Ivette Mongalo-Winston, AICP LEED AP

About Me

Ivette's focus as an urban designer has been on working with public and private clients to actively engage the communities they serve in order to achieve consensus through an open participatory planning process. She believes planning is about people and it can therefore be facilitated by clearly outlining a public process at the outset of a project, engaging participants in a meaningful way, and maintaining transparent communication throughout the life of the project.  She is focused on making Pittsburgh a more equitable place and advancing opportunity for minority and women-owned businesses within the design and development industry.

Her training as an architect, as well as subsequent graduate work at the University of Miami with some of the most progressive urban design firms in the country, led her to work with Urban Design Associates (UDA) in Pittsburgh, PA. During her twelve years with UDA, her leadership contributed to the effectiveness of widespread public processes and to the success of highly collaborative efforts among design professionals, public officials, and participating public/private partnerships in places as distinctly different as Pittsburgh, PA, Tulsa, OK; Alameda, CA; Norfolk, VA; Baltimore, MD, and small villages in Scotland. These projects shared a design process rooted in collaboration, transparency, and inclusion, which subsequently laid the foundation for Mongalo-Winston Consulting, LLC. In particular her experience working on transforming public housing into mixed-income communities has fueled her commitment to communities suffering from disinvestment. This commitment now grounds her practice and informs her work as a designer, facilitator and community mediator.

Education

Ivette Mongalo-Winston earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Suburb and Town Planning, with honors, from the University of Miami. Among her awards, she was a participating scholar in the Knight Program in Community Building, an organization that provides a forum for educating professionals in many disciplines in the field of urban design. She is a member of both The American Planning Association and the Congress of New Urbanism.