Kiya Jones currently interns for the Ron Brown Scholar Program. Prior to that she served as the California political field director for a national nonprofit, where she helped coordinate grassroots campaigns to benefit working class communities of color. She specializes in organizing voter registration and ballot initiatives in African American and Latino communities. During the 2004 election cycle, she worked as the Ohio field director and helped to run one of the largest minority voter outreach operations in the state’s history, registering over 170,000 voters. She has coordinated minority voter registration operations in California, Missouri, Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, Wisconsin and Virginia. Kiya has also served as a field coordinator for numerous progressive campaigns, including successful campaigns to raise the minimum wage citywide in San Francisco in 2003, statewide in Florida in 2004, and a razor-close unsuccessful minimum wage campaign in Albuquerque in 2005. Prior to that she worked an independent expenditure campaign which elected three progressive city council members in Denver, and a successful bond campaign to rebuild deteriorating public schools in Cincinnati.

Kiya Jones studied government and journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked for the ACLU on their prisoners’ rights campaign. She is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.