Skip to Content
MIT News magazine

Dora Leong Gallo, MCP '92

Affordable-housing advocate helps people with special needs

Urban planning and grassroots advocacy merge in the career of Dora Leong Gallo, MCP ‘92. Since 2003, she has been CEO of A Community of Friends (ACOF), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that develops affordable housing for homeless people and families headed by someone with a mental illness. “I get a lot of affirmation for this work at the building openings when I see people crying when they get the keys to their apartments,” Gallo says.

Dora Leong Gallo, MCP ‘92, spoke at the Graduate Convocation and Reunion in April.

As CEO, Gallo oversees project development, asset management, residential services, advocacy, and fund-raising. ACOF has housed more than a thousand people in 28 apartment buildings since 1988 and has eight more projects in the pipeline. The group also provides on-site social services–from anger management counseling to cooking classes. “You can’t build buildings and hope that everyone who moves in is going to be okay,” she says. “And you can’t address their issues before they are housed. They can’t deal with drug abuse recovery or job training when they don’t know where they are going to sleep at night.”

Gallo’s interest in affordable housing was sparked when, as a teenage rental assistant in a real-estate office, she was unable to find an apartment for a low-income woman. She studied public administration at the University of Southern California before earning her master’s in city planning at MIT. In the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), she found like-minded people who believed in social justice and grassroots advocacy.

Before heading ACOF, Gallo worked for 11 years in local government; among other things, she’s been a housing analyst, a redevelopment project specialist, and chief of staff for an L.A. City Council member. Last spring, she returned to campus as a featured speaker at the DUSP Alumni/ae of Color Dinner Series and the Graduate Alumni Convocation and Reunion to share her experiences as an Asian-American woman in a political field.

Gallo has served as a president of the MIT Club of Southern California and earned MIT’s Lobdell Award. She and husband Grey Gallo, who heads Vector 3D Solutions, live in Torrance, CA, and enjoy collecting and drinking wine and vacationing in vineyard areas.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.