As CoCo Welcomes 2025 Cohort, Debra Lee’s Legacy Continues To Be A Guiding Light
Today is National Caregivers Day. Caregivers spend a great deal of time caring for family—whether they be spouses, children, parents—or maybe even neighbors or friends. Studies show that for some caregivers, they can spend about 24 hours of care per week. But for others, like Community Coalition’s (CoCo) Kinship activist Debra Lee, it could be a full-time job.
Debra Lee, one of CoCo’s amazing community leaders, made her transition on June 11th, 2022,. She was the backbone of our relative caregiver’s program—Kinship In Action (KIA). The ground-breaking campaign demanded that relative caregivers be recognized as the healthiest and safest alternative to placing The campaign significantly shift child welfare policy throughout the state of CA, and it also provided families with increased resources to meet the needs of the children in their care. In 2004, CoCo opened the Kinship In Action (KIA) Center — the first kinship support center in South LA that combined resources, self-care and respite activities with advocacy.
In honor of Ms. Lee, CoCo launched its first all Women-Identified Community Organizing Fellowship in 2023. The goal of the Debra Lee Women’s Organizing Fellowship is to contribute to the social justice movement by investing in the next generation of BIPOC women-identified organizers. “Not only was she a hard core CoCo KIA leader, but she was the rock and matriarch of her family. As a great grandmother, she was a caregiver to generations of children in her family. ” says Aurea Montes-Rodriguez, Executive Vice President of Community Coalition.
The Debra Lee Women’s Organizing Fellowship supports the leadership of girls and women-identified organizers in LA County through training, gatherings, and retreats. The curriculum also focuses on developing the skills of non-binary BIPOC women who work with base-building organizations or have lived experience related to immigration, unemployment/underemployment, recovery, and incarceration. A cohort of 12-15 fellows received intensive training in the theory of social change, women’s social movement history, and the art and science of community organizing through hands-on application in a policy action campaign.
As a relative caregiver activist, Debra and her great granddaughter, Tamierra, are featured in the artwork on the exterior of Community Coalition’s building.
See What the Fellows Had To Say About the Debra Lee Fellowship
Through this fellowship, participants sharpened their skills in applying foundational organizing through field practice at their respective organizations. They each brought unique skill sets, lived experiences, and a commitment to transforming social and economic conditions for Black and Brown communities. We are excited to see how they will continue to build on their leadership and community organizing skills and translate it into impactful change throughout the County of LA.