Alison Coffey is a Ph. D student in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Research Affiliate of the MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab). Her research focuses on conflicts over land, property, and urban development, as well as community-led efforts to build democratic forms of local governance. Previously, Alison spent three years at MIT CoLab, supporting knowledge co-creation processes with partners in Latin America and the U.S. This included facilitating participatory action research on the solidarity economy in Brazil, co-designing methods for assessing community innovation capacity in Colombia, and supporting the development of a transnational framework on diverse approaches to building economic democracy with 20 leaders from across the Americas. She holds a Master’s degree in City Planning from MIT and a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Tufts University. alisoncoffey@utexas.edu