Sandra McNeill, Founder & Principal

Sandra McNeill has been involved in community building work for over thirty years, working with community-based organizations and coalitions which have each approached the problem of wealth and resource inequality through a range of strategies.

As principal of Sandra McNeill Consulting, Ms. McNeill is committed to enhancing the capacity of non-profit organizations, community-based initiatives, local government and philanthropy by offering her experience, skills and services in policy and program development, technical capacity-building and training, and strategic and campaign planning.

Consulting as a Campaign Strategist with ACT-LA from July 2017 to present, Ms. McNeill worked extensively with coalition members to develop a multi-year campaign to ensure that the $160B investment in the build-out of LA’s public transit system will serve –and will not displace – LA’s working-class communities of color; and more recently to prepare the United to House LA citizens ballot initiative to create new affordable housing revenue for the City of LA.

Ms. McNeill also consults on policy development and implementation with the Los Angeles Community Land Trust Coalition, and advises other CLTs throughout California, including the cohort affiliated with The California Endowment Building Healthy Communities sites in Oakland, Sacramento, Santa Ana, East LA and South LA. In addition to these projects, Ms. McNeill speaks and consults regionally and nationally on community land stewardship, anti-displacement strategies, participatory planning methodology, and coalition development.

Over the past two decades, Ms. McNeill has convened and played a strategic leadership role in multiple coalitions to advance affordable housing policy or land use campaigns, which have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits and community-serving investment for LA’s working-class communities of color.

From 2007 to 2017, Ms. McNeill served as the Executive Director of T.R.U.S.T. South LA (Tenemos que Reclamar y Unidos Salvar la Tierra-South LA), a democratic and permanent steward of land advancing community-driven strategies in both gentrifying and disinvested neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Ms. McNeill led the organizational and financial start-up of T.R.U.S.T.; developed a grassroots Membership base and elected Board of Directors; secured equity for land acquisitions; initiated T.R.U.S.T.’s new construction and acquisition/rehab land stewardship projects to house hundreds of families in permanently affordable housing; developed T.R.U.S.T. as South LA’s lead active transportation organization; originated participatory research and participatory planning programs; incubated the Free Lots Angeles collaborative to facilitate community access to city-owned vacant land. She also provided strategic leadership to community/labor/faith coalitions which have: increased city and county funding for parks; obtained over $80 million of direct economic benefits for South LA residents; and secured affordable housing and quality local jobs in LA’s transit-adjacent development over the next decade through a community-labor ballot initiative.

Ms. McNeill’s previous work includes co-founding Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), an economic justice organizing group, and coordinating the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice (predecessor to UNIDAD) and the Share the Wealth coalition, to challenge corporate-driven development plans through community benefits agreements, address the University of Southern California’s relationship as a property owner and developer in South Central, and to restructure the City’s redevelopment plans in LA’s Skid Row. Prior to moving to Los Angeles from her hometown of Seattle in 1995, Ms. McNeill spent nine years directing a community-based adult literacy center that served over 500 adult students annually in writing, reading, math, GED and college preparation, and English as a Second Language, student leadership training, family literacy, publication of student writings, entrepreneurial training and joint student/tutor training; and where she developed expertise in participatory management.

Ms. McNeill holds a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning, with a concentration in Community Economic Development, from University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA); and has served as adjunct faculty at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, instructing the Community Collaborative program. She also holds a Bachelor of the Arts in Political Science, with a minor in Spanish Language and Literature, from Williams College in Massachusetts. Ms. McNeill is bilingual/bi-literate in English and Spanish, is the grateful mother of 23- and 26-year-old daughters, and is a 20+-year resident of South Central Los Angeles.