About the Speaker: Amy Chester has spent more than 25 years in municipal policy, community engagement, real estate development and communications advocating for the built environment. As the Managing Director of Rebuild by Design (RBD), Chester led an international design-driven competition utilizing a truly inclusive and collaborative process, to create implementable large-scale infrastructure projects to address the physical and social vulnerabilities exposed by Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast United States. The process resulted in $930 million in awards from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to implement the winning designs, which have now attained $4.2 billion of investment. Since then, Rebuild by Design has transformed the competition’s collaborative approach into an organization that helps governments and communities replicate its success for a variety of scales in locations around the world to address climate change, transportation, housing, community collaboration and equity.
Chester previously worked for NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg as Chief of Staff to the Deputy Mayor for Legislative Affairs and as a Senior Policy Advisor. Outside of her responsibilities at RBD, Chester co-founded the Resilience PAC to educate and elect candidates who prioritize climate resilience and has taught at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture. (more)