About Tram (she/her)
Tram is an award-winning activist and community leader who helped found New Virginia Majority in 2007, where she currently serves as Co-Executive Director. She leads multi-racial, multi-issue campaigns using large-scale civic engagement, community organizing, advocacy, leadership development, and strategic communications. Her work on democracy and voting rights, criminal justice, immigrant rights, climate change, and economic opportunity explore the intersections of social, racial, and economic justice.
Under her leadership, New Virginia Majority has expanded the electorate in Virginia to be more reflective of Virginia’s rich diversity by registering over 300,000 new voters and knocking on over 4 million doors to get people of color and young people to the polls. Working with key partners, she anchors several initiatives throughout the state that have transformed the political landscape in Virginia and led to significant victories for Virginia’s most vulnerable populations.
She has played a key role in expanding voter access in Virginia, from helping to restore the voting rights of returning citizens throughout the commonwealth, to working to pass the historic Voting Rights Act of Virginia. Working with state legislators, she helped move Virginia from being the second to the last state in the country for access to voting in 2019 to now the eleventh easiest state in the country to vote.
As one of the country’s leading voices on civic engagement and voting rights, Tram advises leaders and organizations across the country, as well as celebrities and influencers to help them develop their civic engagement strategies and plans, including Stacey Abrams, Kerry Washington, Mark Ruffalo, and organizations in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Tram is a partner at Democracy Partners, and she currently serves as the Board Chair for the Meyer Foundation and sits on the National Advisory Council for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research as well as the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice Program at the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York. She is a certificate faculty member at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Tram is an alumna of Barnard College and a former Lead the Way Fellow of the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.