Andrea Armeni, Co-Founder and Executive Director

Andrea brings to Transform Finance a combination of expertise in corporate law and finance, social justice work, and nonprofit management. A lawyer by training, Andrea was previously the Executive Director of the Gaia Amazon Fund, an organization advocating for the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest and for its environmental protection. His direct experience with the impact of outsider-led projects on Amazon communities led him to rethink the priorities of investments and social entrepreneurship through a community-focused lens. Andrea was a longtime correspondent for Emerging Markets magazine, with a focus on Latin America. He has taught sustainable development at Université Paris-Dauphine (France) and was a lecturer at the Yale Law School on the connections between law, power, and democracy. 

Andrea is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and the BMW Responsible Leaders Network. He is a graduate of Columbia University, the Yale Law School, and the United World College of the Atlantic.  

Curt Lyon, Associate Director of Programs

Curt brings his passion for developing system-level solutions to social justice issues as Associate Director of Programs of Transform Finance. In this role, he helps steer the direction and vision of Transform Finance’s programs, manages major research and advisory projects, contributes to reports and briefings, and coordinates staff across program areas. In addition, he develops key language for narrative building around the intersection of finance and social justice and holds relationships with Transform Finance’s broad set of stakeholders. Before Transform Finance, Curt became inspired by the power of a more just and democratized economy when he worked with the New Economy Coalition and the Boston Ujima Project in 2016. He considers himself an active learner of community engagement with capital, multi-stakeholder governance structures, and scalable strategies that allow the disenfranchised to reshape and redefine power structures. Curt studied math and economics at Hamilton College and now lives in Queens.

Sophie Kemp-Sherman, Operations Associate

Sophie is passionate about economic justice and wealth redistribution. She moved from West Virginia to New York in 2013 to attend Barnard College, where she studied economics and mathematics, learning the models of our current economic system and ways impactful change can be made within them. Her senior thesis examines the rise of the coal industry and historical patterns of labor exploitation and poverty in Central and Southern Appalachia. Since graduating, she has gained professional experience in communications, research, and data analysis. As the Operations Associate, she manages the logistical and administrative components of Transform Finance's projects, events, campaigns, and networks.

Wilneida Negrón, Project Manager, Capital, Media, and Technology

Dr. Wilneida Negrón most recently worked at the Ford Foundation, where she led cross-thematic area strategy development between the Gender, Race, Ethnic Justice, Technology and Society, Mission Investing, Future of Work(ers), and Civic Engagement Thematic areas, with a focus on helping labor movements deepen and leverage economic partnerships and movement-based partnerships. She works on the frontlines of social change spaces, fostering new multi-issue and cross-sectoral approaches and solutions to our increasingly complex socio-technical world and serves as a strategic advisor, consultant, and capacity-builder to emerging and established national and global civil and human rights organizations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she teaches courses on human rights, economic, social and cultural rights, and corporate social responsibility. She has a PhD in Comparative Politics, with a specialization in social and political implications of emerging technologies in East Asia and Latin America, a Masters in Public Administration, and an M.Phil. in International and Global Affairs. She is a fellow at Data & Society Research Institute and the 2019 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity.

Wilneida currently serves as the point person for two Transform Finance projects: one on reviewing the investment landscape – the major players, investment structures, and the reasons for a financing gap – for media organizations run by or for people of color, and one on developing considerations for investors and movement leaders around technology platforms that enable worker organizing and anti-corruption activities.

Kevin Keenan, Senior Advisor

Kevin Keenan is a Senior Advisor on criminal justice and human rights at Transform Finance and the founder and director of GROW Strategies. Kevin brings more than 25 years of management, policy change, and fundraising experience, as a leader at the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Vera Institute of Justice.

As Executive Vice President and Special Counsel at Vera, Kevin supervised several flagship programs. He helped Vera’s successful campaign to repeal the Congressional ban on funding college in prisons and its most successful fundraising campaign in sixty years. As COO and General Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he helped create and fund the organization’s research and campaign center, the Thurgood Marshall Institute. As Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego, he tripled the organization’s staff and budget and led ground-breaking efforts on voting rights, immigrants’ rights, and educational equality.

He graduated from Yale Law School and Swarthmore College.

Isabelle Clérié, Researcher

Isabelle is the co-founder and director at Haiti Impact Group, a think-tank with a mission to claim local narratives. She is a Haitian anthropologist whose work has focused on leveraging the power and assets of communities for self-directed progress. Isabelle has worked with a variety of organizations including community-based organizations and agricultural co-ops, multi and bi-laterals, impact investors and more across diverse fields such as microfinance, social business development, climate justice, food security, and human rights. In 2019, she worked with the UN’s Human Rights Office to lead an entirely civil society led process to design Haiti’s first national strategy for confronting past crimes and impunity.

Camille Kerr, Project Manager, Conversions to Employee Ownership

Camille Kerr is a business developer and consultant with expertise in ESOPs, worker cooperatives, and other structures that empower workers and communities. Camille has served as the Associate Director of The ICA Group, the Director of Field Building at the Democracy at Work Institute, and the Director of Research at the National Center for Employee Ownership. Camille serves as a member of the Council of Cooperative Economists, is an Executive Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, is an advisory board member for start.coop and Certified Employee Owned, is on the design team for Fifty by Fifty: Taking Employee Ownership to Scale, and was on the planning committee for the Platform Cooperative Conference and the Cooperative Professionals Conference. She earned a J.D. from the University of Cincinnati College Of Law, where she was an Arthur Russell Morgan Fellow for Human Rights and graduated cum laude.

As Project Manager for Transform Finance's project on building a fund to foster conversions to employee ownership, Camille leads research, relationship-building, and coordinating our partners and advisors. 

Meredith Benton, Project Manager, Repurposing Financial Innovation for Social Change