
Patricia Williamson
Deputy Director of Community Programming, Community Relations Unit, New Jersey Division on Civil Rights
2024
Patricia D. Williamson (she/her) is the Deputy Director of Community Programming and a Community Mediator in the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights’ Community Relations/Crisis Response Unit. Patricia is the unit’s lead on programming initiatives for the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination. She provides strategic oversight and implementation of the Community Relations Unit’s statewide outreach and programming to support and uplift the Division’s initiatives, social media presence, and crisis response efforts to prevent and eliminate discrimination and bias in New Jersey. She is based in Trenton.
Prior to this position, Patricia was the New Jersey Counts Project Director at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Patricia led the Institute’s work to ensure a complete and accurate count of New Jersey’s urban communities in the 2020 Census. Patricia was part of the Census 2020 NJ Coalition, and convened a sub-coalition of African American community-based organizations, non-profits, and institutions (such as clergy). Patricia worked for over 20 years as a systems engineer in the optical networking area of various telecommunications companies in New Jersey. She was also an adjunct professor at Bloomfield College.
Patricia earned a BA in Mathematics from Hampton University, an MS in Computer Science from Howard University, and an MA in Education and Human Development in the Educational Technology Leadership Program at The George Washington University.
The catalytic power of this Summit in bringing together those who are devoting their lives to pushing back and working to confront, understand and work towards solutions around hate in our society is a noble and difficult task. The Summit not only energized those who attended but led to connecting the dots in a global network of those doing this work. The stories of the victims of hate were painful to witness but their courage in coming forward was inspirational. Those who attended left energized with the hope that by working together solutions can be forged.

