Latrina Kelly-James

Latrina Kelly-James serves as CPD’s Chief of Equity & Racial Justice, driving our internal equity practices, and internal and external voice around racial justice.

Latrina comes to CPD with 15 years experience building and advocating for marginalized communities. With equity at the center, she has provided strategic leadership and capacity building to forge collaborative community and institutional partnerships, utilize data and community voice to drive policies to reduce harm, reallocate resources to communities, and support community access to and sustainability of funding. Most recently, Latrina served as a Director of Training and Capacity Building with Equal Justice USA creating racial equity for Black and Brown survivors of violence through building community organizations’ capacity to access federal and other sources of funding to advance their healing, driving $4 million to Black and Brown-led community groups in 15 cities working to reduce violence, and leading a project to facilitate conversations between communities and police, centering historical trauma of the policing system and the need for community-led responses to harm.

She is former Director of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Drug Free Coalition and formerly served as the Deputy Director and interim Executive Director for Junta for Progressive Action in New Haven, CT, where she led coalition-building and advocacy strategies around ending federal Secure Communities, and pushed against racial profiling in local police departments . Latrina is also a past Fellow with the Justice Policy Network, a Washington DC-based policy leadership program, volunteers with North Carolina’s Center for Community Transitions where she mentors women returning from incarceration, and is a former Community Equity Consultant for Root Cause, a Boston-based strategic consulting firm.

Latrina brings a commitment to driving equity from spaces of liberation; building and centering the power of voices of Black and Brown communities; and liberation as an organizational practice.