Jodi Callender

Futurist · Sense-Maker · Weaver

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” — Octavia Butler

After fifteen years moving through real estate, government, and early-stage organizations, Jodi Callender kept arriving at the same gap: the people with the deepest stake in a community's future were the last ones the capital system was designed to serve.

She spent most of her early career in economic development and housing, underwriting deals, setting and implementing capital strategies, navigating public systems. She carried that technical fluency into some of New York City's most complex challenges. But the work that has defined her practice is what happens at the edges of conventional finance: the projects that don't fit standard underwriting, the organizations that have the mandate and the community trust but not the capital architecture, the moments when community organizations need someone who can walk into a room with institutional actors and get them all working toward the same outcome. That is the work her advisory practice was built to do and what she brings to Meridian Collective.

Her focus is the community ownership ecosystem: community land trusts, investment structures, and the blended capital strategies that make them executable. She enjoys helping organizations move from vision to transaction-ready — developing investment narratives, structuring capital stacks, and sequencing funders. What that means in practice: she helps funders, founders, community organizations, and government institutions build the shared understanding, infrastructure, and governance models that make community ownership viable without compromising mission.

Jodi is the founder and principal of Jean Street Capital, an advisory focused on advancing shared community-controlled real estate initiatives in New York City. The name of her practice comes from her two grandmothers — one who became the first American citizen in her family and planted roots in New York, and another who raised her family on a street in Trinidad and Tobago. Both women created the conditions for their families to stay, belong, and build. Her practice is an extension of that act: structuring capital so that communities, not just investors, become the lasting owners of the places they have built.

Jodi holds an MPS degree in Real Estate Finance and a BS degree in Finance from Georgetown University. When she is not working, you can find her reading speculative fiction, cooking elaborate meals, or chasing her toddler around a Brooklyn playground.