Vera Institute of Justice

Shawnda is a lead program specialist in the Center for Youth Justice (CYJ) where she supports ongoing work on a federally-funded initiative aimed at preventing and ending girls’ incarceration in New York City, and developing a model for ending the incarceration of girls nationally. Prior to joining Vera, Shawnda worked as a research analyst at the Institute for State and Local Governance at CUNY. With particular focus on marginalized and vulnerable populations, Shawnda has broad experience developing as well as implementing research, monitoring, and evaluation materials both domestically and internationally. Her expertise includes quantitative and qualitative study design, data collection, and analysis. Partially based on her own experiences, her work has focused racial justice, gender justice, and understanding the ways girls of color get pushed into the criminal justice system.

Shawnda earned her Bachelor degree in sociology and Master of Science in applied social research from The City University of New York, Hunter College.