Dasjon Jordan is an organizer, designer, and planner from New Orleans. He has worked with public agencies, cities, community-based organizations and the private sector on place-based economic development strategies in the U.S., South Africa and Mexico. Dasjon specializes in commercial district  revitalization focusing on small business financial and marketing ecosystems, restorative design strategies, and neighborhood cultural planning.

Prior to returning to BCC, Dasjon was the Strategy and Development Officer for the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation. Also, Dasjon was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) CoLab (Community Innovators Lab) post-graduate fellow. His work focused on growing the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, student engagement in racial and economic justice in practice and pedagogy through CoLab. Dasjon returns to lead BCC, after working as the Commercial Revitalization Coordinator at Broad Community Connections in 2016. He holds a master’s of city planning from MIT and a bachelor’s of architecture from Louisiana State University.

Dasjon believes in people and trusting relationships to forge civic power and make things happen. BCC’s future with Dasjon is rooted in relationships and driven by bold imagination.

Shana brings over two decades of experience as a community organizer, program strategist, and small business owner with a deep commitment to justice, equity, and neighborhood resilience. With a background that bridges grassroots advocacy, nonprofit leadership, and cooperative economics, she brings a people-centered approach to program design, stakeholder collaboration, and community development. Whether mobilizing residents around land use, founding parent-led education initiatives, or co-creating spaces for restorative justice, Shana builds strategies rooted in care, power, and possibility.

She joined BCC after co-founding and operating Pagoda Café on Bayou Road for a decade, where she combined her hospitality experience with a vision for collective ownership and local cultural vitality. Prior to that, she served as Co-Director of Community Building Initiatives at Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, where she led post-Katrina recovery efforts in Freret and the 7th Ward.

At her core, Shana believes in collective leadership, joyful resistance, and designing programs that honor the voices, needs, and dreams of the people they serve.

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Sonali Fernando is a first-generation Sri Lankan American whose multidisciplinary path—spanning brand direction, restaurant ownership, music and art curation, cultural arts education, live performance, and economic development—has provided her a layered understanding of how communities form and how culture moves through the world.

Sonali joined BCC after serving as the inaugural Brand Director for Ace Hotel’s New Orleans location, where she shaped the hotel’s local identity, programming, and community engagement. Prior to that, she owned and operated a whiskey-centric gastro pub in New Orleans' vibrant Marigny neighborhood. Both roles gave Sonali invaluable experience in managing large, diverse teams of stakeholders while deepening her understanding of local economies and their direct impact on individual residents, neighborhoods, and culture -at-large.

Sonali’s dedication to the transformative power of collaboration is paired with a disciplined approach to process. With deep expertise in co-creating and activating organizational values, Sonali weaves these ethics into every aspect of a business— through internal processes, communication methods, workflow design, and the external touchpoints of events, services, and marketing. She’s driven by a radical imagination that looks beyond the present to shape a future that’s creative, intentional, and community-focused.

Chris Daemmrich is a designer and organizer raised in Austin, Texas, on Tonkawa land. He has worked in architectural, development, advocacy and political organizations in New Orleans, across Louisiana, and throughout the US. Chris studied architecture and political science on Chitimacha, Choctaw and Houma land at Tulane University, graduating in 2017 with a master's degree in architecture and a bachelor's degree in political science.

Chris is a National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) Project Pipeline mentor and serves on the boards of NOMA Louisiana and of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. From 2021 to 2023, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Design Thinking at Tulane’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center. In his teaching and through the Collaborative Design Workshop, a design justice education, facilitation and advocacy practice he founded in 2019, Chris prepares students and professionals to challenge unjust systems. Chris has lived in the Broad corridor since 2018 and in New Orleans since 2012.

Chris is inspired in his work by his grandmother, Ellen Loeb, a public schoolteacher in Montgomery, Alabama, and by her father, Isidore Green, owner of a retail clothing store in downtown Bessemer, Alabama in the early 20th century.

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Maria Rowinska is a first generation Polish American born to a family of educators. Raised between the East Coast and Poland, she and her family were incorporated into broad networks of diverse immigrant populations in Boston and New York. These networks, and the systems they created for mutual support, emergency response,  and the preservation of joy, became the bedrock of her values system.

After graduating with a Bachelor’s of Music in Performance from Berklee College of Music in 2017, she relocated to Puerto Rico, where she taught at the Conservatorio de Artes de Caribe, and joined the Afro-Cuban electronic music project IFE, touring nationally and featuring on 3 LP + EP releases. She moved to New Orleans in 2021 and served as the Music Programs Coordinator and Music Education Lead at Material Institute until 2025. In her role at Material Institute, she built a robust Music Education complement to the Institute’s recording technologies, and administered programs that gave over 250 new participants access to Material Institute’s resources, collaborating with local artists, educators, and universities within a non-hierarchical learning model of her design. 

Her work as an educator, administrator, artist, and creator of systems is inspired by and dedicated to the infinite creativity of the communities that have welcomed and grown her throughout her life.

Heather was born in Rhode Island and raised by New Orleans, where Fairgrounds and Faubourg St. John became home. Her values were shaped by the radical mutual aid and solidarity practiced by her community and chosen family in our neighborhood.

Heather attended UNO and Delgado before earning her Masters in Media Studies at the New School. She brings years of experience in collaborative community media, nonprofit leadership, organizing, disability justice, and mutual aid affinity groups to her role. When she’s not in New Orleans, she’s in the high desert of New Mexico - off-grid with her husband  and a funny dog. Her interest in solidarity economies and in the wellbeing and thriving of her home corridor of Broad Street inform her work at BCC.

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