The team behind the work.
Our leadership brings together lived experience, design research, public administration, and community development — perspectives that rarely share the same room.
Loren Dalbert
Founder · Dalbert Design
Loren works at the intersection of lived experience and institutional change. After navigating homelessness twice and spending most of his life in poverty, he didn't just find his way to stable ground — he built a career out of what he learned getting there. A disabled veteran and social entrepreneur, his philosophy is simple: sometimes the best way to change a system is to color outside the lines, then make the system move the lines to include what you've created.
Today he serves as a lived experience consultant embedded in Contra Costa County's cross-sector planning processes, with active relationships spanning county department heads and directors. He co-chairs the California Guaranteed Income Community of Practice Policy Workgroup, helped catalyze the CoCo Go BIG guaranteed income pilot and $4.25M in county funding, and is building Dalbert Design into a replicable model for lived experience leadership in public systems. Lives in Antioch, CA.
Dalbert Design
Loren Kadar
Youth Living Expertise · Dalbert Design
Loren Kadar brings the living expertise that matters most to Dalbert Design's youth-facing work: he was unhoused during his high school and young adult years. That experience — navigating systems as a young person with no stable ground — is the lens he applies to every engagement. It's not background. It's the work.
He splits his time between Dalbert Design and the City of Antioch's Office of Public Safety & Community Resources, where he works in housing and youth services — building from the inside the kinds of systems he once had to navigate from the outside. He has co-led Comment Academy's youth advocacy group, served as a housing advocate through the Hope Solutions Resident Empowerment Program, and co-led Antioch's YMCA Youth and Government cohort.
Living Expertise · Youth
Judi Brown
Co-founder & Managing Partner · CivicMakers
Judi co-designs immersive, accessible learning experiences to bring collaborative problem-solving tools to individuals and institutions. As co-founder and managing partner of CivicMakers, she has spent over a decade partnering with governments, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations to unearth human insights and co-create solutions to public challenges — specializing in service design, strategic planning, training, and community engagement.
She brings a graduate background in public administration and policy and a deep commitment to the idea that good design only works when it's built with the people it's meant to serve. In the Dalbert Design partnership, Judi provides the human-centered design methodology and facilitation infrastructure that transforms lived experience insight into actionable institutional change.
CivicMakers