Leadership

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Lynn M. Ross is a globally recognized urbanist and the founder of Spirit for Change Consulting, LLC. Her practice is rooted in the deep belief that everyone deserves a place to thrive and that the most effective practices for creating and sustaining just places are co-created, centered in lived expertise, and equitable by design. 

Through Spirit for Change, Lynn partners nationally and across sectors with organizations on a mission to design, implement, and steward the plans, policies, programs, and relationships needed to ensure a future where we can all thrive together. The work of Spirit for Change takes many forms to leverage Lynn’s expertise in housing, community planning and development, and civic infrastructure, as well as strategy and program design, coaching, systems change, and policy making.

Recent engagements include facilitating a reflection process with a humanities focused foundation and its grantees to gather insights and unpack learning from early programmatic investments; leading an initiative to reimagine the federal role in housing policy and inform the presidential transition that resulted in the New Deal for Housing Justice; supporting a well being focused foundation in reimagining their grantmaking approach in healthy housing; serving as a steering committee member for a multi-community demonstration amplifying the transformative power of the public realm; and partnering with a mid-sized, legacy city to set a new course for equitable community development.

Prior to founding Spirit for Change in 2017, Lynn’s leadership journey includes roles as Vice President, Community and National Initiatives at the Knight Foundation; Executive Director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing; Chief Operating Officer for the National Housing Conference and Center for Housing Policy; and Manager of the Planning Advisory Service at the American Planning Association. Appointed by President Obama, she also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2014 to 2016.

Lynn currently serves as the board chair of KABOOM!, a national nonprofit working to end playspace inequity for good. She previously served as a member of the Next City Board of Directors, the National Academy of Medicine’s Culture of Health Program Advisory Board, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Civic Infrastructure Working Group. She has also served as an advisor for the Trust for Civic Life and as Co-Chair for the American Planning Association’s Planning for Equity Policy Guide Working Group.

Lynn holds a Masters of Regional Planning from Cornell University, where she has also served as a visiting lecturer, and a B.S. in community and regional planning from Iowa State University. Lynn was honored by the Iowa State University College of Design with the 2009 Design Achievement Award and by the Iowa State University Alumni Association with the 2016 Outstanding Young Alumni Award.  In 2019, she was named one of 50 “Women of Influence” by the Royal Town Planning Institute’s The Planner magazine.