To further the expertise and capacity of our Real Estate Program, CEDAM welcomes Teresa Gillotti to the team as our part-time real estate program specialist! Teresa is well experienced in the community economic development field from working with city and local governments. We are excited to have her with CEDAM and get to know her better.

Jennifer Lareau-Gee, Communications Specialist: Can you give me a brief overview of what you were doing before joining CEDAM and how that led you here?

Teresa Gillotti, Real Estate Program Specialist: I most recently worked in local government, for the city of Ypsilanti and then at Washtenaw County, eventually leading the office of Community Economic Development there. So I had the privilege of working in a lot of different ways around planning, community development, economic development, and housing, particularly affordable housing. I think, specifically, in the last five or six years, I really dug deeper into how to remove barriers and support local units of government, nonprofit housing developers, and others to achieve community goals around adding affordable housing. So, I really got into it and really enjoyed it. And when I heard that CEDAM was going to build out a real estate team to sort of build this capacity with their members statewide, it was a really exciting opportunity to see the field in a larger context  (small towns, rural areas, maybe other communities that didn’t have a background in developing affordable housing) outside of my particular community. It’s great to now have that broader perspective.l