On staff since 2010, Angela Larsen leads the Building Resilience team as Community Planning Director. Angela is a land use attorney and urban planner whose work is focused on implementation of policies, projects, and practices through community networks to enhance and sustain the Great Lakes’ natural and social environments. A central part of Angela’s work is the facilitation of collaborative planning processes to identify relevant climate impacts, assess risks, prioritize actions, and remove barriers to implementation. To move this work forward with a wide range of partners, Angela also secures and manages a portfolio of public and private investments directed towards the implementation of community priorities. This includes communication materials to build support for climate-informed conservation practices, participatory planning, and the development of local leadership across the communities in which the Alliance works.
Angela has a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a master’s degree in urban planning and policy with a focus on sustainable development from the University of Illinois-Chicago, where she currently serves as an adjunct professor of land use law. Angela is driven by the belief that meaningful change happens at the local and street level. She gets excited about working with communities to build local leadership to create powerful, sustainable change. In her spare time, Angela loves to spend time in her garden.