Tunua Thrash is the Executive Director of the West Angeles Community Development Corporation where she serves as the organization’s leader and chief economic development expert for the Crenshaw District of South Los Angeles. She has an extensive background in advocacy, urban revitalization, ...
Read moreTunua Thrash is the Executive Director of the West Angeles Community Development Corporation where she serves as the organization’s leader and chief economic development expert for the Crenshaw District of South Los Angeles. She has an extensive background in advocacy, urban revitalization, workforce development, and project management.
As Executive Director of West Angeles Community Development Corporation, Ms. Thrash has proven her commitment to the organization’s mission of increasing social and economic justice, demonstrating compassion, and alleviating poverty throughout the community. West Angeles Community Development Corporation is the outreach arm of West Angeles Church of God In Christ, a 25,000 member mega-church in Los Angeles. The West Angeles CDC is one of the largest property owners in the Crenshaw Corridor with more than 400 units of affordable housing for young families, seniors, and the disabled. They provide services to people in need through meal programs, homebuyer education classes, entrepreneurial training, and foreclosure prevention counseling. Ms. Thrash has overseen more than $100 million in real estate assets and development projects, brokered public-private relationships with equity partners, and structured complex financing from multiple sources while at West Angeles CDC. Her leadership on a number of important initiatives surrounding urban revitalization, affordable housing development, urban infill, and transit-oriented development has literally transformed South Los Angeles.
A native Angeleno, Ms. Thrash is admired for her ability to provide a unique perspective while analyzing and managing the real estate development process in some of the country’s most unique marketplaces. Prior to joining West Angeles Community Development Corporation, Ms. Thrash served as a Director for Green Door Advisors, an urban real estate advisory firm. As a small business owner, her firm’s expertise included market and financial analysis of urban infill communities, mixed-use retail, office, hotel and housing developments. She has also previously worked as Director of Commercial Revitalization for a Massachusetts-based economic development corporation. While in that role, she assisted in the acceleration of private capital investment into the Boston inner city neighborhood of Roxbury. As an alumnus of the Greenlining Institute’s Academy Program, Ms. Thrash spent the past decade advocating for the economic empowerment of women and people of color through formal meetings and testimony at the Federal Reserve, Security Exchange Commission, and California Public Utility Commission.
Ms. Thrash received her Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an emphasis on Urban Economic Development and a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Ms. Thrash is also a graduate of the Ross Minority Program in Real Estate sponsored by the University of Southern California’s Lusk Center. Along with a host of other designations and distinctions, Ms. Thrash is an active member of the Urban Land Institute, chairs the LA Metro Crenshaw to LAX Community Leadership Council, appointed Board Member of the Los Angeles Development Fund, elected Board Member of the Greenlining Institute, and former Commissioner for the Los Angeles Convention Center.
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