Background and Credentials
LaTroya Lovell is an academic, researcher, strategist, and educator. Her work spans participatory action research, equity-centered evaluation, policy strategy, youth development, and narrative translation. She has led multi-year research initiatives, built impact measurement systems, designed citywide training curricula, co-facilitated participatory grantmaking processes, and translated community-generated data into legislation, policy briefs, and advocacy campaigns. Across every role and context, the through line is the same: rigorous, grounded research that returns power to the people it’s about.
EXPERIENCE
LaTroya has served in research, facilitation, and strategy roles across the nonprofit, academic, and public sectors. She has led and contributed to work on mandated reporting reform — including a two-year participatory research initiative working toward a $15M statewide pilot program — youth-led transit and housing justice research, direct cash transfer policy for young people transitioning out of foster care, community wellness programs, and citywide police training curriculum redesign grounded in youth experience and Positive Youth Development frameworks.
She has designed and directed research-based impact measurement systems, co-developed participatory grantmaking processes, co-led citywide youth policy coalitions, and facilitated Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) programs training young people ages 16–24 as researchers and advocates. She has also taught at the university level, bringing participatory research methods and youth development theory into higher education classrooms.
Her work has directly informed city and state policy, shaped philanthropic funding strategy, contributed to legislative advocacy, and supported organizations in building the internal infrastructure to sustain research-driven learning over time.
EDUCATION
M.A. in Youth Studies — CUNY School of Professional Studies, 2023 (Summa Cum Laude)
B.A. in Literature with Writing Concentration; Minor in Gender Studies — The New School, Eugene Lang College, 2018 (Summa Cum Laude, Departmental Honors)
Advanced Certificate in Data Analytics — NYU School of Professional Studies, 2024
RESEARCH & METHODS
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)
Participatory Action Research (PAR)
Auto-ethnographic Research
Qualitative & Quantitative Research
Mixed-Methods Evaluation Design
Impact Measurement & Data Analysis
STRATEGY & PRACTICE
Participatory Grantmaking
Grant Writing & Program Management
Curriculum Writing & Facilitation
Public Policy & Advocacy
Narrative & Strategy Translation
Higher Education Teaching
RECOGNITION & PANELS
LaTroya has been recognized as a scholar and practitioner across academic and professional communities. She has spoken and presented at the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Conference, the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) Conference, the Citizens Committee for Children, and Children’s Aid’s Foster Youth Success Alliance Summit. She has appeared as a podcast guest on work focused on children of incarcerated parents, and her writing has been published in literary journals including 12th Street Literary Journal and The Missing Slate.
Academic honors include graduating Summa Cum Laude at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the Horatio Alger National Scholarship, the Eugene Lang Opportunity Award, and the Stephen Kennedy Scholarship.
FOUNDATION
Her approach to research is shaped by more than academic training or professional experience — it is shaped by knowing, firsthand, what it means to be on the other side of the systems she studies.
LaTroya is a Black queer woman who grew up in Harlem and has navigated systems of poverty, child welfare, parental incarceration, and the criminal legal system — as a young person and as a parent. That experience is not a footnote. It is the foundation of how she approaches partnership, methodology, and accountability. It is why she takes seriously the difference between research that serves institutions and research that serves communities.
She brings to every engagement a commitment to ethics, integrity, and honesty — with clients, with communities, and with data. She works from the belief that research is a tool for collective learning and liberation, and that the most credible research is the kind that communities recognize as true.
