Jim Fisher is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and is a former Vice-Dean and holder of the Marcel Desautel Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management. He developed the first leadership course at the school and has taught it for over 25 years. Jim has an MBA, High Distinction, Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School. After several decades in the business world as a management consultant and food industry executive, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Toronto. Jim teaches courses in leadership, strategy and organization design in MBA programs and in Executive Development Programs for managers in the private and public sectors. He has received many teaching awards including being voted “Teacher of the Year” by MBA and EMBA classes six different times. His book, “The Thoughtful Leader: An Integrative Model of Leadership” published by UofT Press, offers a fresh and forward thinking framework that allows active and emerging leaders to be better prepared to live as a leader day to day. In order to successfully meet the challenges of a fast changing world, leaders can no longer choose between managing, directing or engaging. The thoughtful leader is someone who simultaneously, consistently and coherently manages, directs and engages their followers. The framework provides a way for anyone who is motivated to lead, has the courage to act and is willing to think about their actions to become more effective.

Bill’s focus is comprehensive city and regional planning, development economics, and implementation, working on projects in cities and regions throughout the United States and internationally. He is a lecturer on urban economic development at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior advisor to clients on planning and development under the dba CITECON. Bill’s professional experience includes Principal for City Economics at Arup; Principal/VP and Director of City & Regional Planning, Americas for AECOM; and a Sr. VP for Economics Research Associates. With these firms, Bill has worked on economic planning engagements in thirty states and ten countries. His government experience includes serving as Director of City Planning & Community Investment for the City of San Diego; Deputy Executive Director of the San Diego Redevelopment Agency; and Deputy Chief Operating Officer. Bill chaired the San Diego Association of Governments’ Technical Working Group of the region’s planning directors, chaired SanGIS, and was a board member of the San Diego Public Facilities Financing Authority. He directed adoption of San Diego’s City of Villages General Plan, which received APA’s prestigious Daniel Burnham Award for national excellence in comprehensive planning. It was California’s first large jurisdiction general plan adopted in compliance with AB32, the landmark climate law. An FAICP, Bill was national President of the 38,000-member American Planning Association from 2013-15, President of the California Planning Roundtable from 2018-2021, is a Vice-Chair of ULI’s Urban Revitalization Council and serves on ULI’s Curtis Infrastructure Forum leadership team. Bill received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Claremont McKenna College, and Master’s in City and Regional Planning from Harvard University.

Yvonne Yeung is the Principal, Practice Lead for Planning Sustainable Cities and Communities at Hatch Urban Solutions. She is a professional planner, urban designer, landscape architect, LEED Accredited Professional, and project management professional. She has over 23 years of experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors delivering award-winning transit-oriented communities worldwide. Specialized in team building, executive strategy, large-scale transformation and cross-sector implementation, Yvonne is the recipient of the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management MBA Award, the American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award, and numerous other industry planning and design awards. Appointed as the Urban Land Institute's Curtis Infrastructure Fellow, Vice-chair of the ULI SDRC Product Council, member of ULI Infrastructure Forum Leadership, ULI Toronto Advisory Board and ULI WLI Women’s Leadership Initiative Champions, Yvonne founded the “ULI Gettring to Transit Oriented Communities Initiative” and authored the "ULI 15-Minute Communities: A Leadership Guide" - a practical tool to inform how cities can better position infrastructure investment to deliver healthy, equitable, 15-min walkable complete communities through synergistic collaboration as a blueprint. Yvonne holds a Master of Business Administration, Executive, from the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management, and a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Rachel MacCleery is Co-Executive Director of the Lewis Center for Sustainability in Real Estate at the Urban Land Institute, where she leads the real estate industry in creating places and buildings where people and the environment thrive. In this role, Rachel provides strategic direction for the Lewis Center’s programs on sustainability, resilience, health and the built environment. Between 2013 and 2022, she led ULI’s Building Healthy Places program, which leveraged the power of ULI’s global networks to shape projects and places in ways that improve the health of people and communities, and prior to that she led ULI’s Infrastructure Initiative. Rachel has extensive knowledge of land use, environment and sustainability, social equity, and infrastructure policy and practice issues. Rachel has worked at ULI since 2008 and previously worked for AECOM and the District of Columbia Department of Transportation. She has a Masters Degree in Public Administration and Urban and Regional Planning from Princeton University, and also speaks Mandarin Chinese. She currently lives in Washington, DC.