About

Biography

Diana Zúñiga

Diana Zúñiga is a healer, policy advocate, community organizer and consultant with over 11 years of professional work experience in group facilitation, coalition building, capacity building, campaign management, leadership development, fiscal sustainability, strategic planning, and policy development and implementation. Her leadership skills were developed through her campaign work with the William C. Velasquez Institute and the Southwest Voter Registration Project. Diana also worked at the Drug Policy Alliance where she worked on the first bill to decriminalize drug possession. She later moved into the role of Statewide Coordinator at Californians United for a Responsible Budget where she managed a statewide coalition seeking to curb prison and jail spending, reduce the amount of people incarcerated, and reinvest the savings into restoring the social safety net and education. During her time with CURB, Diana managed campaigns across the state to stop prison and jail construction efforts in several counties including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. The coalition was able to stop over $4 billion of prison and jail construction funding through the state budget process and pass several key sentencing reform policies such as Elder Parole, the Alternative Custody Program, and the Expansion of Good Time Credits. Diana’s expertise in state and local criminal justice and budget policy are rooted in an anti-prison industrial complex framework and based on her experience having her father and several other family members incarcerated. Her work supporting institutions, organizations and coalitions to expand their capacity stems from approaches based in values based leadership, strategic development, and healing justice.

Diana has also worked with the Department of Health Services as the Associate Director of Regional Collaboration in SPA 7 for the Whole Person Care Initiative and was the County Staff Lead for the LA County Alternatives to Incarceration Work Group (ATI Work Group). WPC-LA was a Medi-Cal 2020 waiver-funded five-year initiative that provides comprehensive and coordinated services to the most vulnerable LA County Medi-Cal beneficiaries focused on individuals who are homeless, justice-involved, or have serious mental health needs or severe and/or persistent substance use disorder or medical issues. In 2019, the Alternatives to Incarceration Work Group provided the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors a Care First Road Map, with an action-oriented framework and implementation plan, to scale alternatives to incarceration and diversion so care and services are provided first. The final report,Care First, Jails Last: Health and Racial Justice Strategies for Safer Communities, was developed by a broad range of community and county stakeholders through a year-long public process that focused on consensus building, community engagement, and racial equity. The ATI opportunity came about around the same time that LA leaders stopped the $3.7 billion jail plan, a campaign that Diana led and participated in for almost 9 years. As a part of her work in County government, Diana weaved  in community engagement, racial equity, and participatory budgeting practices in the plan to close Men’s Central Jail, the development of the Reentry Health Advisory Collaborative, the imagining of an Alternative Crisis Response System, and the implementation of the County COVID-19 Community Equity Fund. Diana is also a member of the Reimagine LA Coalition, a coalition monitoring the implementation of Measure J which is a local initiative that shifts 10% of local generated revenue towards alternatives to incarceration, youth, and housing. Through these roles Diana has worked to engage thousands of people, especially those most impacted by the incarceration system and the social determinants of health to participate in systemic transformation, develop and implement policy, lead community engagement efforts, and navigate service delivery.

Diana Zúñiga is a native Angeleno whose family lineage is connected to Los Angeles and Texas, as well as migrants from Mexico. Through this lineage she identifies as both Latinx and Indigenous with her Indigenous roots stemming from the Mexica, Navajo and Yaqui peoples. She holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in Political Science and Chicana/o Studies with a minor in Psychology from Loyola Marymount University. Diana has served as an Advisory Committee Member for the Fund For Non-Violence Justice with Dignity. Diana is also a 2013 graduate of the State Women’s Policy Institute Criminal Justice Team and a 2016 graduate of the Local WPI Criminal Justice Team in Los Angeles through the Women’s Foundation of California. In 2017, Diana received the Cindy Marano Leadership Award from the Women’s Foundation of California and was designated one of the 40 Under 40 Emerging Civic Leaders in Los Angeles County by the Empowerment Congress. In 2021, she received a National Association of Counties Award for her work on COVID-19 entitled “Promoting Health Equity in COVID-19 Testing for Communities Disproportionately Affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic in Los Angeles County”. Diana serves as an Advisory Board Member for Cage-Free Repair, a non-profit organization seeking to repair the harm done by the War on Drugs by ensuring that people of color benefit from the above-ground marijuana industry. She also serves on the Advisory Board for Initiate Justicewhose mission is to end mass incarceration by activating the power of the people it has directly impacted. She recently joined the board for the John M. Lloyd Foundation. Diana completed the Racial Equity and Healing Justice Facilitator Program run by the California Conference for Equality and Justice and funded by Southern California Grantmakers and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Diana has also co-created an online virtual ritual space called #HonorLivesLost dedicated to memorializing and uplifting incarcerated people we lose to COVID-19 in California.

Her work has appeared in City of Inmates and Basta: 100 Latinas Against Gender Violence, among other publications. Diana also identifies as a healer that works with indigenous spiritual practices bringing in medicine that connects to plants, dreams, and the elements.