KEY STAFF

Abriance Baker, Assistant to the Director
Abri Baker comes to Parks & People with experience in teaching, museum programming, business planning, and advocacy. She studied at the University of Maryland, where she was a Research Assistant in the Smith School of Business Department of Management and Organization.

Kenneth Barbour, Park Assistant
A lifelong DC resident, Kenny assists all aspects of maintenance and improvements at Marvin Gaye Park and the Riverside Center.

Stephen W. Coleman, Executive Director
Steve Coleman has led Washington Parks & People’s award-winning work since it began as a volunteer neighborhood park crime patrol in 1990. In 25 years of non-profit service, he has been a vice president for development and director of research for a national business association working to reverse the arms race, program director of an international environmental advocacy network founded by Ted Turner, staff officer for a national foundation, a fundraising consultant for environmental media initiatives, a lobbyist with the American Friends Service Committee, and an intern reporter for Public Broadcasting’s MacNeil/ Lehrer Report. Steve has been an elected officer of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, Washington Innercity Self Help (WISH), the Reed-Cooke Neighborhood Association, and the city-wide Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners Assembly. An inspiring speaker and consultant on urban park revitalization, Steve has appeared in media stories about the urban parks movement across the U.S. and abroad. His recent writings about city parks have appeared in Places: A Journal of Environmental Design, and Urban Parks Online. Steve is a Trustee of the City Parks Alliance, has served on the faculty of the American Planning Association’s City Parks Forum and the Urban Open Space Leadership Institute, and appeared as a keynote speaker at Great Parks/ Great Cities Conferences in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Portland (Oregon), London, and Barcelona. Born in India, Steve has lived in Adams Morgan for 22 years.

Behnam Mehrabkhani, Maintenance Chief
Behnam Mehrabkhani has helped train and coordinate thousands of Parks & People volunteers helping in all aspects of park and landscape revitalization and building restoration and construction. He came to Parks & People in 2001 as a refugee from Iran, helping to assist the award-winning exterior restoration of the Josephine Butler Parks Center before he could speak more than a few words of English. Prior to coming to the United States, Behnam supervised a staff of 18 machinists in a Teheran factory and worked as a welder in Turkey. He is fluent in Farsi.

Brian Rodgers, Riverside Community Greening & Training
A trained master gardener and six-year veteran of Johnson's Florist and Garden Center, Brian was one of the 2001 co-founders of the Down by the Riverside Campaign and Watts Branch Community Alliance. Brian is a lifelong resident of Ward 7 and has been a leading advocate for community greening east of the River. He is a graduate of Denison University with additional experience in youth development.

Ian Tyndall, Director of Planning and Design
Charged with heading the planning and design for DC’s longest city park, Ian Tyndall is an experienced and respected landscape architect, planner, and urban designer, having planned parks and public spaces in cities across the United States and the world including Edinburgh, Paris, and Taiwan. His master plans and landscape designs include the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, the Goddard Space Flight Center, and DC’s Watts Branch Park. He began his career with the Office of Dan Kiley, a landscape architect with a national and international clientele, which became Kiley/Tyndall/Walker. He later formed his own firm, Ian Tyndall Landscape and Urban Design, with an emphasis on international projects, and then launched the firm of Symbiosis. In 2000, Ian developed the master plan for the Botanical Park of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Taiwan. This 11-hectare urban botanical park is in the center of Taiwan’s third largest city. It features landscapes from seven distinctive ecosystems of Taiwan, a 36-meter-high greenhouse, public parking, and an office building.

Ian’s interests are in places suffused with a calm and generous spirit, where natural resources are conserved and celebrated. A 15-year resident of Washington, Ian has been a Visiting Critic at many universities in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland and earlier was an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Ian received his Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and his DA in Architecture from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in his native Scotland.

Part-Time Staff and Contract Support
Jenny Carden, Web Manager, Triple Smart
Liz Falk, Gardener, Community Harvest
Anisha Gade, Graphics
Tony Harstley, Event Host
Allen Kadis, Tech Support, Virtual Port
Mike Klar, Engineer, Eco-Site
Leland Larsen, Bookkeeper
Michael Lucy, Park Planning, Creative Life Designs
Juana Luna, Custodian
Wendy Minor, Event Host
Roza Oblak, Parks Center Program Manager
John O'Leary, Audio Engineering
Rebecca Stamps, Riverside Family Services, Project Blessings
Charles Stone, Building Repair
Aaron Teeter, Land Planning, Floura Teeter Landscape Architecture
Karima Wheat, Event Host

Board of Trustees
Arthur Fawcett, Chair/ Planning
Brenda Richardson, Secretary/ Funding
John Theoharis, Treasurer/ Facilities
Lara Hansen, Environmental Initiatives
John Henderson, Performance Measures
Alvan McNeil
Sharon Robinson, Media
Ann Satterthwaite, Advocacy
Steve Coleman, ex officio

Parks Council
Dianne Dale
Milan Davis
Jim Dougherty
Maisie Hughes
Brian Rodgers
Jackie Ward
Debbee Yamamoto

Watts Branch Community Alliance
Wanda Aikens
Thomas Alston
Mary Brown
John Campbell
Carolyn Carpenter
Carol Casperson
Muriel Chambers
Kia Chatmon
Libby Morris
Diana Ridgeway
Rebecca Stamps