• • About the Project
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• • History of the Lower 9th
  • Lower 9th Ward Aerial
• • About the Team
  • William McDonough + Partners
  • Cherokee Gives Back Foundation
  • Graft
• • Executive Architect
  • Design Firm Biographies

The Make It Right Team

The Make it Right core team assembled by Pitt includes experts such as:

• William McDonough + Partners, a world leader in environmental architecture
• Cherokee Gives Back Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Cherokee, a firm that specializes in remediation and sustainable redevelopment of environmentally impaired properties
• Graft, an international leading architecture firm that Brad Pitt collaborates with on projects around the world
• Trevor Neilson and Nina Killeen, advisors to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation

This core team is working in tandem with leaders of a local, neighborhood led coalition of not-for-profits, and has expanded to include four local, four national and five international architecture firms to ensure that the focus on – and commitment to – the Lower 9th Ward is demonstrably diverse and reflective of Brad Pitt's dedication to giving this critical neighborhood access to the best expertise available.

Tom Darden, III, Director

Tom Darden is the Director of Make It Right. Mr. Darden received a B.A. with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He worked as a development consultant in Washington, DC, evaluating former manufacturing and mining sites in the D.C. metropolitan market, including the site of the discovery of the largest dinosaur bone unearthed on the east coast of North America. Darden focused efforts on reclaiming the mine while establishing a conservation easement in order to preserve the archeologically significant site. In 2003, he joined a startup wireless telecommunications firm in Raleigh, N.C., which he helped grow from five employees to over twenty-five in two years. Darden left in 2005 to found Arbor Equity, a real estate firm committed to sustainable development and brownfields. Mr. Darden has relocated to New Orleans to oversee the Make It Right project.

Trevor Neilson

Trevor Neilson is senior advisor to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation and is a senior advisor to APCO Worldwide. Prior to these roles, Mr. Neilson was Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, which was created with investments from Bill Gates, George Soros and Ted Turner and represents more than 220 multinational companies with interests related to healthcare, biotechnology and life sciences. Previously he served as Executive Vice President of the Casey Family Programs, the United States' largest operating foundation, and as Director of Public Affairs and Director of Special Projects for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest foundation, with assets of more than $28 billion dollars.

Additionally, Mr. Neilson worked directly for Bill and Melinda Gates on a variety of personal projects. Prior to his work for Gates, Neilson served in the White House Office of Scheduling and Advance and worked for EvansGroup Public Affairs. Mr. Neilson is Chairman of the Advisory Board for Global Action for Children, and non-executive Vice-Chairman of SAFLINK Corporation.

He was a founding board member of Bono's organization Debt, AIDS, Trade Africa and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Genocide Intervention Network, the Business & Human Rights Resource Center and the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. Mr. Neilson is a Georgetown University Center for Public and Non-Profit Leadership Visiting Practitioner, a World Economic Forum "Young Global Leader" and Lyndon Johnson Congressional Scholar. Mr. Neilson graduated from Washington State University. Neilson is joining the faculty of the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute as an adjunct professor.

Nina Killeen

Nina Killeen was born and raised in New Orleans (and lost her home to the break in the levee at the 17th Street Canal following Hurricane Katrina). She attended Loyola University, and subsequently worked for a local television production company as a producer on numerous commercials and documentary-length films. After living in Italy and New York City for four years, Nina returned home to New Orleans and continued in the field of film production and marketing. Spanning the next 15 years of her career, she produced and/or coordinated over 250 projects, including numerous award winning productions. One of which she is particularly proud was the nationally acclaimed PSA for Prevent Child Abuse, filmed with convicted murderers at Angola Prison in Louisiana. In 1996, the Advertising Club of New Orleans named her the "Advertising Person of the Year" in the field of Director, Producer, Creative Technicals. Nina has served as chairman of the local PBS Showboat Auction, coordinating and organizing the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, business and community leaders and raising hundreds of thousand of dollars for the station. She has owned and operated Target Media, a media buying service specializing in political strategies. Most recently, after producing the New Orleans segment of Angelina Jolie's "A Place in Time," she is serving as Advisor to the Jolie Pitt Foundation on the Make It Right Project.