BOARD

Stephanie Rivera-Kumar is the Director of Business Development at the National Education Opportunity Network (NEON). She brings more than 15 years of experience across nonprofit leadership, fundraising, research, strategy, and cross-sector partnership development, with a focus on education, economic mobility, public health, and equitable community development. Stephanie is also a PhD candidate in City and Regional Planning and a Fontaine Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Her doctoral research examines Latinx entrepreneurship, ethnic enclaves, spatial analysis, and urban economic development. She is based in Philadelphia.

Nando Micale is a principal at LRK, an architecture and city planning firm with offices across the US. He brings over 25 years of architecture and urban design experience for communities across the country and abroad. He is actively involved with Urban Land Institute (ULI) at both the national and local levels. He teaches urbanism courses at the University of Pennsylvania and resides in Collingswood, New Jersey.

Richard Roark is Co-Chief Executive Officer and Partner at OLIN, a landscape architecture firm based in Philadelphia. He first joined OLIN in 2001 upon receiving his Master of Community Planning. His work spans a range of scales, focused on expanding the civic capacity of the landscape. He has served as an invited guest juror at Arizona State University, Auburn University, Temple University and University of Pennsylvania, and is a past member of Auburn University’s Landscape Advisory Council. He is based in Philadelphia.

Betsy Caesar is trained in design and early childhood education and has been working in the field of play since 1995. She and her husband owned a play design build company and she wrote the ASTM play safety guidelines for infants and young children. She has designed children’s environments across the PA/DE/NJ region, including Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse, and was a juror for the Play Space Design Competition in 2016. She is based in Haverford PA.

Alexandra Lange is a Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic and author. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in design publications including Architect, Curbed, Harvard Design Magazine, and Metropolis, as well as in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. She is a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. In 2025 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for a series in CityLab on how urban design and architecture affect children and families. She is based in New York City.

Cynthia Gentry has been a play designer, writer, and children’s rights advocate for over three decades. Based in Atlanta, she served for over 12 years on the executive board of the International Play Association as the Editor-in-Chief of PlayRights Magazine, and advocated world-wide for children’s right to play. Her company Living Playgrounds designs nature-based, joy-filled play environments. She is currently worting on The Larkie Project, a children’s nature-play book series backed by a podcast and DIY/DIT (Do It Together) videos.

Keiko Tsuruta Cramer is a principle of WRT, a landscape architecture and planning firm based in Philadelphia. She has over two decades of experience in landscape architecture, architecture, and engineering. She also holds licensure in Japan, and has worked on numerous projects abroad including the Daiichi Mutual Life Insurance Office Landscape in Kanagawa. She is based in Philadelphia.

Dr. Mariana Brussoni is the Director of the Human Early Learning Partnership, and a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research investigates child injury prevention and children’s unstructured, outdoor play, including risks that come with it. We spoke on WHYY’s podcast on Risky Play, and she showcased our work on the recent TedEd video on risky play. She is based in Vancouver.

Teresa (Teri) B. Hendy, CPSI is President of the Hendy Institute and a nationally recognized leader in playground safety, design, and advocacy. As owner of Site Masters Inc. for 30 years, Teri led the design of hundreds of play environments across the US and provided safety consulting to manufacturers, schools, parks and recreation agencies, and museums. She serves as Vice-Chair of the ASTM Standard for Public Playground Equipment and has been recognized for her significant contributions to playground safety. She is based in Florida.

Tony Malkusak is a Landscape Architect with over 40 years of experience creating and ensuring safe outdoor play environments. He is one of the nation’s leading experts on playground safety, accessibility for play areas, and play environment design. He is a training instructor for the National and International Certified Playground Safety Inspector program and has developed Contining Education Training for ongoing CPSI certification. He is based in Rochester.