Event Information

• Online via Zoom

Lessie Branch is a United States Navy veteran, an award-winning author and public and urban policy scholar with a focus on racial socioeconomic and political disparities. She uses her skills, knowledge, and abilities to raise visibility of human rights challenges and her public policy training to mitigate the disparities and create policy solutions to close these gaps.

As an equity advocate, Branch works to make the invisible visible through exposing and reframing harmful speech and language in social policy and other narratives. She does this by helping people to think critically about how language assigns and transfers blame for inequity to those at the margins of society. Branch promotes social justice-minded education and restorative social policies that advocate targeted economic, political, and social rights and opportunities and cultivates strategies for individual and collective action to achieve socioeconomic and political gains.

Branch earned her Ph.D., and M. Phil. in Public and Urban Policy as well as an M.A. in Political Science from The New School and her B.A. in Political Science from Fordham University. She is the author of "Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama's America."