Keith Lawrence

Keith Lawrence is Co-Director of the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change. Keith has been a leading contributor to the Roundtable's work on structural racism and author of several related publications including Structural Racism and Community Building; Structural Racism and Youth Development; and Constructing a Racial Equity Theory of Change. He has also contributed essays and opinion pieces on race and community building to a number of edited volumes, periodicals and other publications. Keith coordinated a project with The Open Society Institute’s After Prison Initiative to apply a critical race lens to crime and punishment in the U.S., and edited a volume, Race, Crime and Punishment: Breaking the Connection in America, at the culmination of that two-year effort. Along with his work at the Roundtable, he is currently involved in a post-disaster Oxfam-sponsored community planning initiative in Haiti.
Before joining Aspen in 1999, Keith held management positions at the New York City Housing Authority and taught political science at the City University of New York and the NYU School of Continuing Education. He also was an elementary and high school teacher in New York City and the Caribbean. He holds a Ph.D. in International Politics from the City University of New York Graduate Center, an M.U. P in Urban Planning from Hunter College, and a B.A. in Geography from the University of Guyana.