Collins Center Associates
Mary Aicardi, MPA; BA
mary.aicardi@umb.edu
MPA: UMass Amherst
BA: UMass Amherst
Mary Aicardi brings twenty years of experience in public sector human resources administration and labor relations to the Collins Center. She served for more than eight years as the personnel director for the town of Watertown, Massachusetts, where she negotiated numerous collective bargaining agreements on behalf of Town management.
Additionally, Ms. Aicardi has worked as the assistant personnel director for the City of Barnstable, Massachusetts and as a volunteer recruiter for a non-profit agency. Ms. Aicardi is a management member of the Commonwealth’s Joint Labor Management Committee and serves on the Board of the Massachusetts Municipal Personnel Association.
She has conducted numerous training programs on a wide range of human resources topics, including performance appraisal, progressive discipline, and sexual harassment prevention. Aicardi has consulted with many cities and towns as a hearing officer in discipline cases and as an advisor in organizational restructuring. She has also reviewed and modernized classification and compensation plans for several municipalities.
Aicardi is certified by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination as a trainer of discrimination and sexual harassment prevention.
Kym Craven, MA; BA
kimberly.craven@umb.edu
MA: Anna Maria College
BS: UMass Lowell
Kym Craven leads the center’s public safety practice. She has 25 years of experience in the public safety sector and is nationally recognized for her facilitation, training, strategic planning, program development, departmental assessment, grant writing, training, and management expertise.
Craven has provided management consulting services to the City/County of San Francisco Police Department, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security’s Highway Safety Division, the Dallas Area Transit Police, the State of Vermont, the Town of Bridgton, Maine, the Port of New York/New Jersey Police Department, the City of Somerville, Massachusetts, and the Center for Campus Environmental Excellence (C2E2), along with more than 350 additional municipalities and state agencies. Among other projects, Craven developed a strategic mobilization plan for the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services, an in-depth study which led to a plan to integrate emergency warning and notification systems in an 85 community region. She helped secure funding for the Central Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association for regional training, management of a National Response Plan (NRP), and the National Incident Management System (NIMS) workshops for the Department of Homeland Security Office of Grants and Training.
Craven also conducted an organizational assessment and needs and gaps Analysis for an 18 community region in Central Massachusetts, facilitated a Local Emergency Planning Committee in Westford, Massachusetts, and developed Community Emergency Response Plans for municipalities and health agencies as well as participating in other projects related to planning, training and exercise for municipal agencies. In addition, Ms. Craven has conducted leadership training both nationally and internationally.
Craven is a former police officer with certification from the Northeast Regional Police Institute in Massachusetts.
Amy Dain, MPP; BA
amy.dain@umb.edu
MPP: Kennedy School of Government
BA: Wesleyan University
Amy Dain coordinates the StatNet initiative for the Collins Center. Previously, Ms. Dain managed Pioneer Institute's Housing and Middle Cities Initiatives, coordinated government affairs at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, served as an intern at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, volunteered in Israel, and worked as an environmental organizer in the Berkshires.
Barry L. Del Castilho, MPA; BA
barry.delcastilho@umb.edu
MPA: Maxwell School at Syracuse University
BA: Brown University
Barry L. Del Castilho possesses more than 35 years of experience in municipal management and is available through the Collins Center as a consultant, interim town manager or interim town administrator. Del Castilho retired from full-time, permanent duties in 2006 after more than 23 years as town manager of Amherst, Massachusetts. His position there followed 10 years in several positions for the City of Durham, North Carolina, including city manager, assistant city manager, director of public safety, and budget director. Del Castilho has also served as president of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, president of the Massachusetts Municipal Management Association, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission. Since 2006, Del Castilho has served as interim town administrator for the Towns of Wilbraham and South Hadley and as a consultant to South Hadley Fire District #1 (management assessment and fire chief search), to five towns through the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (sharing police services) and to the City of Springfield (regional E911).
James G. Gardiner, BS
jgardiner1609@charter.net
BS: Providence College
James G. Gardiner serves as a consultant to the Edward J. Collins, Jr. Center for Public Management on a wide range of municipal projects. He has a diverse public service background with over thirty years of municipal experience within the Commonwealth. His executive experience and expertise includes public/private sector health care, population health, and a wide portfolio of human service programs. His passionate and dynamic leadership is focused on designing and delivering policies and programs structured to proactively protect the quality of life for communities. His professional career began in 1980 within the discipline of public health and with progressive responsibility has served as both the Director of Public Health and Commissioner of Health and Human Services for the City of Worcester, MA. Additionally, Mr. Gardiner served as a member of the City Manager’s Executive Cabinet responsible for developing and prioritizing regional initiatives, identifying critical assets, and constructing supporting policies and operational procedures.
In his consulting career, he has provided organizational leadership and strategic planning to establish an innovative, sustainable, and equitable regional service delivery model of health and regulatory services within Central Massachusetts. Jay has also served as an Executive Director for a non-profit agency. As Director of the Molly Bish Center, Anna Maria College he lead a national network of public safety organizations to identify and prioritize its mission, secure financial support, inspire and engage community participation, and assembly legislative support.
He serves on multiple agency Boards and is a member of the Board of Health in Grafton, MA.
Rob Haley, MBA; MS
robin.haley@umb.edu
MBA: Georgia State University
MS: Georgia Institute of Technology
Rob Haley is an Associate with the Collins Center. His experience encompasses analyses of all local government services in hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the country. This experience includes organization-wide management audits as well as well over 200 organizational and staffing studies of every local government service. In addition, Mr. Haley has conducted over 30 classification and compensation studies for local governments. Mr. Haley’s career has included over 23 years as a private management consultant, as well as six years in the defense industry as a financial analyst.
Stephanie Hirsch, MBA; BA
stephanie.hirsch@umb.edu
MBA: Harvard Business School
BA: Swarthmore College
Stephanie Hirsch is director of SomerPromise, a joint City/Somerville Public Schools initiative to raise student achievement through performance management and increased coordination of service delivery, for the City of Somerville’s Mayor’s Office and Superintendent’s Office. Stephanie has brought her skills in analysis of operations and data to numerous organizations, including the University of Chicago, the City of New York, and the Boston Police Department. She launched the City of Somerville’s SomerStat program in 2004, which serves as the mayor’s primary tool for municipal management. Hirsch, together with Collins Center staff and with leadership from several New England municipalities, worked to establish StatNet. StatNet is a regional network of municipalities, coordinated by the center that shares data and meets regularly to discuss best practices in municipal governance. Hirsch also oversaw the initial development and rollout of Somerville’s 311 call center for resident service requests.
Richard Kelliher, JD; BA
richard.kelliher@umb.edu
JD: Suffolk University Law School
BA: Government, Harvard University
Richard Kelliher has a four decade career in Massachusetts local government, having served for fifteen years as Brookline town administrator, government, ten years as chief administrative officer for the City of Newton, five years on the staff of the Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA), and nearly ten years in the administration of Boston Mayor Kevin White. His leadership was recognized statewide in 2005 when he was elected MMA president.
Throughout his career, Kelliher chaired numerous study and action committees including those labor relations, revenue sharing and group health insurance. He was the first municipal designee ever appointed to the state Group Insurance Commission. Most recently, he was asked to serve on the Local Aid Task Force by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance. He has also held project and teaching positions at Brandeis and Clark Universities, respectively. Kelliher is currently a senior fellow at the Moakley Institute and Center for Public Management at Suffolk University.
Richard Kobayashi, MPA; BA
richard.kobayashi@umb.edu
MPA: Northeastern University
BA: UMass Amherst
Richard Kobayashi leads the center’s executive recruitment and interim management practice. He has worked with the Commonwealth and its municipalities as both an elected and appointed official since 1972. He served for over a decade as director of the commonwealth’s technical assistance programs for municipalities, as aide to the mayor in Malden, as director of planning and development in Lawrence, as a staff member of the Community Development Department in Cambridge, and as a senior planner at the MWRA.
In addition, he has served as an elected official in his hometown of Belmont. An independent consultant since 1995, Mr. Kobayashi has developed expertise in executive recruitment, urban planning, charter reform, and restructuring, creation of municipal consortia, water/wastewater, and capacity building of all kinds.
Kobayashi was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University where he studied urban policy
Monica R. Lamboy, MCP; BSE
monica.lamboy@umb.edu
MCP: City and Regional Planning, University of California at Berkeley
BSE: Civil Engineering, with a certificate in Architecture, Princeton University
Monica Renee Lamboy comes to the Collins Center from her most recent position as executive director of the City of Somerville’s Office of Strategic Planning & Community Development. She brings twenty years of progressively senior management experience in municipalities across the country, including stints as chief operating officer of the Washington, D.C. Department of Health and as chief administrative officer of Oakland, California’s Community & Economic Development Agency, where she was named that City’s Employee of the Year in 2002.
Lamboy has extensive experience in long range and strategic planning, public sector administration and budgeting, organizational change and development, program design, legislative drafting and ordinance implementation. In Oakland, she was one of the co-leaders of an organizational change initiative, “Moving Oakland Forward,” that involved 350 employees who evaluated and made recommendations on how to improve internal and external city services. In Somerville, in preparation for the extension of the Green Line through the city, Lamboy initiated preparation of the city’s first Comprehensive Plan and drafted innovated zoning to promote transit oriented infill development. During her time in Washington, D.C., she drafted the budget and monitored expenditures of $1.7 billion for the Department of Health.
James Purcell, BA
jampurc@aol.com
BA: UMass Amherst
Jim Purcell had a long career in municipal management before joining the Collins Center in 2011. He served as town manager of Norton for eight years, Leicester town administrator for eight years prior to that, and also served as Worcester County manager for nine years.
In these positions, he served as chief administrative officer and, as such, negotiated collective bargaining agreements; supervised all procurement and contracting; led the recruitment, education and training of municipal employees; prepared and presented annual operating and capital outlay budgets for the public entity, as well as proposing and implementing long range goals and policies. In addition, Purcell has served as a peer counselor providing technical assistance to other municipalities at the request of the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.
Purcell is currently serving as interim town administrator in Ashland, and has served in that capacity for the towns of Sherborn and North Andover.
Anthony J. Torrisi, MBA; BA
anthony.torrisi@umb.edu
MBA: Northeaster University
BA: Political Science and Urban Affairs, Boston College
Anthony J. Torrisi brings more than thirty-eight years of experience in Massachusetts municipal finance and administration to the Collins Center. From 1979 to earlier this year, Torrisi served as the director of finance and budget for the Town of Andover, responsible for the management and planning of the Town’s $150 million annual budget. During this period, he also served two lengthy terms as acting town manager. Prior to his service in Andover, Torrisi worked for the City of Worcester and the Town of Danvers.
Torrisi is a founding member of the Massachusetts Government Finance Officers Association, was elected its first president, and served as the state association’s representative to the national association. He is often invited to speak before many governmental and non-governmental groups and has won many significant awards over the years from a variety of professional organizations, including the National Government Finance Officers Association, the Association of Town Finance Committees, and the Massachusetts Municipal Association.
