California State AssemblyCandidate for District 54Short Term

I am a UCLA educator and community organizer. In 2020, I was one of two co-chairs of LA County’s historic Measure J campaign, which passed with over 2.1 million votes in the general election and secured nearly a billion dollars in permanent funding for youth development, small business support, alternatives to incarceration, affordable housing, and other forms of community investment. I led this successful campaign in an election that saw similar referenda fail across California.

I currently serve as Director of Public Policy at the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and I am the founding Director of the UCLA Black Policy Project – an applied research initiative dedicated to advancing racial equity. I served in Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Office of Reentry and CENTCOM Unit, where I wrote the City’s first comprehensive report on the holistic needs of the formerly incarcerated. I’m an appointed commissioner of the LAUSD Redistricting Commission, I was co-chair of the LAUSD task force on school policing, and I’m a key advisor to LAUSD on ways to expand youth development. In the community, I serve as an executive board member of the Justice LA Coalition and as a founding member of the Million Dollar Hoods Project, a community-driven research project with the mission to end mass incarceration. I’m a member of the PUSH LA Coalition, and I often serve as the bridge between grassroots, activist-led protest and pragmatic political decision making around issues of racial, economic, and environmental justice. In 2018, I helped lead the successful effort to force LA County to cancel a multibillion dollar contract to build a new women’s jail and instead launch an evidence-based, alternatives-to-incarceration initiative focused on advancing employment, life opportunity, and healing instead of ineffective, costly, disproportionate, and unjust punishment.

My academic reports have influenced policymaking on a wide range of urgent issues. My youth justice briefs on the devastating impact of the criminal justice system on kids was used by Senator Holly Mitchell as the foundational research that shaped SB 439 – California’s minimum age of juvenile jurisdiction law that limits the prosecution of young children. I was a lead author of the proposal to establish a Youth Development Department in Los Angeles County – a proposal unanimously accepted by the Board of Supervisors last year. I was the first scholar to calculate the fiscal impact of the money bail industry in Los Angeles, and I’ve helped illuminate the fiscal impact of incarcerating individuals who are unhoused and in need of care.