Monique L. Dixon serves as Deputy Director of Policy and Director of State Advocacy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), Inc. In these roles, she is responsible for assisting with the development, coordination and implementation of LDF’s overall federal policy and legislative reform priorities with a focus on criminal justice and education. She also serves as the lead architect of LDF’s state and local legislative and policy activities, including LDF’s Justice in Public Safety Project, which uses policy and legislative advocacy, public education, community organizing, litigation, and communications strategies to advance laws, policies, and practices that will result in unbiased and accountable policing and community-based public safety systems.
Prior to joining LDF, Ms. Dixon was Director of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Program of Open Society Institute (OSI)-Baltimore, which is part of an international network of private foundations known as the Open Society Foundations established by philanthropist George Soros. At OSI-Baltimore, Ms. Dixon was responsible for developing, monitoring, and evaluating criminal and juvenile justice grant-making and advocacy strategies, and distributing over $8 million in grant awards to nonprofit organizations and state agencies.
Prior to joining OSI-Baltimore, Ms. Dixon served as senior staff attorney at Advancement Project in Washington, D.C., a non-profit civil rights organization. In that capacity, she assisted multi-racial grassroots community organizations, lawyers, and public officials throughout the country with addressing policing, education, voting rights, and affordable housing issues. Ms. Dixon was part of a team of civil rights attorneys, including LDF lawyers, representing African- and Haitian-American voters in NAACP v. Hood (a class action suit that arose out of the 2000 general elections), and she served as co-counsel in Anderson v. Jackson on behalf of African-American residents who challenged the demolition of public housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Dixon also co-authored several reports on zero tolerance school discipline policies that led youth from schools to jails.
From 1997-2000, Ms. Dixon was a staff attorney at the Public Justice Center, where she served as the Center’s first Equal Justice fellow spearheading its juvenile justice reform project.
Ms. Dixon is a 2017 recipient of the Maryland Daily Record Leadership in Law Award, a 2011 recipient of the University of Maryland Carey School of Law Benjamin L. Cardin Public Service Award, and a 2009 recipient of the Racial Justice Award from the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Ms. Dixon is a member of the Bars of Maryland and the District of Columbia. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and Hunter College of the City University of New York. She clerked for The Hon. Mabel Hubbard of the Circuit Court for the City of Baltimore.
