Our Team
Heang Leung Rubin, EdD, MA
Founder and PrincipalDr. Heang Leung Rubin draws from multiple identities, experiences, and skills to her work. She has been informed by work as as advocate, organizer, healer, researcher, teacher, farmer, writer, and mother. Through her work in Chinatown, she has been described as a “bridge” and a “convener”. She specializes in leading community engagement processes with multiple stakeholders, advising researchers on how to conduct community engaged research, and using her research skills for telling authentic community stories.
Her professional life in Boston started in Boston Chinatown. She worked at Tufts Medical Center/Tufts University for twelve years as an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Director of ADAPT, a research partnership between Tufts and Chinatown. She also served as the Chair of the Friends of the Chinatown Library for eight years, a twenty-five year campaign to bring a branch library back to the community. During her tenure, she worked collaboratively with the City of Boston and Chinatown stakeholders to develop a request for proposals that will enable a branch library to be built in a mixed-use development with affordable housing.
In her creative life, she am working on a book of creative non-fiction and hoping to start a documentary project about the Chinatown library project. Her ideas about healing, growth, and transformation are informed by formal study of Ayurveda, reiki, and Narrative Healing. She is also a certified coach and studying different movement-based healing modalities such as qoya.
She holds a Doctorate in Education from Harvard University, a Masters of Arts in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. She was born and raised in San Francisco and currently lives in Jamaica Plain with her husband and 10-year old son.
Mia Han Colby, MPH
Community engagement consultantMia Colby works as a community engagement consultant in the Greater Boston area. Ms. Colby comes from a unique background as a Korean adoptee who grew up in a multiracial, multiethnic family including a Swedish immigrant mother, Irish-American father, and adopted Korean brother. Her background strongly influenced her views and values and instilled in her the importance of culture and community which have influenced her in her career.
She began her community engagement work as part of the Asian CARES research team in 2019 focusing on problem gambling in the Asian community around Boston. In her work, Ms. Colby has primarily worked in conjunction with the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center on several projects including, the Asian CARES project, the Everett CLHP, the AAPI Gambling Outreach Project, and Project RISE. She largely plays an organizational and coordination role, using her education in public health communication as a guide for her work. Through her community engagement work, she has been able to expand and utilize skills learned through her degree in anthropology. She strives to be an active and compassionate listener, collaborating with the communities she works with. She strongly believes in the importance of observation and the lived experiences of those in the community. Ms. Colby strives to build trusting relationships with the communities she works with and to be responsive and adaptable to the needs of the organizations and communities she works with.
Ms. Colby graduated from the Tufts University School of Medicine in with a masters’ degree in public health, where her master project focused on developing culturally appropriate social marketing messaging targeted toward problem gambling in Asian communities. She holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Bowdoin College where her studies focused on cultural anthropology with a particular interest in Asian studies.
Katrina Brink
specialist consultantKatrina brings over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit, academic and philanthropic sectors. Specializing in facilitative leadership practices and data-informed strategies, her thoughtful and people-centered approach drives her work with dynamic and collaborative social impact initiatives.
Katrina builds stakeholder teams to plan and implement innovative, civically-engaged, constituent-centered ‘Cradle to Career’ initiatives. She works at the neighborhood, city, regional, state and national levels to implement collective action strategies in the context of schools, non profit organizations, institutions, and place-based initiatives. Katrina led successful projects in program development, evaluation, and research with the YMCA of Greater Boston, Boston Teachers Union, Project Hope, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Boston Public Schools, the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at Wellesley College, the Youth Affairs Network of Queensland, Tufts University, Stuart Foundation and the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities at Stanford University. In 2018, along with other school, district, city, and nonprofit leaders, Katrina launched the Boston Hub Schools Consortium which marked a formalized and shared commitment for deepening, strengthening and sustaining community school strategies to accelerate student success and as a key lever for community development in Boston.
Katrina graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature (English and Spanish), she received her M.Phil. in Sociology of Education from the University of Queensland, Australia. Her facilitation practice was shaped by leadership development training from Coro of Northern California and the Institute for Interactive Social Change. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston, MA.
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