CTC ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS
Sharon Akkoul
Sharon is passionate about employing technology to address environmental, healthcare, and education challenges. Her strengths are strategic planning, gap analysis, and requirements definition in order to create technology solutions for colleges, universities, hospital systems and medical schools, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions. She has proven project management, team leadership, critical thinking/problem-solving, communication, and organizational skills. Sharon retired from NYSERNet in 2020, and currently serves as a reviewer for the NTIA’s Broadband Connectivity Program.
Andy Gunn
Andy partners with communities to build and govern their own digital communications using the principles of Community Technology. He is a wireless, broadcast radio, and networking engineer, with experience in monitoring and control systems, and pedagogy and training. During his time as Senior Field Engineer at the Open Technology Institute, Andy worked on the Community SEED Grants project, which provided funding assistance and technical support to 11 community-controlled infrastructure projects in 10 countries. Prior to that he co-developed and piloted the “Digital Stewardship” approach to community technology with partners in Detroit and Brooklyn. He also co-developed a large suite of documentation and training tools for community wireless networks - the Commotion Construction Kit. Andy currently serves as the Director of Engineering at WAMU 88.5 in Washington, DC.
Kokei Otosi
Kokei Otosi has spent several years working with cities to design and execute urban development strategies, with a particular focus on mitigating climate impacts. Driving initiatives in tech and urban design, Kokei has experience bringing innovation to the public realm. Kokei currently works as a Senior Consultant at IBM. Prior to that, while at Van Alen Institute, she delivered a series of coastal and inland climate adaptation projects in Greater Miami, managing a critical workstream of a $200M bond program. Kokei holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a graduate of New York University.
Tonya Meyers Phillips
Tonya Meyers Phillips is a lifelong Detroit resident and woman of color. Her extensive legal and public policy advocacy background combined with this lived experience enables Tonya to provide research and advocacy that aligns with the needs of the communities she serves. Tonya currently serves as Public Policy Advisor to Michigan Legal Services – a nonprofit legal services organization dedicated to eliminating systemic causes of poverty in the areas of housing, health, public benefits, and community economic development– and is the Director of Community Partnerships & Development at Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice. Tonya’s work has directly supported Black, brown, and low-income Detroiters in their struggle for a Right to Counsel, a meaningful Community Benefits Agreement ordinance, and the interrogation of property overtaxation, as well as community wins for state and local eviction moratoriums and unemployment benefits solutions during the height of the COVID pandemic.
Theo Pride
Theo Pride is a community organizer with Detroit People’s Platform, a social justice organization committed to building power for majority Black Detroit. His work focuses on equitable development and strategies to build and implement inclusive, collectively owned, solidarity economies in marginalized communities of color. He leads the Detroit Budget Justice Coalition which seeks to win annually a municipal budget that invests in low income, Black neighborhoods and one designed through participatory decision-making by residents. Theo brings his unique experience as teacher/researcher of black liberation movements and its impact on revolutionary politics and social change to inform his organizing work.