Vinita Goyal
Formally trained as an architect and urban planner, I am committed to the vision of intersectional place-based work that moves forward regenerative and restorative models that center the leadership of low income communities of color. This work also honors the system of reparations where extractive resources are returned to the community. In that regard, I am currently supporting Full Spectrum Labs, a US based think tank, incubator, and accelerator that fuels community led visions with capital strategies, through my role as Community Investment Director. I am also serving on the board of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and I am an independent writer and consultant.
I previously led efforts in nonprofits, including at San Francisco Transit Riders (Union) and at the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative, and in philanthropy, at Silicon Valley Community Foundation, in organizational and development strategies and in providing thought partnership on place-based planning, advocacy, policy and investments that were centered on racial and social justice and capacity building for local communities. Prior to that, I was involved in the public sector, including at the City of Oakland, the Association of Bay Area Governments and the City of Seattle, having transitioned from my first forays in the field through the studying and shaping of the built environment as purely a place, devoid of its people. In the public sector specifically, I coordinated efforts to win broader consensus and streamline processes for the integration of social equity concerns in several of my programs and projects.
Places go beyond the built environment for me. Real measure of abundance is the enhancement of community. Therefore, through my work, I am most interested in identifying who the solutions we are all working towards are ultimately serving, the community’s own leadership and creativity in thinking through alternate pathways, and how and where the intended outcomes from these solutions or alternate pathways are being met.
In between all that, there have been other pursuits in my life: a fair-trade clothing business with a supply chain production across India and the US that helped identify the scale and the industry I was most passionate about, and dance that allows me to forever imagine new possibilities and that never ceases to ground me.
I received my bachelor’s in architecture from the Government College of Architecture in Lucknow, India, a city where I also came of age, and earned my master’s in city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, where “I discovered myself and life in all its myriad hues” became home since then.