(Former) Executive Director, Asian Community Development Corporation

For over sixteen years, Jeremy Liu has worked for and with neighborhoods and communities of color, of seniors, and of youth, to confront issues of social and environmental equity, affordable housing, and community empowerment through community development. His work in community development has been creative and far-reaching. He is currently the Executive Director of the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation; headquartered in Oakland, it is the largest community development corporation in the East Bay, and among the largest in California.

Between 1998 and 2009, he transformed the  Asian Community Development Corporation  (Asian CDC) from a small and reactive community group into a regional and national leader in the community development field by creating programs that synthesize arts and culture, open source technology, community planning, organizing, facilitative leadership, marketing, transit-oriented and mixed-use real estate development, and design thinking. Jeremy worked closely with the Hudson Street for Chinatown Coalition towards envisioning, advocating for, and achieving a Community Vision for Parcel 24, the Big Dig parcel that the Asian CDC will be developing into mixed-use, mixed-income housing in accordance with this Community Vision. During his time with the Asian CDC, they developed over $90 million worth of housing, commercial and community facilities, and put over $130 million into the pipeline.

With professor Eric Gordon of Emerson College, he developed the Participatory Chinatown project, the first program to integrate gaming, augmented reality, and participatory planning into community planning, with seed funding from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning program and with expansion support from the Knight Foundation.

Together with Tad Hirsch of MIT's Media Lab, Liu developed Speakeasy, an open-source telephone network that conveniently connects immigrants with low English speaking proficiency to volunteer translators to improve their access to essential services when and where they need them most. This disruptive innovation is being deployed in pilots around the country, by municipalities and networks of grassroots community-based organizations.

Liu co-created, with Mike Blockstein, A Chinatown Banquet, a multimedia digital art and activism project that functions as a community planning, youth leadership development, and organizing/outreach tool. It is a "living document" of the community that describes the complex facets of the Chinatown neighborhood as a way of substantiating the interests of the community as expressed in the Chinatown Community Plan.

He graduated from Tufts University where he studied biology and environmental studies. He is also the Co-Founder of the National Bitter Melon Council and an artist.