Board of Directors
Will Merrifield, Esq. is the Founder and Executive Director of The Center for Social Housing and Public Investment where he studies and promotes sustainable, publicly-controlled systems of housing, healthcare, and education. Will began his career as an attorney working in Ohio. There he defended people against evictions and foreclosures after the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. For the past decade, Will has worked as an attorney in Washington DC and has been involved in some of the preeminent housing struggles in the District, representing tenant associations fighting to keep their housing affordable in the face of large-scale redevelopment projects. In 2020, Will ran for an At-Large seat on the DC Council on a platform that focused on solving the District’s affordable housing crisis through the implementation of a large-scale social housing program. In 2022, Will co-authored the Green New Deal for Housing Act which was introduced before DC Council in late 2022 and will be re-introduced this council term. The legislation would deliver deeply affordable, mixed-income, and sustainable housing for DC through the creation of social housing. Will’s work has been featured in the Washington Post, National Public Radio, the District Dig and the Washington City Paper.
Patricia Mullahy Fugere, Esq. has been involved in affordable housing and homelessness issues since 1980, when as a college student, she supported low-income DC renters seeking to purchase their homes and convert them to cooperatively-owned housing. She was inspired by that experience to attend law school, seeking to use the tools of the legal profession to expand affordable housing opportunities for community members with limited resources. After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center in 1984, Patty went on to co-found and, from 1991 until late 2022, serve as the executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. She believes deeply that housing is a human right and is committed to ensuring that the wisdom and voices of those who experience homelessness or severe housing insecurity are a vital part of the policy conversations that impact their lives.
While having recently stepped down as the Legal Clinic’s executive director to spend more time with her family, Patty remains involved in housing justice advocacy in the nation’s capital. She has been engaged in a number of initiatives that promote justice for unhoused and low-income community members, both in DC and at the federal level. In addition to serving on the board of CSHPI, she is helping build a new generation of justice advocates as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University, where she co-teaches a course on “Homelessness, Poverty and Legal Advocacy.” She also serves on the boards of directors of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice and Community Spring. She was a founding member of the DC Access to Justice Commission, a co-founder and long-time steering committee member of the DC Fair Budget Coalition, and a member of the governing or advisory boards of the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project, the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, and the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
The importance of Patty’s work has been recognized both nationally and locally, with awards from the National Homelessness Law Center, the DC Bar, the Legal Aid Society of DC, the DC Bar Foundation, the People for Fairness Coalition and the Gray Panthers of Metro Washington. In addition, Patty holds honorary degrees from Georgetown University Law Center and Kings College (PA).
Nawal Rajeh is a peace educator and community organizer in the DC/ Baltimore area. She has organized communities around issues ranging from housing to worker’s rights. She is the co-founder of By Peaceful Means (BPM), a grassroots community organization that works to interrupt forms of physical and structural violence in Baltimore City. Rajeh holds a PhD from George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. She is currently a lecturer at Georgetown University’s Justice and Peace Studies Program and a consultant with Movement Matters in DC, helping housing organizers to build capacity on the ground through trainings, organizing coordination, and accompaniment.
Caroline Hennessy has been a housing organizer in the DC area for over 10 years. She has supported hundreds of tenants to understand and exercise their rights, to gain agency in their housing, and resist displacement. She now supports a team of other tenant organizers at Housing Counseling Services in their work throughout the city. Among the tenant groups she has supported are the tenants of Congress Heights, who fought to get their building out of ownership by a slumlord through many strategic angles of legal, procedural, and political pressure which resulted in the creation of 200+ units of affordable housing and ample housing protections for the original tenants. She has a background in sociolinguistics and approaches her work through a lens of language justice and access. She holds a graduate degree from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico where she lived for many years.