Chelina Odbert

Overview

Co founder and Executive Director of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) a non profit design practice that partners with low income communities to improve physical economic and social quality of life through low cost high impact design interventions. Since 2006 she has worked with community members in the slum of Kibera Nairobi to design and implement a network of Productive Public Spaces transformed waste spaces that link physical upgrading to micro enterprise and community development. The Productive Public Space Network has won numerous awards including Van Alen Institutes' New York Prize for Public Architecture. Chelina has replicated the Productive Public Space process in Haiti Ghana and the United States. She holds a BA from Claremont Mckenna College where she graduated with magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. She received her Master of Urban Planning from Harvard University. Chelina has lectured extensively in the United States and internationally on KDI's community engaged approach to planning and written about it for Forbes Magazine and in the book NOW Urbanism. In 2012 she was named by American Express as one of 15 Global Emerging Social Innovators. In 2014 she was named an Aspen Institute Ideas Scholar.