ABOUT.

Sophia De La Cruz is a Dominican-American, community-engaged scholar and researcher working at the intersection of Youth Participatory Action Research, oral history and archival memory work, and Black Studies. She graduated from the University of Florida, where she facilitated participatory research and completed two honors theses as a Foreign Language Area Studies Scholar in Haitian Creole and Mellon Foundation Scholar in the African American Studies program. She now serves as a paralegal with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she supports young people navigating the juvenile legal system.

In 2022, Sophia co-founded Kiskeya Youth with a network of 30+ partners to build solidarity between Haitian and Dominican diaspora youth through community-embedded research and leadership development. In 2024, she received a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant to launch the pilot Semillero de Líderes summer program, engaging more than 40 scholars aged 11–18 in research, storytelling, and community-based learning.

Sophia continues to dedicate significant time to YPAR facilitation with the Black Girlhood Collaborative (led by Dr. Taryrn Brown) and to the creationg of public-facing educational resources through her role on the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant team for the development of “Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya,” a trilingual, publicly-accessible digital platform on Black Caribbean women’s histories.

Her work centers youth across the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean—particularly those at risk of losing their liberty and those who are vulnerable to the negative impacts of legal systems—as knowledge producers and co-researchers, using participatory methods and oral history to document community experiences and support young people in designing projects that respond to local needs (including the need for legal transformation) across Ayiti–Quisqueya and the diaspora.