Cherise Burda specializes in timely research, strategic communications and creative engagement to drive impact. Her work has influenced policy change in Ontario and British Columbia on housing, transportation, forestry, energy and climate. She has authored more than 40 policy reports, book chapters and academic publications, as well as dozens of articles and op-eds. Her previous roles include Executive Director of the City Building Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ontario Director of the Pembina Institute, Program Director with the David Suzuki Foundation and Senior Researcher at the University of Victoria’s Eco-Research Chair in Environmental Law and Policy. Currently, she is an active member of the national Affordability Action Council and the Task Force for Housing and Climate.

Jim Dunn is the Senator William McMaster Chair in Urban Health Equity. Working with communities in southern Ontario and beyond, Jim has explored how housing, economic inequality and attributes of neighbourhoods affect residents’ mental and physical health. Since 2005, Jim has been following residents of Toronto’s Regent Park public housing complex through a redevelopment project, finding clear evidence that people who feel safer and more satisfied with their housing also enjoy improvements to their overall health. He has also spent more than a decade studying the impact subsidized housing has on the mental health of its residents in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

Carolyn Whitzman is a housing and social policy consultant and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa. She is an expert adviser to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART) project, which develops standardized best practices for analysing housing need. Carolyn is the author, co-author or lead editor of six books, including the forthcoming Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. She is also the author or co-author of over 80 book chapters, articles and reports. She has provided expertise to national, state/provincial and local governments, UN Women, UN Habitat, and private and nonprofit organizations.

Shaimaa Yassin is a research director at the Institute for Research on Public Policy, leading the Toward a More Equitable Canada research program, which has published studies on proposed dental care and pharmacare programs. She is also a member of the secretariat of the Affordability Action Council, a collaboration of diverse policy and community leaders that works to identify ways to help meet the basic needs of lower-income Canadians. She is a policy-oriented economist with over a decade of experience in translating challenging academic research into strategic advice for a broad audience.

Previously, Shaimaa served as senior director at the Community Economic Development and Employability Corporation (CEDEC) in Montreal. Shaimaa has consulted for several governments and organizations such as the World Bank, Chaire “Sécurisation des Parcours Professionnels” in France, and the Economic Research Forum in Egypt. She was a research fellow in the economics department of several academic institutions, namely McGill University (Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow), the University of Lausanne and the University of Neuchâtel. She has an extensive record of publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, a Presses de Sciences Po book, Les Accidents de Carrière, and two Oxford University Press volumes on labour markets in the Middle East and North Africa. Shaimaa holds a PhD in economics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a MSc in empirical and theoretical economics from the Paris School of Economics.