Scholarship and Biography
Dr. Alexandra Piñeros Shields is an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Public Policy Program at the Heller School. She brings 40 years of experience working to advance the human and civil rights of oppressed communities through innovative practices that create spaces and processes for deep meaningful civic participation and democratic decision-making. The frameworks and strategies that she has developed and facilitated have enabled institutions and community groups to collectively co-create and implement practices of shared power and decision-making with marginalized individuals. Her model of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging has led to significant successes within organizations, across coalitions, as well as in the public sector in the areas of immigration and criminal justice policy reform. Because her model is rooted in civil rights leader Ella Baker’s teaching, “people can think and act for themselves,” Dr. Piñeros Shields sees herself as a Midwife for Power. She uses lessons from the field to create life-giving pedagogies and practices that she shares with her students. Dr. Piñeros Shields served as President of the Board of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center for six years. She also serves on the Boards of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Philanthropy Massachusetts, and the Right Question Institute.
Prior to joining the Heller faculty, Dr. Piñeros Shields was the Executive Director of the Essex County Community Organization (ECCO), an interfaith, interracial, and interclass network of 40 congregations whose mission is racial and economic justice. During her tenure as executive director, she transformed the 40-year-old organization into one which is guided by womanist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist democratic operating principles that center Blacks and Latinos in all levels of organizational decision-making. Through her leadership, ECCO has become a “laboratory for democracy”. By centering people who are most affected by our systems of mass incarceration, ECCO leaders of color created and have lead campaigns that produced impressive policy changes. Most recently those include the establishment of immigrant sanctuary policies in four cities; the institutionalization of implicit bias trainings for the entire police department; and the development of an unarmed crises response team to respond to mental health emergencies instead of police. These successes, among many others, based on sharing decision-making power with marginalized people, demonstrate that the experiment in diversity and inclusion, or radical democracy, yields policy solutions not possible without diverse and meaningful participation. The outcome of this work is what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called the “beloved community.” As such, the impact of Dr. Piñeros Shields’ model of diversity, equity, and inclusion is the birth and nurturing of communities where all members, regardless of differences, can exercise their innate power and experience life-giving belonging.
At the statewide level, Prof. Piñeros Shields served on Governor Deval Patrick’s research design team for the New Americans Agenda, an executive order that produced an immigrant integration policy agenda for Massachusetts. She have worked at many immigrant serving institutions including the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), the International Irish Immigrant Center, and Catholic Charities.