Tisha Leonardo-Santiago
Director of Outreach, New Jersey Division on Civil Rights
2023
Tisha (Tee) Leonardo-Santiago is the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights’ first Latinx Director of Outreach and Community Relations. A second-generation Latinx Hudson County native and a first-generation college graduate earning their undergraduate and graduate degrees in Criminal Justice from New Jersey City University. In 2017, Tee joined DCR as a Bilingual Investigator in the Enforcement Unit, served as the bilingual subject matter expert for the New Jersey Bias Investigation Access System (NJBIAS) that launched in November 2020, and now serves as the Statewide NJBIAS Community Liaison. In March 2021, they were promoted to the newly created Community Relations Unit as the Bilingual Community Relations Specialist before becoming the unit Director.
This cannot be thought of as a conference or a summit. The stakes are simply too high and the data/conversation and methods to drive action more valuable/motivating than any gathering I have attended. I took more than 100 pages of notes and have shared them with my CBS News leadership team, anchors, producers, and correspondents. Nothing about this gathering was easy. The agony around this topic is real. But no one curious about it could ask for a more devoted, rational, or unflinching look into this dark but decipherable world.
