datasets into communicable opportunities. His experience includes assessing the administration of geo-spatial addresses to informal settlements in Nairobi with the UN-Habitat, working with street food vendors to increase low-income consumers’ nutritional security in India, and contributing to and leading numerous research projects on food security and homelessness in Winnipeg with the Institute of Urban Studies.
Susan Brutschy co-founded Applied Survey Research in 1981 with Sociology Professor Dane Archer of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has been President of ASR since 1989, leading hundreds of evaluations, assessments, and strategic planning processes in community quality of life, early childhood development, domestic violence, child abuse and maltreatment, early literacy, K-12 education, and homelessness.
Ms. Brutschy has expanded ASR’s work to national and international prominence. In 2006, ASR won the prestigious Community Service Award from the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS). They noted that ASR won the honor “for its outstanding work in applying its data collection, analysis, reporting, and management skills to addressing homelessness and other social problems.” In 2007, ASR and the United Way of Santa Cruz County won a national award from the Brookings Institution for having the best indicator project in the nation, the Santa Cruz County Community Assessment Project (CAP).
Over the last decade, Ms. Brutschy has pioneered an outcomes framework for ASR’s work in community assessments, evaluations, and strategic planning processes. This framework, known as Results Based Accountability (RBA), was created by Mark Friedman of the Fiscal Policies Institute. The framework’s goal is to begin with the outcomes that a community would like to achieve. Once a community agrees on those outcomes, Ms. Brutschy and ASR staff use RBA to develop the best methods to achieve those ends.
She has successfully led many projects using RBA, including the previously mentioned Santa Cruz County CAP, which functions as a community report card with over 135 indicators; First 5 Santa Cruz County to benefit children ages 0-5 in low income communities of color; and Kindergarten Readiness Assessments in Alameda, Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties.
Ms. Brutschy believes that data should not sit in binders collecting dust, but rather that it should become a catalyst for community change. She has helped many communities in California, Arizona, and Alaska to achieve improvements in health, domestic violence, child abuse and maltreatment, early childhood literacy, drug and alcohol abuse, and school safety.
She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with highest honors in Sociology, and received awards for her research in designing and implementing quantitative assessments of community opinion for the Social Research Unit. In addition to her work at ASR, Ms. Brutschy enjoys reading about the history of ancient Egypt, international travel, and camping with her husband and four adult children.
Caitlin’s work focuses on education, particularly post-secondary education and the transition to the labor market. Her other areas of interest include STEM education, English learners, and teacher preparation programs. Across these topics, she designs projects with an audience of practitioners and community-based organizations in mind. Her research often leverages large, administrative data sets to produce descriptive statistics for use by community stakeholders, or for use in quasi-experimental analyses.
Before joining Wilder Research, Caitlin led the research team at a nonprofit education research organization in Austin, Texas. Prior to that, Caitlin completed a PhD and a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.
Stephanie Fritz serves as the Senior Director of Strategic Research and Analytics Director for United Way of Central Indiana. Stephanie guides the reporting and analytics process for United Way’s impact strategy, community data strategies, and oversees the community partner accreditation process. Across these strategies, Stephanie leads a research team that focus on how community data can inform and support the human services sector. Her priorities include developing reporting and analytic tools with community-based organizations in mind.
Prior to her time at UWCI, Stephanie was an admissions and retention analyst for graduate and non-traditional programming at for the University of Indianapolis. Stephanie completed a master’s and bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Indianapolis.
Steve Hine is the former director of the Labor Market Information Office at DEED. He has a master’s degree and Ph.D. in economics from Washington State University in Pullman and a bachelor’s degree from Bemidji State University.