For over 30 years, I have participated in social movements that seek to transform society.

I work to end structural racism and social stigmas, as an independent consultant, community organizer, and teacher.

Since 2003, I have trained students at UCLA to fight injustice while partnering them with organizations working for social change. Together, we challenged racism in the response to Hurricane Katrina, supported formerly incarcerated people to build power to fight discrimination against them, and helped undocumented college students launch a collective voice.

Currently, I support the movement to end LA County's failed use of youth jails. Partnering with my former students, I worked to establish the country's only civilian oversight body over a probation department, which runs youth detention. We also erected the first residential program for youth to complete their sentences in college, instead of detention facilities. I taught a course to the first two cohorts of this ‘Court to College’ program, focused on activism by formerly incarcerated people. I integrate critical race theory and community organizing principles to bring unlikely partners together to produce knowledge and design solutions to injustice.

Globally, I served as an advocate at the Central American Human Rights Commission in the late 1990s, when the U.S. launched mass deportations to the region. In early 2025, I worked with Liberated leaders to organize ‘Building Bridges’, to enhance higher education options to deported and incarcerated people in México. I work to strengthen restorative justice across borders, including supporting the chapter-building efforts of leaders in the Incarceration Nations Network.

Locally, I served as a community organizer in South Los Angeles. There, I shaped direct-action campaigns with people on welfare, grandmothers caring for their relatives' children placed in foster care, and social service providers.

Today, I work to enhance the capacity of change-agents by:

* Designing collaborative partnerships to solve problems and achieve structural change across geographic boundaries, policy issues, and identities;

* Training people to build an organized voice by using base-building strategies & power analysis, such as creating an LA County child care power building table;

* Facilitating efforts to shift taxpayer investments from human caging to human needs, including:

At the municipal level, I led Culver City's review of public safety services which replaced police with mobile crisis teams in health-related 911 calls.

For LA County, I chaired a 15-month process that catalyzed adoption of a road map to decarcerate the juvenile justice system. I also equipped staff in the 2nd District to launch an ongoing Racial Justice Learning Exchange.

I was born and raised in LA and my ancestral roots are in the mountains of Durango, México, where I took this picture.