Our Team

We are a diverse set of
multi-disciplinary practitioners working at the intersection of planning, engagement, and equity.

Wilnelia Rivera

Founder & CEO (she/her)

Wilnelia Rivera, Founder & CEO of Rivera Consulting Inc. (RC), is an urban planner and equity strategist with a 21-year track record of success and results focused on the nexus and connectivity between people, public and private organizations, and places. Through her work and lived experience, Wilnelia has come to understand that the most important economic and social issues are intersectional and interconnected but require different mindsets, collaboration, and adaptability to address them. Her north stars are prototyping values-driven ideas and solutions while fostering buy-in and trust for leaders, teams, and communities to advance their mission and outcomes.

Before founding RC in 2015, Wilnelia was a history-making community organizer, advocate, and political strategist across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. RC is a Boston-based management and strategy consultant firm working at the intersection of planning, engagement, and equity. With an asset-driven, mixed-method research approach RC has worked with non-profit organizations, government agencies, and private companies to apply equity to advance innovative solutions to complex cultural and structural problems. The cornerstone of RC’s approach is Deep Democracy — a value and a methodology that tends to the whole, the underrepresented, experts, and decision-makers to unpack nodes of connectivity and innovation. Through this framework, all practitioners at RC deploy rigorous and human centered design thinking practices to ensure those often left out of the public commons are centered in our research, facilitation, and organizational development products.

  • Raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and resident of Boston, her leadership has been recognized by Boston Magazine in 2022 and 2021, as one of Boston’s Top 100 Influential Bostonians, and the Tufts University Alumni Magazine. She holds both a B.A. in International Relations, B.A. in Women's Studies (2004) and an M.A. in Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning from Tufts University (2014). In 2021, she received the Lyon & Bendheim Citizenship Award from Tisch College of Civic Life.

    She also serves as a Board of Advisor at Tisch College of Civic Life, a Board member of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, a member of the Eastern Bank Board of Ambassadors, and Secretary on Board of Directors of the Rare Ensemble Foundation.

Jon Hillman

Senior Research Director (he/him)

Jon Hillman comes to Rivera Consulting Inc. with a passion for understanding the intersection of policy, politics, and community engagement. He specializes in techniques of policy and program evaluation, survey design, project management, and both quantitative and qualitative research methods—all tools that ultimately promote sustainable, inclusive, and equitable community development.

He has led on a diverse array of projects since joining Rivera Consulting in 2019, including an assessment of the Urban Land Institute of Boston New England technical assistance panel programs, a community needs assessment for the Boston neighborhood of Allston-Brighton, and the development of the first Social Justice and Equity Framework for the Boston Planning and Development Agency.

  • After growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received his bachelor's degree in political science. Following graduation in 2007, he began a decade-long career in organizing for Democratic and progressive candidates. He worked on change-making campaigns throughout those years, be it the 2008 Presidential campaign of Barack Obama or the 2018 Congressional campaign of Ayanna Pressley. 

    This commitment to grassroots engagement techniques brought him to several distinct communities across Massachusetts and the United States. In this work he saw firsthand the deep inequities that pervade every facet of public life in America, from the rural post-industrial rust belt of northern Wisconsin, to the segregated exurban communities of Maryland, to neighborhoods across Boston left to fend for themselves after decades of underinvestment and policy choices rooted in a racist and inequitable status quo.

    Seeing the possibilities of community-centered policy engagement inspired him to attend Northeastern University, where he received his Master’s degree in public policy in August of 2017. He is currently a resident of Somerville, Massachusetts with his wife Jen and chihuahua-terrier-brindle-weirdo mutt dog Hank.

Sheila Encarnación Castillo

Equity Researcher & Project Manager (she/her/ella)

Sheila Encarnación Castillo is a researcher and public policy specialist with over eight years of experience in multisectoral coalition building, human rights advocacy, humanitarian programme management, and qualitative research. 

Sheila is a mixed methods qualitative researcher at Rivera Consulting where she has been able to put into practice her skills in qualitative analysis, in-depth interview process design and implementation, policy analysis, programme evaluation, and project management through a wide array of urban planning and organizational development projects.

  • Her past experiences include being a researcher and a project manager in strategic planning processes with both private and public actors, as well as being a researcher for community engagement design and internal equity assessments with various municipalities across Massachusetts. 

    In her previous role as a Protection Assistant at the UN agency for refugees, Sheila served as a liaison between social movement organizations, government agencies, and the UN to advocate for the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and Dominicans of Haitian descent at risk of statelessness. As a humanitarian programme manager, she oversaw the mobile biometric registration of over 25,000 individuals from vulnerable communities in order to lead an evidence-based human rights advocacy strategy. Sheila is passionate about centering historically marginalized voices in decision making processes. Her experience in community consultations and on-the-ground advocacy building work fuel her belief that people have to be at the center of any solution-building process looking to affect their modus vivendi. 

    Sheila holds a LL.B from Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santo Domingo and a Masters of Public Policy from Northeastern University. She is a Fulbright Foreign Student Program alumna. Sheila enjoys exploring the built and natural environments which spike her curiosity about the different ways of living and interacting with the world around us. 

Manavi Datta

Equity Researcher (she/they)

Manavi Datta is a design-led researcher and an alternative urbanist with six years of work in public and private sector consulting as well as data-driven urban advocacy. Manavi merges systems thinking, place-based exploration and people-centered design principles to work on issues of equitable economic development and accessible civic services often focusing on the experiences of immigrants and minority communities. 

At Rivera Consulting, Manavi works as an Equity Researcher on a variety of urban planning projects. She brings an expertise in people-centric insight and strategy development and an enthusiasm for conveying complex research in an easy to understand manner. Some of her projects include researching and developing more equitable models for community engagement as part of the City of Boston’s Article 80 modernization efforts and synergizing insights across data sources to aid the development of a comprehensive neighborhood plan for Allston-Brighton.

  • As a nonprofit consultant in India, she worked with 150+ nonprofit leaders over two years through the design and execution of organization capacity building programs. Manavi has been an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, gaining new knowledge and working on mixed methods urban research projects advocating for inclusive infrastructural development for the non-services sector in Bengaluru, India. More recently, she has been a researcher on a participatory climate mobilities initiative at Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility in New York City and developed accessible knowledge products to reach audiences beyond academia. Before moving to Boston, she piloted interventions for worker centric service design with The Drivers Cooperative NYC that influenced the development of a better driver experience digitally and offline within the worker owned organization. 

    Manavi is a graduate of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design and often indulges in writing poetry as a medium for understanding her own transnationality, the experience of cities and the places they hold.  

Kevin Fagundo-Ojeda

Equity Researcher (he/him)

Kevin Fagundo-Ojeda is an impact-driven urban planner and researcher with more than 10 years of experience helping city governments, nonprofit organizations, and members of the community assess and increase the impact of planning projects through multidisciplinary qualitative and quantitative research, analysis of statistical and geographic data, innovative urban design, advocacy, and stakeholder collaboration.

While working as an Equity Researcher at Rivera Consulting, Kevin has been working in a diverse array of urban planning projects that aim at making cities and municipalities more equitable and sustainable. One of his main projects is the City of Easthampton’s Equity and Environmental Assessment project. Here Kevin has collaborated closely with city officials to create and implement comprehensive community engagement plans that center vulnerable and underrepresented communities.

  • Throughout his career Kevin has dedicated his career to explore topics such as disaster and hazard and mitigation, social determinants of health, migration and displacement, economic development, equity, and justice in the United States and the Caribbean. 

    In his previous role Kevin worked as principal investigator and project manager for a research project funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation understanding the needs of women diagnosed with breast cancer during compounding and cascading disasters in Puerto Rico. Kevin oversaw the implementation of community based research methods and techniques that allowed him to collect and analyze data centered around people that informed the creation of public policy and effective disaster mitigation plans on the island. These plans have been instrumental in advancing gender equity, environmental justice, and infrastructure recovery in areas affected by climate change. His environmental practice has been recognized by Yale University and the University of Utah, and his work has been published in national and internationally recognized journals.

    He holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Community Development and Planning from Clark University and an MSc in City and Metropolitan Planning from the University of Utah. In his free time Kevin enjoys playing sports and cooking.

Carine Andre

Equity Researcher & Project Manager (she/her)

Carine Andre is an urban planner with a specialization in community engagement and environmental justice. She obtained her Social Science degree from Florida State University and her Master of Urban and Regional Planning from The University of Florida. She has experience working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and communities redeveloping previous superfund sites. She has additional expertise in helping communities obtain grants for projects such as community gardens, housing construction, and the Superfund Redevelopment Program (SRP). 

Carine’s role at Rivera Consulting, allows her to engage with various non-profit, municipal, and state-based clients. She provides thought partnership with the President and relevant staff on how to best design and implement client engagements, stakeholder convenings, and research-based tasks. As well as monitor progress to ensure that client engagements remain on schedule.

  • Her passion lies in helping those with the most need but the least resources, with a special emphasis on the empowerment and liberation of Black folks. Carine has spent considerable time abroad advocating for systematically disadvantaged neighborhoods, both in the US and abroad. Carine spent considerable time in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Wuhan, Shanghai helping various communities through resiliency research and designs, community planning, and data gathering. 

    In her spare time, she loves putting puzzles together, buying plants she doesn't have room for, traveling to new places, and reading about places that don’t exist.  

We look forward to hearing from you.

info@riveraconsult.com
(617) 410-6631

50 Milk St, 15th Floor
Boston, Massachusetts, 02106