Kira Shepherd is Associate Director of Racial Justice at the Public Rights/ Private Conscience project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. Before joining Columbia Law School she was the Executive Director and Director of Campaigns at The Black Institute (TBI), an action think tank that leads advocacy work in the areas of immigration, education, the environment, and economic justice.  Prior to working at TBI, Kira was a Campaign Manager at ColorOfChange.org, the nation’s largest online civil rights organization, where she worked on criminal justice and corporate accountability campaigns. She also worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Pubic Policy Center where she managed a city-wide youth activist project that was instituted in every public high school in Philadelphia. In addition, Kira worked for Families for Freedom, a human rights organization by and for families facing and fighting deportation, and Make the Road New York, the largest member-led economic justice group in New York.  Kira graduated from Rutgers University School of Law, Newark with a Juris Doctorate degree.