Associates

Anna Brassard

Anna is a full-member of the Canadian Institute of Planners and Registered Professional Planner with the Alberta Professional Planning Institute. She has 14 years experience in the fields of strategic planning, SafeGrowth®, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), facilitation, facility planning, master planning and comprehensive community planning with First Nation communities. She spent 5 years as an Adjunct Assistant professor with the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary supervising Master’s level theses and teaching graduate level students courses in facilitation and building safe communities. This included developing a new joint initiative – “People and Place” – between the faculties of Social Work and Environmental Design. She has conducted workshops across North America on SafeGrowth® to police, design professionals and community members.

Tarah Hodgkinson

Tarah is a certified SafeGrowth® Advocate and holds a PhD in criminology. She is a lecturer/assistant professor in criminology at Griffith University in Australia. Her areas of research include crime prevention, policing, collective violence, methodology and statistics, auto-theft, gangs, crime-mapping, and victimology. Her doctoral research focused on the need for community leadership in partnerships with the police. She has co-taught SafeGrowth® in Canada and the United States and worked with the planning department of the City of Saskatoon, Canada. She is a board member of the International CPTED Association as well as member of the World Society of Victimology and the American Society of Criminology.

Macarena Rau Vargas

Macarena is an international authority on CPTED and has appeared on TED Talks describing her story working in gang ridden favelas. She is a Chilean-born architect and the Vice Chair of the International CPTED Association. Macarena heads the Latin American chapter of the ICA and has consulted in CPTED for the World Bank and advised national governments. She is executive director of the South American International Safety Fair and Director of the firm PBK Consulting, a leading CPTED firm in Latin America.

Cindy Granard

Cindy is a CPTED and SafeGrowth consultant to AlterNation LLC. She has been a police officer for 28 years with police departments in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Redmond, WA. She has worked in anti-crime teams, general patrol, undercover, domestic violence, community response teams, communications and evidence. Cindy has won numerous local and national awards for her prevention and community safety work including Working Against Domestic Violence Award, the Seattle Police Department Foundation’s Innovation Award, and the national LISC/MetLife Community Policing Partnership Award.

Carl Bray

Carl Bray, MCIP, RPP, is Principal of Bray Heritage in Kingston, Ontario. He is an award-winning heritage planner, urban designer and landscape architect with over 40 years of experience in both the public and private sectors. He has graduate degrees in urban design and cultural geography and has successfully completed projects across Canada and in the United States, the Caribbean, and Great Britain.

An early advocate of CPTED, he has a unique specialty in analyzing local resident’s meanings and values for place and for translating these values into successful planning policy and design guidelines. In recent years Carl has been a member of the SafeGrowth Network and consults with AlterNation LLC on SafeGrowth® programming. He currently teaches heritage planning and community design courses as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Queen’s University’s graduate School of Urban and Regional Planning.

Along with his extensive experience in urban settings of all sizes and types, Dr. Bray has a special affinity for small towns, having grown up in one, lived and worked in many, in Canada and the UK, and studied them as part of graduate degree work. As an example of his work in such places, he leads teams that prepare Heritage Conservation District Studies and Plans and has completed many across southern Ontario. His projects in cities begin with an understanding of the evolution and character of the component parts, whether individual properties or entire neighborhoods. In each case, work involves an assessment of cultural heritage resources that includes extensive consultation with local residents.

John Lyons

John spent a number of years as fraud investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and as international crime analyst with Interpol Ottawa. He has extensive experience in identifying, preventing and mitigating insurance fraud in both the private property and casualty insurance industry and with public health insurance systems. He is author of a forthcoming book on the role that identity documents play in fraud. With an academic background in art history, he is also a specialist in art fraud. While assigned to Interpol from the RCMP he established a Canadian art theft repository, consulted law enforcement and insurance agencies on complex investigations, and assisted museums with crime risk assessments. He specializes in search conferencing as a means to establish collaborative networks for capacity building within organizations.