Malaika Rivers

Founder & President

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Malaika Rivers is the Founder & President of Pontem Resources. She helps businesses and governments work together to imagine and build great places. She works with a wide variety of changemakers — from CEOs to city mayors — to find cost-sharing strategies for pressing development needs.

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With a focus on transportation, mobility, connectivity, and placemaking, Malaika’s work builds physical infrastructure as well as sustainable organizations to support it. Having worked for and with real estate developers, consulting firms, governments, and planning organizations, she crafts strategies that bring vision, process, funding, and politics together to achieve healthy ROIs.

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Malaika’s work includes the billion-dollar, sports-anchored, mixed-use development models of Centennial Yards (Atlanta Hawks) and The Battery Atlanta (Atlanta Braves). She is the foremost expert on Community Improvement Districts (CIDs). Having formed and led CIDs over decades, Malaika advises on how these development tools effectively channel infrastructure funding into commercial centers.

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Malaika is a 100 Influential Women to Know, a Georgia 500, and a 25 Power Women to Watch. She received her B.S. from Virginia Tech and her C.M.E. from Harvard Business School. She frequently contributes to various media outlets and publishes forward-thinking reports, including how CIDs may be positioned at the forefront of smart cities and digital transformation.

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Malaika’s drive to conquer challenging terrain for her clients extends to her personal life. Whether hiking mountains or exploring deserts, Malaika is in constant pursuit of the way forward.