Staff
The Asset Policy Initiative of California is the policy arm of EARN, a San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to creating a new cycle of prosperity through financial management training, match savings accounts and innovative financial services. Learn more at www.earn.org
Ben Mangan, President and CEO
Ben Mangan has more than 10 years of experience in public policy and management in the areas of education, affordable housing and business development. As the Midwest Practice Leader for Ernst & Young's Public Private Development Group in Chicago, he led efforts to find solutions to policy, development and strategy problems for public, private and non-profit clients.Immediately prior to joining EARN, Ben served as the Director of Organizational Strategy for an international internet company. He has also consulted to affordable housing developers, CDFIs, and quasi-governmental economic development agencies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from Vassar College and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University.
Contact: Ben@earn.org or 415.217.3662.
Camille M. Busette, Vice President
Camille M. Busette is EARN's new Vice President. She will lead EARN's policy arm, the Asset Policy Initiative of California. Before joining our team, Camille served as Deputy Director of Government Relations where she managed PayPal's advocacy efforts for the Americas. In addition to state and federal legislative advocacy, she worked closely with several national central banks and U.S. Federal regulators on financial services issues. Prior to joining PayPal, she headed the privacy function at Intuit, and the consumer and market research division at NextCard.
Camille is a former Ford Foundation Post-doctoral Research Fellow, and holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Contact: Camille@earn.org or 415.217.3661
Sheryl Lane, Director of Constituency Building
Sheryl joined EARN in June 2010 as our inaugural Director of Constituency Building. Sheryl brings a wealth of policy and coalition-building experience.
She was most recently the Program Director and Campaign Coordinator for the Richmond Equitable Development Initiative (REDI) at Urban Habitat, a highly regarded organization in the San Francisco Bay Area that focuses on including low-income communities and communities of color in the advocacy, research, and coalition-building necessary to advance environmental, economic, and social justice in the Bay Area.
Prior to her work at Urban Habitat, Sheryl was a Community Relations and Policy Analyst on the staff of Mayor Ron Gonzales in San Jose, where she represented the Mayor at community, business, and public agency meetings and where she was responsible for a significant policy analysis portfolio.
Sheryl holds a Master's of Science in Urban Policy and Management from the Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy at the New School in New York City. She holds two B.A.s, one in Sociology and another in Psychology & Social Behavior, both from UC Irvine.
Contact: Sheryl@earn.org or 415.230.0907
William Lapp, Ph.D., Research Manager
William Lapp, Ph.D., joined EARN as the Research Manager during the summer of 2010 to advance the cause of helping low-and middle-income people to achieve economic prosperity by conducting research on evidence-based best practices in the financial industry. Bill came to EARN with a diversity of experience evaluating pro-social initiatives such as the Friends for Youth Mentoring program in Redwood City, CA, sober living houses in Berkeley and Sacramento, programs for helping homeless people in the Haight-Ashbury district and the Treatment on Demand program in the City and County of San Francisco that was sponsored by the National Institute of Health. Dr. Lapp has also worked as : (a) Biostatistician for the Public Health Institute in the East Bay who among many other things studied predictors of longevity, (b) Senior Scientist at Ischemia Research and Education Foundation finding ways to advance cardiac and other cardiovascular surgeries, (c) Researcher/Analyst at Stanford University Medical School examining treatments for Alzheimer's disease and late-life depression and (d) Completed a two-year NIDA Sponsored Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCSF's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute.
Before finally arriving "home" in San Francisco, Bill worked for 10 years as a Research Scientist at the New York State Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) in Buffalo, New York. He started at RIA during his last year of graduate school in the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he studied Cognitive Psychology under one of the world's foremost Gestalt Theorists, James R. Pomerantz, Ph.D. In the process of learning about artificial intelligence models of perception, memory, language and thought, Bill opened up his mind to the formal science of multivariate statistics, thereby discovering interesting ways to look for coherent patterns within nests of complex information. The clinically and theoretically oriented researchers at RIA valued these skills and invited him to join them in the search for models of addiction and effective treatments. There he helped to develop psychological tests that have been broadly used in Addiction Medicine for decades, studied social interactions and cognitive-emotional reactions of people in a simulated bar setting, and conducted his own psychopharmacological research on the effects of alcohol on attention, creativity and the perception of time. Dr. Lapp's research was mentioned in the London Times, he has been interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland, asked to deliver an invited address on innovations in statistical analysis at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association and received an Outstanding Research Award from the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. Bill was also listed in the Who's Who in the East, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in Health Care and Medicine before "Heading out West."
At EARN, Bill is applying what he has learned about people's cognitions, emotions, motivations and behaviors to help the various teams develop financial products and policies that work to optimally build people's assets. The intellectual challenge is to develop mixed design research (qualitative and quantitative) and to apply new and existing forms of multivariate statistics to explore theoretical possibilities in Behavioral Economics. His human interest is to strengthen people so they can maximize their health, their experience of life and more readily achieve peace of mind. Using the strength of multivariate statistics, Bill is testing predictive models of asset building as well as the wealth-health connection, while simultaneously searching for patterns in open-ended discourse through the extraordinary magic of artificial intelligence.
Contact: bill@earn.org or 415.230.0908
Sunaena K. Chhatry, Senior Policy Associate
Sunaena is a Senior Policy Associate at EARN where she manages EARN's communication and advocacy efforts. She is also the primary policy liaison for local and state level partners. Sunaena is currently a Women's Policy Institute Fellow, a program of the Women's Foundation of California.
Before Joining EARN, Sunaena served as an Academy Associate at the Greenlining Institute where she did research on issues affecting low-income and minority communities in California. After completing the leadership training program she worked at the Delaware Financial Literacy Institute where she developed the foundation for a statewide, social marketing campaign called First State Saves, an offshoot of the National America Saves campaign.Sunaena holds a Bachelor of Arts in South & South East Asian Studies and Education from the University of California, Berkeley.
Contact: Sunaena@earn.org or 415.217.3671.
Javier Oliver, Undergraduate Policy Intern
Javier is an Undergraduate Policy Intern at EARN. Prior to joining EARN, Javier worked as a Policy Intern at the Greenlining Institute where he did research on issues related to urban economic development. He also served as an intern at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
Javier is a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow at Princeton University. He is a senior at UC Berkeley double majoring in Political Science and Psychology.
Contact: Javier@earn.org
