Danielle is the Chief Executive Officer of Civil Rights Corps. Prior to joining the CRC team, Danielle was the Executive Director of the Million Dollar Hoods project and the Director of Research and Programs at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.
Danielle’s education and experience are at the intersection of health and justice and she centers abolitionist principles in her efforts. Since 2006 Danielle has facilitated community-driven processes to challenge U.S. systems of justice administration and healthcare delivery in order to address racial inequities and improve quality of life outcomes for directly impacted and marginalized communities. In Chicago, Danielle collaborated with hospital administrators, health care providers, policy makers and patients to drive down racial health disparities. She worked with the majority of hospital and healthcare systems in the city to develop training and adjust institutional processes that would improve the quality of care for Black women. She also worked with methadone programs providing re-entry healthcare for mothers suffering with addiction and their children as well as developed and evaluated youth violence prevention initiatives in collaboration with local alderman offices.
Danielle obtained her Ph.D. from UCLA in Community Health Sciences with a minor in Law and has applied her background in public health and data to addressing the Los Angeles system of mass incarceration. Since 2013 her efforts in Los Angeles have primarily focused on youth and violence. She worked with the Violence Prevention Coalition to conduct participatory research and education on the intersection between gang and domestic violence. She developed, raised funding for and ran after-school programming for incarcerated youth charged with serious and violent crimes and helped launch the UCLA prison education program, which provides UCLA college credit courses for incarcerated people.
Danielle had the fortune of joining the Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) team in 2017. She helped build out the MDH rapid response report process that drew attention to the fact that we spend the most money incarcerating Black and Brown people from a handful of communities for minor offenses. Through these reports and data analysis MDH was able to contribute to several major advocacy wins for the LA community including but not limited to putting a stop to the construction of a new women’s jail, defunding the LA School Police Department, bail reform and drawing attention to the criminalization of poverty through the rapid increase in arrests of houseless individuals.
Between 2019 and 2022, Danielle served in a variety of capacities in Los Angeles, collaborating with government, organizers and institutional leaders. This includes as a probation oversight commissioner, as an advisor to the Alternatives To Incarceration work group and as a consultant on the establishment of the new LA County Department of Youth Development. She served as a university lecturer, teaching courses on law enforcement data, collateral consequences of incarceration and the carceral workforce. Most recently, Danielle has worked on two important projects. She is part of a team developing an implementation plan for LA County per a Board of Supervisors motion that aims to release all girls and gender expansive youth from incarceration and prevent any new detentions among this population. Danielle also co-leads efforts to address workforce challenges in LA that have arisen as the probation footprint shrinks and fewer youth are detained.
Danielle joined CRC because she wants to continue this important work on a national scale and partner with people invested in building holistic approaches to community wellbeing.
